Mina’s mother came around the corner with a paper clip. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Jerry? Go get a brownie before the girls eat them all.”
Once he was gone, she used the paper clip to pop the lock. Then she opened the door. “Mina? Whatever game you’re playing?—”
Mina’s mom stopped with a strangled noise. Ellie pushed past and saw Mina…facedown in the tub, tendrils of pink water snaking from around her head.
Itwasn’t your fault. That’s what everyone said. When Ellie wept and begged mercy for her sins, they hugged her and told her that she’d had nothing to do with Mina’s death. Yes, she’d gotten batter in Mina’s hair, but that didn’t kill her. Mina had slipped in the tub, hit her head and drowned. It wasn’t Ellie’s fault.
Except it was, because Mina hadn’t slipped. Ellie had pushed her, and when hitting her head hadn’t knocked her out, Ellie held her under the water.
In the end, though, Ellie wasn’t going to accept all the blame. At least half went to Mina for putting Ellie in that position,where the fortune-teller’s words had been a lifeline thrown into the darkness. A way out of her own personal hell on earth.
Ellie had been three when Mina’s family first came to town and their mothers decided they should be friends. Having never had a friend before, Ellie had accepted Mina’s pinches and bites and slaps. When they left marks, Ellie said she’d tripped and fallen, as Mina told her to.
After they started school, Ellie had accepted it when Mina drove all the other kids away. She accepted it when Mina wanted her lunch or her new necklace or her allowance money. The few times Ellie dared refuse, she’d paid for it. She always paid for it.
But then, when they were eight, a miracle happened. Mina moved away, and Ellie got a taste of freedom and a life where she could eat her own lunch, keep her new necklaces and spend her own allowance money. And make friends. Real friends.
Then, last year, Mina’s family moved back, and it was as if she’d never been gone. She chased off Ellie’s new friends. She made Ellie do her homework. She took ten percent of Ellie’s babysitting money—friendship tithe!—and still expected her to pay for everything when they were out together.
If you tell anyone, you’ll regret it.
One time, Ellie did tell someone—a teacher—and the next day, she woke up puking so hard she had to go to the hospital, where they said she had food poisoning. No, she’d had Mina-poisoning. Her entire life was Mina-poisoned, and all she could do was learn to live with it.
Then came the fortune-teller and that silly drowning cat card that made Mina freak out, thinking it meant she was going to drown. That gave Ellie an idea. She captured the stray kitten that her mom wouldn’t let her keep and put it into Jin’s garage. She mailed that twenty-dollar bill to Brad. And she sat near Trevor during the math test, knowing he’d try to cheat—he always did—and putting her test where he could see it.
Then it was just a matter of making sure people—like the boys—knew about the “prophecy” and enlisting their help to “protect” Mina. The water-choking incident had been a godsend. It freaked Mina out and gave Ellie the chance to freak out, too, babbling about the fortune-teller’s words.
After that, she just needed to set the scene. Break Mina’s shower the week before, knowing her parents were slow to fix anything. Splatter the brownie batter, knowing Mina would insist on a bath to clean her hair.
No one would suspect the truth, not when Ellie was so devastated and had tried so hard to protect her friend from a fortune-teller’s words.
Therewasone prophecy thathadn’tcome true. She’d lied to Mina about Jin asking her to the dance. Or it had been a lie at the time, but at school yesterday, her first day back, Jin had been trying to cheer her up and asked whether she was going to the dance, and Ellie said no one had asked her and she was supposed to go with Mina and…
“You could go with me,” he’d said. “I know it’s not the same…”
She’d sniffed, blinking back tears. “That’d be nice. Thank you.”
The church taught that tarot cards were evil because no one should know the future. That was silly, of course. No one could predict the future.
The future was something you needed to make for yourself.
Time Out
When Dawn was a kid, she could imagine no greater horror than living in a small town in cottage country. Every summer, her parents dragged her to a mouse-infested cabin that belonged to an old college friend of Dad’s. He’d let them stay rent-free, and even at Dawn’s age, she smelled the smug charity in that.
No, really, Charlie, take it. You guys deserve to get away, and I know how hard it’s been since the accident. A week, two weeks, whatever you want. My treat.
Of course, the friend—Dawn forgets his name—hadn’t cared how long they stayed. He didn’t use the cabin himself. He had a million-dollar place a half-hour away. This was the inherited family cabin that he couldn’t bear to part with, especially not when Dawn’s dad would spend his “vacation” fixing up the place.
Dawn hated every minute of those trips, especially when she’d look at the new cottages on the other lakes and imagine her dad’s friend in one of them. Couldn’t even invite them over for the weekend, could he? Nope, he might call Dad an old friend, but her father was really just the handyman, getting two weeks in a dump in return for keeping that dump standing until the friend could sell the land, which he eventually did.
Whenever they made the drive up, they’d pass through endless tiny towns with an old-fashioned main street and cottagers eating overpriced ice cream and buying ugly hats they’d never wear. As they drove through, her dad always said the same thing.
Can you imagine living here?
Dawn thought the same thing, but for her the words had a very different inflection. Her dad said them with wonder, like this was some kind of middle-aged guy Disneyland. In Dawn’s mind, those words came with undercurrents of horror and disgust.
Can you imagine living here?
