Fiona runs the appointment book with an iron fist, never letting anyone skip the queue or bargain their way into a better time slot. She always keeps ten minutes for herself, at the end of the day. I don’t even tell her much. We draw cards but she mostly just lies on the floor and tells me how she’s going to study Drama in Trinity, but that there are only seventeen places a year, and how she has to get in.
But despite all that, I like Fiona. She always does brilliantly in exams, but never makes a fuss about it, and she’s not a lick-arse with the teachers either. And she doesn’t bother herself with gossip, like everyone else does. Most of the girls who come in for a reading have the exact same questions: what their best friend is thinking, and what their best friend is saying. Moira Finch and Grace Adlett have both been in three times, just to set the record straight on why, exactly, they’re no longer speaking to one another.
Some girls have incredibly benign readings and they still leave the Chokey weeping and shaking. It’s all show, of course. Everyone wants to be the one who had the life-changing, future-telling, you’ll-never-believe-it reading.
Fiona’s on the floor again, rubbing a piece of orange-tipped calcite between her hands.
“My older brother’s a doctor. He lives in Boston,” she groans. “My mum thinks acting is for egomaniacs.”
“Both of my brothers are engineers,” I sympathize. “And my sister Abbie works for the EU, in Belgium. No one can believe that I can’t pass Italian.”
“Ugh, that sucks. Who cares about Italian?”
“I know, right?” I say, relieved to hear her say it. “We should all be learning Spanish.”
“They speak Spanish in most of LA, you know. And there’s lots of Spanish words in Tagalog.”
“Really? You see, that’s exactly my point.”
We’re friends, kind of. I think. It’s hard to say.
Things get complicated, however, when Tarot Time bleeds into class time. The girls I can’t fit in during my lunchtime sessions start dropping by my desk between lessons. Mr Bernard is almost always five or ten minutes late, and people take full advantage of this. They crowd around me, pleading for a reading.
“It’s better if we do it in private,” I say, hesitant at the gaping audience of girls too cheap to pay for a reading, or too spooked to go into the Chokey alone. “It’s supposed to be a private thing.”
“I don’t mind!” Rebecca Hynes says gamely. “People can watch!”
“But … I need to … y’know, conserve my energy.”
It’s true. I’m beginning to feel what the Divination Lady was saying. I miss my aimless old lunch breaks, listening to Michelle talk about nose contouring. I’m starting to feel heavy at the end of every day now. I get home and don’t watch Raya Silver videos any more. Two days in a row I fall asleep on my bed in my school uniform until Mum calls me for dinner.
But I still give the readings. It’s hard to say no. I don’t want people to think that I have ideas above my station, just because I have a deck of cards now. I have to stay nice, stay likeable, stay funny. With my grades looking the way they do, being funny is the only thing that keeps people interested in me at all.
So, when I give my classroom readings, I ham it up a bit. I play to the crowd.
“The Lovers!” I say, as if the words were fresh strawberries. “Now this is an interesting card.”
“Is it about love?” Rebecca Hynes says, all excited. The girls crowded around exchange giggles and nudges. The only girl not peering to see the reading is Lily. I glance at her through the clutter of heads and shoulders and watch her hand reach to her hearing aid.
Is she turning it off?
“It is about love,” I say to Rebecca, though that’s not strictly true. The Lovers is more about finding harmony between two opposing forces than proper romantic love. But who wants to hear that?
“You’re going to meet your soulmate,” I say.
“When? Where? How?”
I stick out the deck to face her. “Ask the cards. Ask them. Ask them who your soulmate is.”
I see Fiona’s face from across the room. She’s more annoyed by people abusing the tarot than me. She rolls her eyes at me and picks up her phone. My WhatsApp beeps. I look down at it quickly, the screen half-shielded by my pocket.
Hamming it up, much?
I grin and decide to ham it up even more. “Rebecca, you have to ask the cards with an open heart. Ask them who your soulmate is.”
“Who is my soulmate?” Poor, stupid Rebecca Hynes asks the cards.
“LOUDER!”
“WHO IS MY SOULMATE?”
“The forces of magic can’t hear you, Rebecca!”
“WHO IS MY BLOODY SOULMATE?” she yells.
She yanks a card from the deck. It’s the Devil card.
“Satan!” I shout, trying to look afraid. “Your soulmate is Satan!”
At that moment, Mr Bernard walks into the room and the whole circle gathered around me screams in sudden panic.
“What? What’s all this? What’s going on here? Maeve?”
I sneak my cards away. “Nothing, sir,” I say sweetly.
“Andiamo! Andiamo!” he commands, gesturing everyone back to their seats.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I DON’T SEE RORY FOR A FEW DAYS, BUT BY THURSDAY I’M next to him on the bus again.
“Heya,” he says. “I have your thing.”
He fiddles at the collar of his shirt and pulls out a long, brown string that he has fixed to my rose quartz.
“Thanks,” I say, as he drops it into my hand. I’m embarrassed by how warm it is from the heat of his skin. “You’re kind of into jewellery, aren’t you?”
It’s an innocent-enough question, but the way it comes out feels loaded and awkward.
“Yeah, I am,” he answers, casually enough. “I like …”
He stretches his hands out and shows me his freshly painted nails. They are aquamarine now.
“… plumage,” he concludes, with a
