Gettin' Lucky (4 page)

The 3.2 minutes before she made it to class were probably the longest of my life. Would she try to talk to me? Would she apologize again? Would she pretend that nothing had ever happened? That she had never MADE OUT WITH MY BOYFRIEND?

Ex-boyfriend,
I reminded myself.

Exactly four seconds before the bell rang, Alana made her entrance. She was flanked by Katy (there was no such thing as remedial arts class) and had the good sense to look somewhat abashed as she swished past my desk. She glanced at me briefly, her blue eyes regretful. A lump rose in my throat briefly—she looked positively distraught—but I quickly tamped it back down.

Katy offered a “Hey, Cass” that sounded fairly sincere. I replied with a vague nod of my own. Katy hadn“t done anything to me, after all. Other than consorting with the enemy, that was.

The bell rang, and our teacher, Mr. Albon, took his usual seat behind his desk. I liked Mr. Albon. He was grown-up cute in that non-gross way, and he talked to us like we weren’t morons. He also knew a
lot
about movies.

“Welcome back,” he said, smiling at us wryly. “I’m sure you’re thrilled to be here.”

Some of us groaned appreciatively at him. Others of us stared intently at our desks and imagined—silently, of course—our ex-best friends shaved bald.

It made the time pass quickly.

Albon was just warming to a discussion about documentaries, which,
yawn.
When I was little I hadn’t even liked those segments on
Mister Rogers
or
Sesame Street
where they head off to the candy factory to show you how chewing gum is being made. While I am quite interested in
eating
a delicious Hershey’s Kiss, or smacking on a piece of Juicy Fruit, I am less than intrigued by its origins. What can I say? Nonfiction bores me.

Suddenly Albon was talking about homework. Homework, on our first day back. It’s like the
entire
cosmos was aligned against me. I wanted to scream.

“… So I’d like you to read chapter three in your textbooks, and tonight, write up a two-to-three-page summary of a worth-while documentary that you’ve seen recently.”

Oh, no. What were the odds he’d let me report on
Mister Rogers’?

A hand shot up to my right.

“Yes, Kelly?” Albon asked.

“Can we do our project on reality TV”

Kelly Connor was a tiny, skinny girl with super-pale skin and hair so black that I was sure she dyed it. She wore copious
amounts of black eyeliner, which on anyone else might have looked skanky but on her somehow worked. It made her eyes, which were a shocking shade of sea-glass blue, seem all the more intense. Kelly was an artsy type, a total film snob. She ran a website called YOU ARE HERE, which mostly featured her own first-person rants on pop culture, school politics, and life in general. Kelly was kind of a fringe-y type—she definitely wasn’t interested in the cheerleaders and jocks (which was to say, my crowd), but every kid at Midvale knew about her website. It was funny and well written.

Kelly took this class very seriously, and as a general rule, Alana, Katy, and I avoided her for just that reason. But I was interested in what she had to say. If I could parlay my love of a certain show about C-list celebrities forced to live together into an A, that’d be pretty sweet.

Mr. Albon looked taken aback by the question. He ran his fingers through his receding hairline. “Huh,” he said finally. “You know, there’s a question of authenticity.”

Kelly nodded. “That was going to be the focus of my paper,” she replied, sounding almost smug.

“Of course it was,” Albon said. His eyebrows twitched, and he seemed to come to a decision about Kelly’s project. “Then you’re good. I’m interested to see what you come up with.”

The bell rang. I gathered up my books quickly. I was half-tempted to thank Kelly for establishing a decidedly non-academic precedent for our homework, but ultimately thought it best to beat a hasty retreat. The last thing I needed was an awkward, forced confrontation with Alana.

Four

Something had to give.

I couldn’t keep spending my lunch hours in the library. For one thing, it was boring and a little bit lonely. For another, the librarian had caught me yesterday, hunched over a keyboard and sucking down a low-fat yogurt, and read me the riot act. Food is strictly
verboten
in the library, and bringing it within ten feet of a computer is considered an act of aggression. Upon being discovered, I immediately became appropriately apologetic, swearing to Mrs. Melkin that it would
never,
ever happen again.

There was also the small but nonetheless unignorable fact that I was slowly but surely becoming a major buzzkill. The sad
truth was that most of my friends had been extensions of either Alana or Jesse. They were all perfectly—if somewhat guiltily—friendly to me when they passed me in the halls at school or whatever, but the last thing I wanted to do was hang with them on the weekends or talk to them on the phone at night. I had a feeling they preferred it that way, anyway. They spent most of their weekends with Alana and Jesse, after all.

I needed a plan.

I checked every possible online astrology scope, to no avail. Saturn was in retrograde, which meant that my love relationships and my friendships were going to be compromised for the next few weeks. Beautiful. Numerology and the Chinese zodiac were no better. Any way that I looked at it, it seemed, I was completely and totally out of luck.

If I wanted things to turn around, I was going to have to be a little bit more proactive.

The sign in the window of Madame Lunichya’s storefront read
OPEN,
but taking in the faint glow of light from within and the dusty cobwebs that swung from the doorway, I had my doubts.

Still, I was at a loss. And desperate times called for desperate measures.

I pushed against the door.

It opened with a creak.

I went in.

It appeared that Madame Lunichya was not a fan of the bright lighting. Once inside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. I stood in the foyer blinking rapidly, wondering if she was going to come out, see me making faces, and think that there was something wrong with me. The alternative being, of course, that she
wouldn’t
come out, and I’d spend the whole evening blinking around half-blind in the semidarkness. Either way, I was starting to feel pretty foolish. If Miss Havisham had been a budget psychic, her office might have looked a lot like this one.

“Hello,”
a voice said dramatically.

I leaped at least five feet into the air, startled. So much for maintaining my last shred of dignity.

“Hi,” I began uncertainly. “Your sign said you were open.” I slid my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, feeling completely awkward.

“I am,” the voice said.

It was really starting to freak me out that I couldn’t see whom the voice belonged to. I mean, I had to assume that it was Madame Lunichya. But why didn’t she either turn on some lights, or come around to face me? This had to be some sort of bad business.

“You have come for a reading?” the vaguely accented voice continued.

“Yes,” I said, grabbing at the printout I’d made of her address and turning around to show it to her.

By the time I’d turned around, though, the voice—and the body to whom it belonged—had somehow managed to disappear again. I heard a rustling in the corner, then the
click
of a light switch being tripped, and then she was there, in front of me, in broad daylight.

Even without the mood lighting, Madame Lunichya was a little bit creepy. More than a little bit. She was short and stood sort of hunched over. It was hard to tell exactly how old she was, because her hair was dark and thick, but her skin was leathery and deeply wrinkled. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her forehead and wore a long, flowing dress. Half a
dozen silver bangles decorated one arm. Her fingernails were polished to bright red razors.

Points to her. If she was a faker, she’d gotten the costume dead-on.

“I, uh, saw you advertised on the Internet,” I stammered, still holding out my crumpled piece of paper. “I made a reservation.”

“I know,” madame Lunichya said shortly.

Of course she knew. She was psychic.

“Right,” I said, feeling infinitesimally small and wondering if this had all been a terrible idea. I hoped not.

“You want to know what the future holds?” madame Lunichya asked, leaning closer to me.

I backed up slightly. She was invading my personal space. I managed a nod. Of course I wanted to know what the future held. I mean, why else would I be visiting a psychic?

“Come,” she said, the bracelets on her arm clattering together as she beckoned. “This way.”

She led me through a beaded curtain that looked like a castaway from the set of
That 70s Show
and into a room that was, if
possible, even dimmer than the foyer had been. This was beyond atmospheric; it was the set of a B horror movie. It was also cramped and musty-smelling. She sat me down at a round table covered in a woven black tablecloth.

“Do you get a lot of people here on their way to the Strip, like, wanting to know their fortunes?” I asked.

Lunichya raised one eyebrow at me as though I were insane. “The gamblers do not leave the tables to come here.”

I shook my head. It was true: Out on the casino floors, clocks and windows were abolished. The house wanted to keep people glued to their seats, and for the most part, the house succeeded at this. I couldn’t imagine that someone on a losing streak would disengage from a table long enough to make his or her way out here, to Lunichya’s outpost. Generally people who’ve been losing just get increasingly more desperate and impulsive, anyway. Or so my father’s told me.

“So,” lunichya said, interrupting my thoughts. “You want we should read the cards? Tea leaves? Crystal ball?”

The options were dizzying. My own area
of expertise ended with numerology. “Um, I have no idea,” I confessed. “What do most people get?”

“Is no one way,” lunichya said. She sat across from me at the table and scrunched up her face in concentration, tapping her fingers against the tabletop as she took in my face. “I think, for you … we read the palm.”

“Cool,” I said.

She reached out and grabbed at my right hand. “Ah,” she began thoughtfully, “you have the cone-shaped hand.”

I did? I squinted at my hand and decided I’d have to take her word for it. It looked pretty basic and hand-shaped to me.

“This is a sign of a creative personality. You are inventive and philosophical,” she explained.

Philosophical, sure. Especially when it came to matters of the heart.

Inventive, I wasn’t sure about, though. I once tried to rig our coffee machine to go off when we turned on the kitchen lights, but it didn’t work, and eventually Dad just ended up buying one of those Mr. Coffees that comes with a timer. She turned my hand over so that my palm was
facing up. She ran her fingers across each of the creases in my skin, looking incredibly thoughtful all the while. I had to resist the urge to giggle—she was tickling me. But she seemed deadly serious, so laughing was probably the wrong tactic to take.

“You have a healthy life line. Live long,” she said.

“Nice,” I replied, feeling a somewhat misplaced sense of pride at this news.

“And here”—she pointed to help me see—“your head line and your life line are separated. You have healthy sense of adventure.”

True again. After all, I’d taken the whole move to Vegas in stride, where I think there were probably a lot of kids who would have totally freaked.

“Oh,” she said, frowning.

“What is it?” I leaned forward in my seat, feeling nervous.

“The love line.”

Ah, yes. The love line.

“Is long and curved,” she said, lightly tracing it. “This says you are pleasant and easy to be around.”

“I like to think so,” I agreed.

“But”
she continued somewhat ominously, “it also means you tend to give your heart away easily. No matter what the cost.”

I thought about meeting Jesse back in sophomore year. It was true, it hadn’t taken much for him to win me over. In retrospect, I had to wonder whether I would have even fallen for him if I hadn’t first learned that he was interested in me.

Whatever the catalyst for our love had been, it sure had cost me.

My eyes welled up, and I willed the tears not to come. Crying in front of Madame Lunichya would just be too humiliating. I sniffled loudly.

I wasn’t fooling her. She put my palm down and patted me on the head. The gesture was clumsy and awkward, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

“You have been hurt,” she observed.

Seriously, this woman was
amazing.

I nodded quietly. “And I’m not sure what to do in order to get over it.”

“You need … something new,” lunichya proclaimed after a beat. “Something different. How do they say, ‘to shake things up’?”

“Shake things up?” I parroted. Okay, fine, so my profile said that I was “adventurous.”
Much as I liked the sound of “adventurous,” “to shake things up” seemed like maybe not the best idea. The last time I’d been “shook up” had been three years ago, when my father hauled me three thousand miles across the country. I liked my life safe and predictable—everyone neatly compartmentalized.

Of course, the truth was that since my ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend had gotten together, all of my neat compartments had been blown wide open. And so Madame Lunichya was probably onto something. I had two choices: I could either wallow in the debris of my formerly tidy lifestyle, or I could move on.

I preferred the thought of a good, solid wallow. Self-pity could be fun. At the very least, it was a handy excuse to consume inappropriate quantities of gummy candy. Moving on, conversely, was terrifying.

Which was probably exactly why I needed to do it. Face my fears and all that.

“Something new,” I echoed, turning the idea over in my brain.