“No worries! Now, excuse me, I have some work for my gala I need to do.” Caroline waved the member away from the door and back to her seat, and then Caroline marched off too. As she passed us, she shot a pointed look at Margot. The message seemed clear: Look at what you’ve done, what you’ve accidentally encouraged. Then Caroline continued her march away, a very sensible queen, watching her subjects be taken in by a charlatan, not at all happy that they were making fools of themselves. This odd-couple partnership between the two of them clearly had its problems. Why in the world had these two very different women decided to team up?
Vy raised an eyebrow at Margot. Margot nodded, then turned to me.
“Sorry, Jillian, give us one second? We’ll be right back. Don’t move!” She and Vy whooshed off toward the door, whispering furtively to each other, and I sat, twiddling my thumbs. There wasn’t any casual way for me to sneak over to the door and listen to whatever was unfurling with Caroline. I briefly considered making a break for the secret door and trying to get inside, but there were too many people around, so instead I looked down at my future pile. It didn’t matter what this last card turned out to be. It didn’t.
Still, it would be nice to be prepared for it, just in case. My mistake about not getting laid had ended up much better than I could have imagined, but I didn’t want to get sloppy again. I snuck a glance to my left and right. No one was paying any attention to me. I scooted closer to the stack and nudged the card over. Then my stomach dropped.
A man’s body lay prone on the ground with ten swords slicing through him. Cool, so this dude had been violently killed. This card portended great things. I picked it up and stared at it, all the same stupid feelings I’d had with that storefront psychic rushing back again. The card trembled in my hand, even though I knew that it meant nothing at all. But how would Margot and Vy react to it? And how the hell was I supposed to react in front of them? Nevertheless was a club for women with bright futures, not women who ended up stabbed to death on the ground.
Margot’s voice floated across the room, and I looked up to see her and Vy rounding the corner back toward me, still focused on each other. Before I even realized what I was doing, I stuck the offending card in my pocket, then rearranged myself on the couch as if I hadn’t moved the whole time.
“Whew, sorry about that,” Margot said as they sat back down.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, just the stress of planning the annual gala for her organization. She’s fixated on getting this one woman to announce her run for representative as the centerpiece of the event. But Tiana keeps going back and forth and is nervous because of . . .” Vy put a hand on Margot’s shoulder, and Margot cut herself off.
I leaned forward and said, in a quiet voice, “Because of what happened with Nicole Woo-Martin?”
A coldness slid across both of their faces. I’d misjudged. They weren’t going to talk about her with a trial member. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Margot said.
“Oh, just how what happened to her showed how hard it is to be a woman in politics.”
“Mm, it really did,” Margot said. “All right, where were we?”
“Future card,” Vy said.
“Ah yes.” Margot shook her wrists out again, then leaned forward, took a deep breath, and turned over the new card on top of the pile. She paused for a moment, bent over it, her shaggy hair falling around her. Then she sat up, revealing a card with three women joined in a circle, their faces beatific, their hands entwined.
“The Three of Cups,” she said, and I was struck by the strangeness of this situation, by how these two intelligent and ambitious women beside me were staring at this card like believers at a church service, like it was the body of Christ and they were ready to taste of it. Maybe they did believe, at least a little bit, in this new kind of religion where, instead of worshipping some male deity, they worshipped themselves. Instead of reading and rereading a Bible to parse the mysteries of Jesus’s words, they read their horoscopes and tarot cards to parse the mysteries within their own hearts and minds. Because what was more important than that?
I shivered. “Is the Three of Cups a good one?” I asked.
“Oh yes, very. It means sisterhood. Celebration.” Margot smiled at me, a genuine smile that showed off her gleaming, even teeth. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“I think it does,” I said, smiling tentatively back. “I know what I hope it means.”
“Well, then,” she said. “It looks like you’re on the right path after all.”
• • •
That night when I got home, I pulled the Ten of Swords out of my pocket. There had been no way for me to sneak it back into the deck. The dead man’s hand was outstretched, curled in rigor mortis. I looked up the meaning online, clicking on the first woo-woo website in my search results, scrolling through a long description of why tarot was so meaningful, how it could help you manifest your destiny. (The women of Nevertheless were absolutely the type who would’ve believed in Manifest Destiny back in the eighteen hundreds, secure in the knowledge that they deserved whatever they could take.) God, the amount of copy on this website was practically Dickensian, but finally I found what I was looking for.
The Ten of Swords: Betrayal. Crisis, the description read. Painful ending.
I closed out of the window quickly. Good thing I didn’t believe in that shit. Still, I preferred not to look at that card lying around all the time, so I buried it
