The One That I Want Read Free Page B

shrugs. “You were always an easy read.”
    “I thought you moved away.” I deflect, because I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about. Ashley was the third part of my best-friend trio with Susanna up until the seventh grade. When puberty attacked, we—all hormones and budding breasts and
boys, boys, boys
—dismembered our triangle. Ashley gravitated toward the kids who lurked outside the middle school, cat-calling at the nerds, unmerciful in their teasing, and later graduating to the stoners and crew who smoked cigarettes in the parking lot, while Susie and I stuck to the jocks, the cheerleaders, the prom court. Last I’d heard, after two years at community college and then beautician school, she headed south to Idaho.
    “I came back a few months ago,” she says. “Quietly. Didn’t make a big announcement.” She pauses. “My mom got sick. Coronary heart disease.”
    “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I say, because I am. “Please send her my hellos.” Ashley’s parents were always kind to me, even when she and I had long outgrown each other. In high school, when my family was fraying at all edges, they both showed up on our front porch, toting tuna casseroles and an offer for a home-cooked dinner at their place. I thanked them for their generosity but turned them down, saying we were coping and doing just fine. I’m not sure if I ever did return their Tupperware.
    “What’s up with the tent?” I say, glancing around.
    “I do readings,” she says, like this is supposed to make sense.
    “Readings?”
    “Yeah, you know, of people’s destiny, of their future.”
    I feel my upper lip curl, my forehead wrinkling in bemusement, but then sift through my memory for a vague recollection of her saying much the same in high school—that she could read palms, predict when someone would die, eerie incantations that eventually branded her an outcast, even among the dweebs who were already outcasts enough. She’d brush by me in the hallway and whisper in my ear, “Tilly Everett, do I have something to tell you!” a hint of foreboding, a tickle of glee in her voice. I could never figure out if she was doing it because she resented me for becoming popular or if she still remembered our friendship and was only playing me, that tiny fragment of our childhood still a shared spark.
    “Let me read you,” she says. “You never let me in high school, and now’s the time. I can feel it.”
    “Um, that’s okay.” I pause. “I have a pretty great life.”
    Her face morphs into a sneer. “You always thought that. You were always oblivious.”
    “I’m not oblivious!” I say, instantly defensive. “I love my life. I married Tyler, by the way. We’re trying for kids.”
    “As if that’s the answer to anything. As if Tyler and a baby are the answers to anything,” she says, moving behind her makeshift table.
    “Well, I think they are,” I say. “Not that I’m looking for answers.” I stop, annoyed at myself. “What’s your point, Ashley?”
    “My point, Silly Tilly, is that you need a little clarity, a little insight. And I’d like to help you get it.” I wish she would stop calling me that, stop making me feel like I’m nine again.
    “Sit,” she commands, gesturing to a weather-beaten chair in front of her table. Inexplicably, I obey. She walks over with a glass bowl of water, two small candles, a vial of gray powder, and what appears to be some sort of vegetable root.
    She drops in the chair opposite me, all of the lines on her facepointing downward, the sweat pooling above her lip into round, beady drops, and interlaces her fingers into mine, then closes her eyes. I wonder if I should follow her example, so I press my eyes shut, but then I open them again when she whisks her hands back from me, as if she received an electric jolt.
    “Oh,” she says with a firework of alarm. “Oh my.” Then she smiles as if to mask her horror, reminding me exactly of the Cheshire cat. “I always knew