I turned around to walk south again. A drunk man slurred at me—Heyyy, baby—and a pair of women shook their heads asI approached, as though I was holding out a spider or a mouse. I thought I had imagined it when I heard a girlish voice calling my name. “Ava? Ava?” After the jitney ride yesterday, I second-guessed everything I heard.
They were leaning along the rails, passing a bottle of pink lemonade between them. Lucy Ellison, Noelle Cohen, and Nina Wright. We had gone to middle school together, until their parents sent them to private schools inland. We hadn’t been friends, exactly—Noelle and Nina lived in Margate, in large houses with fountains in the front yards and high iron fences, and they always hung out together after school. Lucy lived in Marvin Gardens, in a pink Spanish-style house with her parents and two standard poodles—her life looked like something from a storybook. Des never wanted to give me bus fare, so I never met up with them on the weekends or after school, and after a while they stopped inviting me.
“I almost didn’t recognize you. Your hair,” Noelle said. She passed the bottle to Lucy, who grimaced when she took a sip—not just lemonade.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s different.”
“How’s Atlantic City High?” Lucy asked. “Do girls really throw bleach at each other when they fight?”
“I heard there’s a day care in the building, because so many girls have had babies,” Noelle said.
“I—it’s okay.” It wasn’t true, about the day care or about the bleach. But I didn’t want to explain that I had dropped out. I’d had visions more frequently in school than anywhere else. It made me anxious, unable to concentrate. Des told me she wanted me to help out more in the shop, but it had been my idea to quit, once my sixteenth birthday came around and no one could report me to the state. I told myself it would just be easier that way.
“Want some?” Nina asked, holding out the bottle.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Some of my mom’s vodka, with a packet of Crystal Light stirred in. Down here none of the cops even care, so we came to pregame.”
I took the drink from her. It smelled like nail polish remover and SweeTarts. A ring of lip gloss shimmered around the mouth of the bottle. I took a sip, which made me cough. I had never had a drink before, but I hoped maybe it’d make me feel different—calmer or braver, or just less myself.
“What are those?” Lucy asked, reaching for my wrist. At first I thought she meant the pearls, but then she turned my palm over into hers, slid a business card out of my grip. My face got hot, and I could feel the mottled rash creep across my neck, the way it always did when I was embarrassed.
“Clara Voyant, Seer and Fortune Teller! Oh my god. Stop.”
“It’s just a … a project,” I said. I thought of what Des had said the other day. My mother and I made the same face when we lied.
“What kind of project?” Her eyes gleamed with mean joy.
“Hard to explain.”
“So you, like, tell people about their futures and stuff?” Nina asked.
“Oh! Do Noelle. Noelle, see if Ava knows whether Nick will finally ask you out.”
“Shut up.” Noelle elbowed Lucy in the ribs. “Nick Hart. You know him, Ava.”
“Ava used to like Nick Hart!”
“No, I mean, maybe. He’s fine. But I don’t like him anymore, obviously.” If only they knew what my life was like now—that in a few days I’d probably go out on a date with a strange, grown-up man. But for a second I let myself picture how Nick would look in the prep uniform, the navy blazer with brass buttons, a crisp blue button-down shirt the same color as his eyes.
“You and Ava have to duke it out, Noelle,” Nina said.
Noelle’s smile was small, catlike. “We’ll probably see him at the party tonight. Actually, we should get going. I gotta do my hair.”
“Yeah, I need to get home, too,” I said. Around these girls, I felt like a sliver of myself. Maybe because they had known a different version of me: quiet, mousy brown hair, good at math. They could see the ways I’d changed, the versions of myself that I had left behind. That itchy, tingling feeling crept up my stomach, and I rubbed at my shirt, hoping they wouldn’t see.
Noelle and Nina whispered back and forth to one another. Nina giggled. “You should come with us,” Lucy said, which made Noelle snort.
“Really, I’ve got to go. Have fun, though.” I hated them, their stupid, perfect, easy lives.
My face burned as I walked on. I turned once to see the girls recede down the boardwalk, their ponytails swinging. Noelle held up my card and the three of them exploded into laughter. I stomped to the closest trash can and threw the rest of the cards away, retreated to the shop without raising my eyes from the ground. Once I was back, I sat at the table, cutting the tarot deck and stacking it again, watching the people stream past, and out farther, to where the waves broke into white foam near the shoreline. Dark clouds collected in the sky above, and I pleaded for them to break into rain, but they blew past, and we were left with the skin-blistering heat.
The next day I was sitting at the table in the shop again—thinking about those messages I’d seen on Julie Zale’s Facebook page—when I heard thetap tap tapon the doorframe, so faint that at first I thought I had imagined it. A woman stood behind the beaded curtain. I called to her to come in. “Are you here for a reading?”
Her face was younger than I’d thought it would be, based on her posture and the slumped, tired-seeming shadow she cast from behind the beads. She was pretty, petite, with straightblonde hair and big brown eyes that shifted around the room. In the light, I could see she had dark circles underneath them, like it had been weeks since she had slept well. She held out one of the business cards.
“I found this blowing down the street.” Her voice was soft, with a trace of a Southern accent. The card trembled in her hands. She was afraid. Of what—who? Me?
