I groaned. “Mom, do we have to do this every time?”
It was a game we’d played since I was little, some off-shoot based on Grandma Selena’s stories of her days as a teenage fortune teller on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, selling readings and homemade jewelry for rent money. I always wondered what it would be like to live that way, your life uncluttered, straightforward, simple. But Grandma Selena wasn’t alive anymore to ask.
“Hmm, let’s see,” she said, pretending to frown deep in thought while she traced the lines of Jess’s palm. “This line here indicates that you freely express yourself and your emotions, while this one shows you are very strong-willed.”
She smirked at Jess and we tried not to laugh.
“Now the shape of your hand indicates you are perceptive, at times sympathetic, and at other times moody. Oh, but here Jess, this line is important. It looks like there will be a break, a sudden change in your life.”
Jess gasped in mock surprise. “Is that bad?”
“Oh no, honey, you’ll be fine. See your life is strongly controlled by fate—”
I put my hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Okay, ma, I think that’s enough for today.”
She tossed back her hair. “You know, Jack, when I’m old and wealthy and living in a retirement community with dumb, demented, wealthy birds who think this is a legitimate science and pay me under the table to learn about their last days, you won’t be invited over to my loft overlooking the city.” She smirked and went back to chain smoking through her pack of Marlboros.
We went upstairs to my room. While I hated the rest of the wilting house, I loved my room—the dusty wood floors, the sloped paneled ceilings with the one skylight, and the view of the woods out back. Jess flopped down on my plaid comforter while I took out my Ren & Stimpy bong and lit up, taking a deep hit, the smoke curling from the side of my mouth. I love the sound of it bubbling. I offered it to her, and she took one hit before choking and coughing like she’d just tried to inhale a cigar.
“You fucker,” she said between coughs. “How do you do this?”
I grinned and shrugged. “Practice makes perfect.”
I had posters on the wall, autographed ones from concerts we’d been to, even one that we’d snuck into in the early hours of the morning. I remembered the smell of wet grass in the rain, mud on our sneakers, a metal bass that to us may as well have been angels singing even though we’d barely known the band.
She flipped on the TV and started up my vintage Nintendo 64 while I finished toking, letting the sweet Mary Jane fill me up to the brim with a buzzed, sated euphoria. “You’re gonna get lung cancer,” Jess said. “You smoke way too much.”
I laughed and plopped down next to her, grabbing the other controller as we deftly moved through the motions of level one, a level we’d played many times before. It was a good talking level, something to do with your hands while you spoke.
“Other things will probably kill me before that,” I said, and she elbowed me in the ribs, causing my little character to fly into a toxic puddle on-screen.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Seriously, don’t talk like that.”
“Keep your attention on the screen, Velez,” I said. “You’re gonna get us both killed in a second—figuratively of course.”
We finished up the next few levels in silence, the only sounds our fingers mashing against the keys and the electronic blipping and bleeping of the Mario Brothers game.
After a while we got bored and just lounged on my bed, flipping through the magazines Mom never read. I kept all of her Cosmos, and we laughed at the outrageous sex tips, the bizarre articles like “How to be the master of his man bits” and ways to give a hand job that sounded painful and embarrassing for everyone involved.
She lingered on the page of a busty blonde dry-humping a shirtless man, sweat dripping down his shiny photo-shopped skin. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m friends with them,” she said.
I kept my eyes on the page, trying to read some secret hidden in the model’s swollen watermelon boobs. “Mmm. Who? Anna and Lizzie?”
“Yeah.” She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think they like each other more than they like me.”
“I don’t know them well enough to judge.”
She nudged me with her foot. “Oh come on, Jack, you know them well enough to at least comment.”
I finally closed the magazine, pushing it aside, but not before marking the page with Watermelon Boobs for later study. “They kind of…I don’t know. They’re not like you, Jess.”
“What do you mean, not like me?”
“I don’t know, you’re smart,” I said. “But not just book-smart, you get things. I can talk to you for three hours straight and not get bored. I don’t know if I could talk to Anna and Lizzie for fifteen minutes.”
“Maybe it’s like you said, you just don’t know them that well.”
“You would know better than me, I guess.”
She shrugged. “Then of course there’s my mom, who suddenly wants to be all mother and daughter Gilmore Girls with me now that I’m moving in for a while, even though we’ve barely spoken since the divorce. I guess now that Kellie’s in college, she needs a new plaything, you know?” I winced at the name of her sister. “A new doll to take shopping and dress up. She keeps going on and on about how my grades are so stellar I should be going to school out east, but it’s like, why do you suddenly care?”
My phone buzzed, saving me from this conversation. It was Connor. My stomach did a somersault.
“Hang on, I got to get
