"Spooky?" Eloise provided.
"Yeah." Tilly's head nodded.
"Well, what does it say?" Ursula urged, taking a sip of her coffee, her green eyes curious over the rim.
"Wheel of Fortune," she read. The card had what looked like a compass but with symbols instead of cardinal directions. There were rough depictions of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, an open book, and gold clouds. There was writing on each end of the card, only one side legible depending on how you held it, and she instinctively knew that, how she had pulled it out, the writing on the bottom was meant to be.
"And?" Eloise leaned over the island, resting her arms there as they waited.
"Misfortune, out of control, bad luck, unexpected setback, disruption, and unwelcome change." Tilly looked back up, a feeling of foreboding coming over all of them. They could feel it settle over their shoulders, a kind of darkness that ate at the lamps and sunlight. Eloise smelled something sharp, and then they watched in awe as the black irises started drooping, as though time had sped up and they were watching a fast-forward vision of the flowers losing their life.
"Well, that's one way to start the day," Eloise said.
4. Wheel of Misfortune
Tilly walked back home, her pocket heavier than before, and something uneasy in her soul. She'd always been sensitive. As a child, her mother would scold her for her emotional outbursts. She didn't learn until much later in life that those "outbursts" had simply been normal shows of emotions, but for two parents who lived just shy of deadpan, they had named and branded her in a way that she would carry always so uncomfortably as she grew.
She was scared of being too emotional. She learned early to hide her tears, even when they were warranted.
Like when she was nine years old and her older sister stole her bird, Helena, and set her free in a cruel joke. She still thinks of that day; she had hopped off the bus, walked into her room, excited to see her colorful bird that chirped happily when she saw Tilly. The bird would often sit on her metal mesh pen holder as she sat at her desk finishing her homework and readingassignments, or nestled on a pillow next to where she read great adventures on her bed.
The evening before, her sister had three friends over, and when they came down to the kitchen with teenage hunger, they found Tilly reading an old copy of Romeo and Juliette. At nine years old, Shakespeare was a feat, even if it was the abridged version. A laughing joke was made about the disparity between the sisters' intelligence, and when she caught the malevolent gleam in Fae's eye, she'd worried what it meant.
She learned young not to outshine her sister.
But she hadn't prepared for what she found in her room that next day; Helena's birdcage was wide open and the green and orange bird wasn't inside. She looked and looked throughout the house for her. Never did she leave Helena's cage open unless she was in her room. When she popped into Fae's room to see if she had seen or heard her bird, Fae was sitting on her unkempt bed, lackadaisically flipping through a teen magazine with her bedroom window wide open and a smirk on her face.
She cried. But not until she got to her room and closed the door gently, the soft click of the latch marking her safety for letting the tears loose.
Similarly, she had learned early that her parents were not a place of advocacy, even against her sister's sometimes cruel actions.
When she was seventeen, her boyfriend told her while she was pulling a heavy chemistry book from her chipped, slate-blue locker that he had cheated on her. And he liked the other girl, Stacey, and wanted to take her to homecoming. She cried to her mother. Such a feminine thing, the tenderness of having a young heart split by betrayal, and she had hoped that her mother would have held and soothed her. Instead, her mother told her to pull herself up, that boys would break her heart, and she could not give in to the pain or they would win.
She couldn't help but wonder,win what? What game was her heart a part of?The feeling of confusion and stifled pain radiated along her breastbone those twenty-some years ago as she looked up at the sparkly silver stars dangling from the high school gymnasium, all while the youthful and intrusive beat of music poured around her. She'd been forced to go to the dance with a broken heart. They'd paid for the silver dress, after all.
Still, now, that feeling would beat through her as she looked up at the sparkling night sky, but as an adult, she'd found ways to breathe out the feeling of broken uncertainty, welcoming instead the magic the night sky offered.
She'd always found solace in the night sky, its sugar stars and milky moon.
It wasn't until her thirties that Tilly had freshly left a broken and abusive marriage, one that would also play with her heart in a game she could not possibly win, that she started questioning her own repressed need to feel.
And to feel out loud.
She had been made to feel small and inconvenient when she wasn't. Her mother had a penchant for making her feel like a monster if she ever inclined to stick up for herself. But when she was younger, she named it something else. She thought her mother was teaching her to be strong.
Strength, she had started learning later, was so much more than control.
She wondered if parents shouldn't teach their children to be strong. Perhaps they should teach them to fall apart a little first, and then rebuild. A child can learn a lot about themselves when they pick themselves up again. A parent can learn a lot about their child by letting them.
Tilly got the distinct feeling that her parents had never learned much about her.
Now, as she walked down the sidewalk toward her sad apartment, a horrible fortune in her pocket and a feeling of warning in her bones, she marveled at how much she had grown in the last decade. That even as a card was telling her there may be trouble to come, she felt more prepared to face it now as someone who recognized her emotions than someone who once shoved them in a closet with a lock.
But something was eating at the edges of her mind. It felt familiar, and it incited a tickling of fear that she knew not to poke at or give too much attention to. And yet...she was finding it difficult to ignore.
Something was off.
Still, Tilly Nguyen had no idea what was to come.
