Authors: David Levithan
“She’s home,” I say. “I don’t know where that is.”
“Ask her for the address.”
I do.
I hold my breath.
She gives it me.
“It’s in Hayes.”
“That’s close,” Mark says. “Let’s go.”
I wish I could buy her a gift, but all the shops are closed, so when we show up at her house ten minutes later I’m empty-handed.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” Mark asks.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “You’re coming with me.”
“Ummm,”
he says, shaking his head. “That is
not
very romantic. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you until you tell me to go.”
I nod, and enter the gate alone. I follow the instructions she sent in her text and round the house to the back, where there’s a small studio, lit up in the night. I knock on the door.
She opens it.
It breaks my heart to see her. She’s still dressed for the party in herringbone pants and high heels, a skinny black tie around her slender neck. If I saw her on the street I would stop still in lust and wonder.
But seeing her now, as she steps back to let me into her room, is too much for me to take. I look at her walls instead. They’re mostly bare save for some black-and-white photographs pinned to one of them. I step closer. They’re all of the circus.
“Did your mom take these?” I ask her.
She nods.
Her laptop is open on her bed, a YouTube video paused on the image of a trapeze artist in silver against a black backdrop, dangling from the bar by one leg.
I came to apologize, to confess. I did worse than desert her. I didn’t even show up.
But instead I ask, “Do you miss it? The circus?”
She’s quiet. I finally look at her for the first time since walking into her room.
“I thought I wanted to stay in one place,” she finally says. “Make a life for myself here. But I can’t even bring myself to unpack.”
She gestures to her suitcase and her boxes and I see what she means. There is no dresser or desk or chair. Only a bed and a kitchenette without pots or pans or other signs of living.
“I’m not used to staying anywhere very long. I came here because I thought something might be waiting for me.” She looks on the verge of tears, but she blinks them away. “Let’s go out. I need some air.”
“Okay,” I say. “I should tell you that Mark’s out front, though. In case you wanted to talk. I can tell him we need some time.…”
“To be honest,” she says. “I don’t feel much like talking.”
I follow her outside, my throat tight, my eyes burning.
“Hey, Mark,” she says. “I’m in a shitty mood. I think we should all get ice cream.”
“I like ice cream,” Mark says, and we walk, Violet leading us toward the heart of the neighborhood where ultracool adults laugh on street corners and sip from pint glasses in a beer garden. We are the only teenagers in sight.
I see the ice-cream store in the distance, but before we get there Violet stops short in front of a woman, sitting on a blanket on the ground.
“New plan,” she says to us. And then to the woman, “I’m buying my friends readings.”
I step closer and see that a sign on the blanket says
Tarot
.
“I’m not sure about this,” I say.
“Yeah…” Mark cocks his head. “Thanks, Violet, but—”
“Admit it,” Violet says. “You could both use a little clarity in your lives.”
And even though I have done enough soul-searching for the night, I know that I can’t let Violet down again, so I grab Mark’s hand and lead him over. Up close, the Tarot reader’s younger than I thought she’d be. Her blanket is soft under my legs and small enough that my knee touches Mark’s.
“I’m Kylie,” she says. “Have either of you had your cards read before?”
Mark and I shake our heads.
“A good way to begin is with a spread of three cards. The past, the present, the future. Which one of you wants to go first?”
“Him,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Violet says from behind us. Then, to Kylie, “Kate has a little problem with follow-through.”
Kylie nods as though she already knows. She takes my hands in hers and I can’t help but blush, and for the first time tonight I feel the cold of the evening, and wish I had brought a sweater or a jacket or at least a scarf, something to wrap around myself.
She lets me go and reaches for her cards but then stops.
She shifts to face Mark straight on and takes his hands. She inhales for longer than I knew was possible, and then exhales just as slowly.
“I’m going to do a joint reading,” she says.
I glance at Mark. He shrugs. I wait to hear why, but all she says is, “It feels right.”
She opens a gold box and pulls out her deck of cards.
“You shuffle,” she says to me. And then, to Mark, “You cut.”
He does. The fortune teller focuses.
“As I’m turning this first card, I already feel pain,” she says.
I would like to keep an open mind, but we are two tearstained teenagers.
Three,
if you count Violet. It doesn’t take intuition to see that.
She reveals a beautiful card: a naked, joyful woman floating in the sky, surrounded by a green wreath.
“Oh yeah,” she says. “
Man
. This card is the World.”
“I don’t get it,” Mark says. “It looks like good news.”
But the card, though beautiful, fills me with sadness.
“It’s upside down,” I say.
She nods.
“A reversed World,” she says. “No closure. Too much left unsaid and undone. You know, I’m feeling this card pulling me toward you, Kate.”
She looks at me.
“You’ve been holding yourself back.”
My throat tightens in hurt but then anger.
“Yeah, well, you were just told that I lack follow-through.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Okay,”
I say. “So what am I supposed to do about it?”
She turns another card over. This time, a woman is blindfolded and tied up, with swords all around her.
“This is as clear as it gets,” she says. “You’re both hurting. You feel stuck.” She turns to Mark. “Your heart”—she holds her hand to her own—“is broken, and you don’t know how to move past it.”
Mark shoots me a skeptical glance and I have to agree. Heartbreak is an easy assumption to make about a teenage boy with straight teeth and nice clothing but a look of desperation.
“She is someone you’ve been close to for a long time,” she says. “I can tell by how deep the pain is.”
I’m confused, but then Mark’s smirk clarifies it: Kylie is just a woman in a costume, talking to a random boy about his love for a girl. She probably does this between semesters to make tuition money.
“Both of you, look closely,” she says. “This figure is bound and blindfolded. She appears trapped, but she isn’t.”
“She’s surrounded by swords,” Mark says. “It definitely seems like she’s trapped.”
“But look. The swords don’t go all the way around her, and only her arms are bound. If she would only trust herself to step forward, she would make it through. This card is a warning to you both. You can’t allow yourselves to be trapped by your pain.”
“Right,” I say. “If you find yourself in hell, keep walking. That seems to be the theme of the night.”
She says, “Could be. Or maybe, if you think you’re in hell, open your eyes. What you see may surprise you.”
She touches the last card, about to turn it over.
“This one will tell us about your future. Are you ready?”
We nod.
And she flips it over. Even though I don’t really believe in this, even though Kylie is just a pretty girl telling stories, playing a game with our lives, fear grips me.
On the card is a tower struck by lightning, raining fire into a black sky. Two men are diving out to escape the flames, plummeting to the rocky ground below. I was expecting a card about strength or peace, Kylie quoting everybody’s favorite words of encouragement:
Yes, times are hard now, but you’ll find your way.
Instead I’m face-to-face with disaster.
“Okay,” she says. “The Tower. This is a powerful card.”
“Yeah,” Mark says. “I can see that.” His voice is shaking.
“Don’t be scared,” she says. “Or, okay, go ahead: Be scared. That’s okay, too. Give me a second. Let me think.”
She goes back to the beginning—our upside-down World—follows it to the Eight of Swords and then to the Tower again.
“I’m new at this,” she says. “And I can see how these cards look frightening. They
are
frightening. But look at you two. You look horrible. You look sad and scared. You don’t need the cards to tell you that. So if we follow the journey they are showing us, we can see that the tower is necessary. Something profound needs to happen. Something needs to change, and it is going to change
soon
. You may already know what’s coming. It’s going to shake you. It’s going to change your world. But after the tower burns to the ground, and you’ve picked yourselves up off the rocks, and the fire ends and the night passes, it’s going to be morning again.
“Mark,” she says. “You think you are alone, but someone is on the horizon. I see love,
mutual
love, in your near future. It’s not coming directly from the card, but it’s a feeling I’m getting. It’s someone you know but wouldn’t expect. She isn’t who you think she is. And Kate, that woman in the blindfold? She is you. But look at how her feet aren’t even touching the ground. You are so close to being free.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I know. But change takes courage.”
She sits back, as though she’s finished, but then she leans forward again and stares at the cards.
“A thought is coming,” she says.
We wait.
And then her face lights up.
“He,”
she says to Mark. “I’m sorry—I just assumed. I wasn’t hearing clearly enough.
He
isn’t who you think he is.”
Violet gives the woman fifteen bucks and Mark stands up, but it takes me a moment longer to gather myself. Finally, I do. I try to call back my skepticism, but I can’t muster it. Whatever this just was, it feels real, and when I turn around I can see that it’s real for Violet as well.
She’s staring at me, her sadness intensified.
“It sounds like you have some things to figure out,” she says. “I don’t want to get in the way of them.”
I should tell her she has it wrong. I should lie and claim I don’t believe in any of it. I should say,
Even if I did believe it, you could never be in my way
. I want to go back to her studio, to the moment when she said she thought something was waiting for her here.
I was,
I should be telling her
. I still am.
But I take too long to say anything, and she gives my silence meaning. She nods. She forces the saddest smile.
“Let me know when you’ve figured it out,” she says, and then she turns from us and walks back toward home.
WEDNESDAY
MARK
“Do you think it’s him?” I ask, for the eleventh time in five minutes.
It’s before school the next morning. We’re sitting on the hood of Katie’s car, sipping coffee and watching the boys head into school.
“Mackenzie Whittaker?”
“I’ll bet behind that rough-and-tumble science-fair exterior, he’s a kitten. Not at all who I think he is.”
“What would the two of you talk about?”
“Science. We’d talk about science. Hot and heavy science.
Earth
science.”
“How about him?”
She’s nodding toward Ted Lee, a guy on my baseball team.
“Straight.”
“You sure?”
“Straight.”
“You’ve given this some thought, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I’ve given this some thought. Some of the thoughts were pretty detailed. But the answer remains the same. He’s straight.”
“I hate that word.
Straight
. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get to be called
curvy
. Or
scenic
. Actually, I like that: ‘Do you think she’s straight?’ ‘Oh no. She’s
scenic
.’”
“You know what I hate?”
“What?”
I glance at Ted, who’s looking really good. “I hate that we start everything with this qualifying round. Is he or isn’t he? If I was into girls, I wouldn’t have that. I’d just be able to go for it, since the odds would be in my favor. And if the girl happened to be scenic, it would just be, like,
oops
.”
“But what if the guy you think is straight is
not who you think he is.
” Katie says this as if she’s in fortune-teller-training school.
“You know,” I say, leaning back on her front windshield and taking a sip of coffee, “we need to have our own morning show. Just you and me on the hood of a car, talking about everyone who passes by. It could be massive.”
“How about Diego? He’s
scenic
.”
Even though I know who she’s talking about, I raise my eyes in his direction. Then I regret it, because he sees, and an awkward moment passes before he looks away.
“Oh,” Katie says. “Interesting.”
“He had a crush on me,” I explain. “Like, for a while. Most of this year. He asked me out. Three times.”
“And why did you say no? He’s awesome.”
“Because I was seeing someone else. Only, I couldn’t tell Diego I was seeing someone else. So I didn’t have a choice. I assholed him.”
“You
what
?”
“I put up a total asshole front. I blew him off. I pretended he wasn’t asking what he was asking. I made it seem like I was a conceited jerk, so he wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with him. I tried so hard to keep him in the friendzone. You have no idea.”
I don’t tell her he cried. That wouldn’t be fair. But he did. The third time was the worst.
I don’t understand,
he kept saying. And what could I do?
I just want you as a friend,
over and over until even I was having a hard time understanding it. Say anything enough times and it’s only words.