by Trish Doller
Did you do your homework?
Yeah.
There’s a plate in the oven for you.
Thanks.
The grass is looking long.
I’ll mow it after school.
I appreciate that my dad’s life sucks sometimes, too. There are nights I lean against the wall outside his door, wanting to knock. Touching the pencil mark on the frame from the last time he measured me there. Wanting him to invite me in. Pressing my ear against the wood grain as if I might hear his thoughts. Wanting to share in the bit of Mom that’s still left in that room. But I’m afraid I’ll break him more than he’s already been broken.
All of this is why, when I finally hear from Dad, I’m not surprised that his reply is a text message telling me I’ve had my fun, but now it’s time to come home, preferably in time to make dinner. Keeping the confrontation as short and impersonal as possible. Like father, like daughter. Only we’re halfway to Cassadaga and I’m not asking Noah to turn the car around now.
I’m typing a response when I’m interrupted by an incoming text from Lindsey.
Everything’s okay. Just a family thing I forgot about.
Before I can find out what was more important to her than Disney World, my phone powers off. Dead.
Perfect.
I lean forward between the seats to tell Noah and Matt about Lindsey’s response.
“Bummer,” Matt says, but he doesn’t sound especially upset. Noah doesn’t say anything and I wonder if Lindsey even matters to them. If I matter. Maybe I’m just another Florida tourist attraction. Then again, how could I be anything more?
“My phone died,” I say. “Do either of you have a charger?”
But they have expensive, gadgety phones that talk to them and play hours of music. Not compatible with my old model that only makes calls and texts. I’m not complaining about it. Just that of all the things I remembered to bring, my charger wasn’t one of them.
“Do you need to make a call?” Noah offers me his phone, but I decide I’ll wait until we reach Cassadaga. A few more miles isn’t going to keep my dad from being upset when I tell him I’m not coming home.
The backseat of the Cougar is comfortable, but the one thing I’ve learned about convertibles since we left High Springs is that at sixty miles per hour they aren’t as romantic as they seem. I’ve peeled the same strand of hair out of my mouth about 642 times, the music just wah-wah-wahs from the speakers, and unless we’re shouting, talking isn’t all that easy. Of course, in the grand scheme of problems, these are not bad ones to have—and it gets infinitely better after we stop outside Ocala for gas and a bathroom break for the dog. Noah tosses the keys to Matt and hops over the side of the car into the backseat with me and Molly.
“Hey!” Matt protests. “Am I the chauffeur now?”
“You wanted to drive Miss Kitty.” Noah stretches his arms out along the top of the seat, tilting his face to soak up the sun. I feel his fingertips tapping out a rhythm on my shoulder, and I’d swear to it that my heart starts beating in time. “And I want to sit back here with Cadie. I’d call that a win for everybody.”
Matt’s hand reaches between the front bucket seats, his middle finger extended, but his reflection in the rearview mirror is laughing as he pulls the Cougar back out onto Route 40.
“Miss Kitty?” I slide up against Noah so I can talk without my words getting blown away. “Is that really the name of your car?”
“Yep,” he says. “She belonged to our granddad, but she’s been garaged ever since he died. Grandmother MacNeal would probably be rolling over in her grave if she knew we had it out on the road.”
“Were you close to her?”
“Not even a little bit.” He smiles to himself and shakes his head. “The first time I met her I had a foot-high, bright-red Mohawk. She looked me up and down, wrinkled her nose like she was smelling something bad, and told me I looked just like my father. So I did the same thing. Looked her up and down, wrinkled my nose, and said, ‘He is quite a handsome son of a bitch, isn’t he?’ ”
I clap my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing, but I laugh anyway. “And she still willed Miss Kitty to you?”
“Maybe in the end she was proud of me for getting myself straight and going to college,” he says. “Maybe she felt bad because Matt’s family inherited everything else, which makes sense because my dad can’t be trusted with money or nice things. Or maybe she liked that I didn’t take her shit. I don’t know, but I do know I love this car.”
“It’s pretty hot.”
Noah leans down close so his lips brush against my earlobe, and my insides feel as if someone has set off a string of firecrackers. “I haven’t made out with anyone in the backseat yet. Wanna break it in?”
I can’t keep from smiling. “Might be fun.”
“I guarantee it.” Noah’s hand comes up and curls softly around the back of my neck as his mouth touches mine. No one has ever kissed me the way he does. Intense, but not hard. Sweet, but not soft. Like if he drew his lips away right now a piece of my soul might just follow along behind. Which sounds completely insane in a head with a history of being level, but I can’t help thinking it. And wanting more, even if I’m just a tourist attraction.
“I’m still in the car, you guys! I can see you!” Matt shouts, his words wedging themselves between Noah and me, pulling us apart. “Have pity on the guy whose date abandoned him, would ya?”
Noah rolls his eyes, but the two of them grin at each other in the rearview mirror.
I shift positions, lying on the back bench-style seat with my feet propped on the door frame, my head on his thigh. “Do you mind?”
“Do I mind your head on my thigh?”
“No, I meant feet on the door,” I say. “If it’s a problem …”
“I never gave a shit what Grandma thought when she was alive, so you”—Noah leans down and kisses me again, quick, like we’re doing it in secret—“can put your feet anywhere you want.”
My imaginary road trip had us holding hands and kissing at stoplights, but in reality, Molly and I both fall asleep against Noah and I don’t wake until his voice burrows its way into my brain. “Cadie, we’re here.”
My eyes open and his face hovers above mine, and I smile because I’m pretty sure I could get used to looking at that face. “Hi, you.”
“Hey,” he says, as I sit up and finger-comb through the snarls in my windblown hair. My face is warm from the sun, and my nose stings a little, making me wonder if it’s burned.
“So what do we do until midnight?” Matt asks, as we pass the welcome post for the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. Established in 1894 by a medium who was led to the area by three ghosts after being told during a séance he would found his own spiritualist community. The whole thing sounds hokey to me, but the street is lined with new age shops—with names like Purple Rose and Sixth Sense—offering gemstones, spiritualist books, and psychic readings. Clearly there are many here who believe.
Tarot. Palm. Crystals. Astrology. Some of the mediums even claim to be able to contact loved ones on the other side. The thought of being able to talk to my mom again cuts a keen sadness through my heart.
“We could take a ghost tour or go to a psychic.” I don’t really believe I could communicate with my mother through a medium, but having my palm read or my tarot done might be fun. I’ve never done anything like that before, except the time Hallie Kernaghan brought an old Ouija board to soccer camp and a bunch of us tried to make it do something. We spent half the night accusing each other of pushing the pointer and just gave up. “Maybe a psychic can tell us who tied Jason to a tree,” I say. “Or maybe she can channel your grandma’s spirit so we can ask her how she feels about you driving the car.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’ll tell us tonight at the Devil’s Chair,” Matt says. “I mean, imagine it. The stroke of midnight, when the veil between worlds is thin enough for the devil to send a message. It’s dark and silent in the cemetery until a disembodied
voice from the deepest pits of hell shrieks, ‘That car was in mint condition!’ ”
Noah laughs so hard that tears trickle from the corners of his eyes, and every time he tries to speak, his words get lost in a new fit of laughter. In the end we agree to grab lunch, pitch the tents at a local park, and then come back for a psychic reading—and maybe even a ghost tour—before we try out the Devil’s Chair. But the first thing on my personal to-do list is call home, and it’s no exaggeration when I say I’d rather speak to the devil himself than tell Dad I’m not coming home yet. I borrow Noah’s phone.
“Where the hell are you?” My dad is so mad his words surely must have rattled the satellites on their way to my ear. The last time he was this upset with me was when I stole Mom’s favorite perfume to wear on a date with Justin. She always let me borrow it when she was alive, but afterward Dad hoarded the bottle in his magpie nest of memories, hidden away behind his bedroom door.
He caught me red-handed and shouted at me, telling me I had no business going in his room. That I had no right to touch Mom’s belongings, as if she’d been only his. I tried to explain that if she were still alive she would give me permission to use her perfume, but he just wouldn’t listen. Finally, I hurled the bottle at the living room wall and it shattered, raining glass onto the carpet and releasing Mom’s scent in the house, where it hung like a ghost for days. We didn’t speak to each other until it was gone, and even then neither of us apologized.
“Cassadaga,” I tell him now. “I’ll be home soo—”
“Now. You come home right now.”
“No.” The word lashes out of my mouth like a slap. Hard. Fast. And other words—terrible words—bubble up behind that word, but I swallow them in front of Noah and Matt. “Not yet.”
“This is not something you get to decide, Arcadia,” Dad says.
“Yeah, actually it is.”
“What?”
“I’m eighteen years old.” I cringe as I say it, because playing the legal-adult card doesn’t make me feel like an adult at all. It makes me feel like a brat, but I say it anyway. “So I do get to decide.”
“My house, my rules.”
“Dad—”
“Cadie, you are still my daughter and—”
“Exactly,” I say. “I’m your daughter. Danny is your son. You’re supposed to take care of us, but all I’ve done for the last three years is take care of you. I just want this one thing. Just—”
“Be back in time for dinner,” he says, softer now, but still firm. Disappointment washes through me. I thought—I hoped—he’d relent. “And bring Lindsey Buck with you.”
“Wait, what? Dad?”
He hangs up before I can tell him Lindsey already went home, and I’m left with nothing but an earful of dial tone. Why would he say that? Why doesn’t he know that she didn’t come with us? And if she’s not at home … where is she?
“That’s weird.” I hand Noah his phone. “He seems to think Lindsey is with us.”
“Where else would she go?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to call her?” He extends the phone to me again and I take it, except Lindsey assured me she was okay. And her business hasn’t been my business in a long time. Still, I told her mom I’d look out for her. I open the keypad, and, after all that wrangling with my conscience, it hits me that I don’t even know Lindsey’s cell number by heart. I try their old landline, which I think the Bucks abandoned in favor of a cellular family plan, and get recorded confirmation that I have no way of contacting Lindsey. I could call Dad again, but … no thanks.
Matt jingles the keys to the Cougar. “Do you want us to take you back?”
“No.” The more my dad wants me to come home, the less I am inclined. He doesn’t want his daughter, he wants the cook, the housekeeper, and the babysitter.
“You sure?” Noah asks.
Molly nuzzles her nose under my hand so I’ll pet her and I do. “Trying to get rid of me?”
He shakes his head and makes an I-can’t-believe-you’re-really-asking-me-that-question face. “Nope.”
“Well—” I miss my little brother something fierce. I don’t think we’ve been apart this many days before, but isn’t that part of the problem? Even though I can justify what I’m doing, it doesn’t keep me from feeling guilty. I’m just getting better at tamping it down. When I smile at Noah I mean it. I don’t want to leave. “I guess I’m staying.”
The lady across the table from me doesn’t look psychic. Granted, my only frame of reference is Esmeralda, the grandma fortune-teller inside the machine at the antique shop next door to our grocery store. The machine doesn’t work anymore, but my dad gave me the printed card that dropped out for him back when he was a kid. It has a four-leaf clover printed on it, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for when you need a little extra luck. I keep it in my wallet, but I’m not completely convinced good luck is transferrable like that.
Anyway, the lady across the table from me looks like someone’s mom and the school photos of moon-faced kids hanging on the living room wall behind her suggest she may well be. So incongruous with the purple neon hand in her living room window offering palm, tarot, aura, and astrological readings for twenty dollars.
She tells me her name is Joan, which seems pretty unexotic, but see: Esmeralda. Beggars can’t be choosers, and the good-luck card in my wallet doesn’t have much company—only the fifty-dollar bill Uncle Eddie gave me for graduation, ten dollars Justin’s mom slipped me at the football stadium after the ceremony, and a fifteen-dollar Target gift card from Rhea Chung. I should probably save the money for something important, but when in Cassa-daga, I guess. So here we are.
Joan distributes her tarot cards on the table in a row of six—a universal spread, she calls it—and flips over the first one. On it is a woman wearing a white dress, with an apple in one hand and some sort of branch in the other. It’s very beautifully illustrated, and I remind myself to ask her the name of the deck.
“This card represents how you feel about yourself right now.” Joan touches it with a manicured hand. So pretty compared to my ragged nails. “The High Priestess means you are seeking guidance and answers. Your life is out of balance, and you’re looking for guidance but need to look within yourself. You need to trust your intuition.”
Generic, but nice, and the part about my life being out of balance is pretty accurate.
The second card is the Fool.
“This doesn’t mean you’re a fool,” Joan assures me. “It usually means you just want to be happy and that you’re trying to find the thing that will bring that happiness. You feel unsure of what you want in life, and you’re ready for new experiences, personal growth, and maybe even adventure. That’s why it’s important to remember the High Priestess, who tells you to trust your instincts.”
My brain pricks up like dog ears at the word “adventure,” but I don’t say anything. Again, she is not wrong, but the card meaning is vague enough that it could be applied to anyone.
I nod.
“I get a sense with you that you have great musical ability,” she says. “Do you sing?”
“In the shower,” I say. “And not very well.”
“Maybe the piano or—no, guitar.” Gathering dust in the corner of my closet is an old guitar that used to belong to my dad. He gave it to me because at thirteen—after my MythBusters phase—I was going to be a rock star. Turns out I was hopelessly bad at playing guitar. I shake my head. “Well, it’s a little hazy, and I could be seeing artistic, rather than music. But cultivate it. Nurture it. Because it will pay off in a big way.”
Right.
“The Fool also might mean you’re having mixed feelings about someone and whether or not you want to begin a relationship with him,” she says.
I don’t respond to that, either, because Matt and Noah are sitting on a bench on her front porch. She can see the backs of their heads through the window, so I’m not convinced this card isn’t a gimme, too.
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“Here the future is a little more clear,” she says. “His name starts with an N. Maybe Nathan. Noah. Nicholas. I’m not sure, but either you know him or you’ve known him in a past life.”
Did I say Noah’s name while I was waiting for my turn? Could she have heard me speaking to him as I paged through a photo album filled with testimonials from happy customers? I don’t think I did, but I still don’t fully believe. Especially because throwing in the part about my past life kind of covers Joan’s ass. I wonder if this is why her readings are so cheap.
She doesn’t say any more about my love life. Instead she turns over the next card, which bears an emperor holding the world in his hand and what looks like a sheaf of arrows. A golden bird—a hawk, maybe, or a falcon—rests on his shoulder.
“The Emperor,” she says. “This card means you’re feeling as if success is just out of your grasp and that you don’t have the support that you need—I think from your father. Perhaps a boy—no, definitely your father.”
There’s no way she could know that I’m torn between the desire to leave High Springs and the fear of leaving my dad and Danny behind. That I’m afraid to tell Dad that trying to fill my mom’s shoes is too much for me to bear.
But Joan knows.
I stare at the Emperor, not wanting to meet her eyes as she taps his golden crown. “Trust your dad, Cadie,” she says. “There’s something blocking the two of you. Something to do with your mother, I think, so you’ll have to make the first move. Ask him. Talk to him.”