I scoff, grip shifting on the ball. “I can laugh,” I defend. “Ha. Ha.”
She guffaws. “Oh please, your aura is practically begging me for a good time.” Her eyes narrow, mine follow suit. “And you’re in denial.” She moves to take another bite but decides against it, saying, “And don’t get me started on your suppressed desires. I’ll have to sage the place when you leave just to see straight.”
Kill me.
I blow out a sharp breath; she takes another disgusting bite of her sandwich.
“Fine, I’m serious,” I admit, blowing my bangs out of my eyes. “Seriously pissed you conned my mother into buying this glorified marble.”
She regards me the entire time she slowly chews another bite, the ball getting heavier with every second that passes.
“She had some of this when she started seeing me,” she says, wiping the crumbs off her hands. “Your mother.”
“Okay.” I don’t want to know the things this woman has told my mother. “That’s nice. But if we co?—”
“She suppressed her desires too.” She takes another bite, chewing slowly, watching me watch her. When she swallows, she says, “Had two dreams locked inside of her.”
I scoff. “That does not sound like my mother.”
“Means she was better at hiding it than you are.”
“What isthatsupposed to mean?”
“It means—” She sets the sandwich down on the counter. “That you need to make a change, just like I told her she did. She listened to me—not entirely, given the state you’re in.” She gives me a judgmental look. “But she’s more aligned with her true self than she was when we started.”
Ifalignedleads to hiding a brain tumor and losing our entire bank account, no thanks.
I give her a tight smile. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”
“You’d be wise to. And—” She stops abruptly, pointing a sharp purple fingernail into the air and closing her eyes as she drops her head back. “I’m getting something here?—”
Because my lips refuse to stay closed, I mutter, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care, because she continues, almost convulsing with whatever she’sgetting. “Ahh, yes. I’m seeing a woman.” She opens one eye to look at me and I frown. “Angry.” The eye closes. “And she has—” She sways back and forth. “Gone down a path that—” The eye reopens, this time giving me a once-over before reclosing. “Isn’t right.” Both eyes spring open, and she smiles wide. “That’s on the house.”
Again:Kill me.
“Noted.” I gesture at her with the ball. “About the ball.”
In her pause, the whir of the fog machine and buzz of the neon sign fill the air and make me itch.
Finally, she says, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars and throw in a free reading.”
“Full price, no reading,” I counter.
She takes a long blink, showcasing the gold glitter on her eyelids. “No.”
If I didn’t need every cent, I’d drop the damn thing on the fake fog-covered floor and let it shatter.
Instead, I pass it to her. “Fine.”
She clicks around the register to open the drawer, handing me a hundred-dollar bill—no doubt a fraction of what my mother paid—and I shove it in the front pocket of my overalls.
“Your reading,” Sylvia calls as I’m spreading the beads of the doorway to leave.
Over my shoulder: “Keep it.”
“The seekers of control are the most ignorant of all,” she says anyway. “The solution is in plain sight, but only if you’re looking.”
