“I was thinking more like Bugs Bunny,” I say with a smirk.
Rooney laughs and gives me a gentle push on my shoulder. When she removes her hand, a monarch lands in its place. Suddenly, it flits up to my neck.
“Oh, no. Where is it?” I say, angling my neck away from the insect.
Rooney holds up her hands. “Just give him the money, Jack, and do what he asks!”
She pulls out her phone and snaps a picture. She turns the screen toward me. I almost don’t recognize myself. I’m mid-laugh, a version of myself I rarely see, let alone in a photo.
“Cute,” she says. She avoids eye contact and turns away from me.
The hair on the back of my neck rises, tingling in the humidity.
“So these Fate Tests,” I say, remembering the reason why we’re at the museum. “You’ve shown up early somewhere. And you completed Test 1 by saying yes to this. We’re returning the ID, so Test 3 is in the works for you. As long as we make it out of here alive.”
“Ha, ha,” Rooney says with a roll of her eyes. “You think it’s funny until you’re a death-by-butterfly statistic.”
I stifle a laugh. “I’ll take my chances.”
Rooney casts a side glance at me. “We need to get ‘Fate Test 4: Interact with someone online’ going. At The Huntington, the guy who opened the door for me had a Cloud Lovers League shirt on. I looked it up and it’s this online forum where members share photos of clouds. That sounded sweet.”
“Yeah. Good idea,” I agree.
Rooney ruffles her bangs, letting them fall casually over her forehead. “I’ll download the app and add my first photo later.” She turns her phone toward me again. “Here’s one I took already. Doesn’t that cloud look like a dumpling?”
Against a bright baby blue sky, an oblong puffy white cloud hangs in the distance. The sides are slightly turned up.
I analyze the photo. “Yeah, there are the pleats. Yum.”
“What do you think clouds taste like?” she asks.
“In Los Angeles, smog with a side of avocado.”
Rooney smiles at me, and for a moment it’s only us in the room. Well, us and about a hundred butterflies.
Rooney slips her phone into her bag. “Any word on Sprinkles’s owner?”
I sigh. “Nothing yet. I’ve left a dozen voice mails and text messages by now. There’s no address, either, so I can’t swing by.”
“Maybe Sprinkles’s parents are out of town,” Rooney reasons. She’s still laser-focused on where she steps. “Someone will miss her and get back to you. Hey, I was thinking about something you said about your parents going on their expeditions and not taking you.” Rooney threads her fingers through her sweater. “It’s so interesting, how different our childhoods were. Yet I relate to so much about the way you felt.”
“It sounds like your mom kind of did her own thing, too.”
“My mom had me in her early forties,” she explains. “By that time, she had lived a good amount of life. She had settled into her routine. She was used to doing her own thing.”
“You mentioned a person named JR,” I say, hoping it’s not too nosy of a comment.
She looks surprised that I remember this detail from New York.
“Oh, he’s who my mom slept with to create me,” she simply states. “They weren’t romantically together ever. Just physically the one time. Neither had ever thought about kids for themselves. Truthfully, I was more like a friend than a child.”
“So you were a surprise for them.”
Rooney stops to watch a caterpillar munching on a leaf. “I wasn’t unwanted, per se, but I definitely wasn’t planned. My mom and JR had been friends in the art world. People always envision that I’m the result of a drunken wild night, but it wasn’t like that. They had been working on curating a show for his gallery, and one night they got together. I was made from mutual respect and attraction. But it wasn’t love. He wasn’t the man on the other end of her red string. My mom knew that.”
“So what happened?”
“Mom decided to have me, and here I am,” she says, raising herarms. “She didn’t want to force JR into something he didn’t want to be a part of.”
