by Melissa Grey
“Well? Aren’t you going to summon the spirits or whatever it is you do?” Summer’s disdainful gaze swept across the room. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. It was a little musty but not nearly enough to justify that kind of attitude. She toyed with a pendant hanging from a golden chain around her neck. It was designed to look like a locket, but Tamsin recognized it for what it was. Custom-made wearable tech. Instead of the clunky smartwatches most plebeians like Tamsin wore, Summer donned her rating in style. Those custom jobs didn’t come cheap. “I’m surprised you don’t have a Ouija board in here. Isn’t that, like, your brand?”
Summer was aiming for glib, but Tamsin saw through the girl’s artless facade. She was afraid. Not of Tamsin, as much as Tamsin would have loved that to be the case, but of this single act of deviance. For a girl like Summer (rating: 82), one skipped class was a minor snag in a tapestry of perfection. Her rating might take a temporary hit, but even that was unlikely. While the threat of the ratings was ever present in the lives of every Maplethorpe student, the practice of doling out punishment was anything but equal. No one was truly perfect, even if Summer Rawlins and her ilk thought they were. But the faculty at Maplethorpe tended to overlook the occasional transgressions of the privileged, provided they were anomalous. It was one of the reasons that the private school maintained an average student body rating so much higher than the national mean.
For Tamsin, truancy was just another Monday.
“Payment up front.” Tamsin gestured toward a small ceramic dish beside the cloth, as if sullying her fortune-telling hands with something as mundane as money would taint the magic in them. Mystique. It all came down to the tiny details. Summer didn’t need to know that the dish was another reject repurposed from Tamsin’s mother’s shop. Ms. Moore would not be pleased that her daughter was using the wisdom of the ancients to swindle money from her fellow students, but she would at least be happy that Tamsin was recycling.
“How much?” Summer asked. As if it mattered to her. The Rawlins family owned half the town, and that was a conservative estimate.
“Forty for you. Another twenty for Tweedledee and Tweedledumb. Each.”
Tweedledee gawked in indignation, but Summer merely nodded and placed two crisp twenties in the ceramic dish.
With a flourish, Tamsin spread the cards across the cloth. “Pick a card. Place it facedown in front of you. Do not turn it over.”
She’d had a different spread in mind—the Celtic Cross, for which she charged extra—but tardy clients demanded a little improvisation.
Summer reached out to select a card from the deck, taking an obscene amount of time to decide on just which one was right for her. Silence thickened in the candlelit room. Tamsin waited patiently until her patience ran out.
She popped her gum, and as one, always as one, the three girls jumped.
Tamsin smiled. “Sorry.”
She wasn’t.
When Summer settled on a card, Tamsin made a show of turning it over. She did it slowly, so as to draw out the dramatic tension of the moment. The girls sitting across from her held their breath in unison. Tamsin wondered if they did everything in unison, even when they weren’t dizzying audiences at basketball games with their unerringly coordinated pom-poms.
For forty dollars, Tamsin would shuffle her tarot deck and deal the cards, reading the fortunes of anyone with enough money to pay. If she liked them, she’d make it interesting. If she didn’t like them, she’d make it really interesting.
Today’s customers were people Tamsin really didn’t like.
Summer Rawlins was the captain of Maplethorpe’s cheerleading squad. Maplethorpe hadn’t even had a cheerleading squad—something about it being antithetical to the academy’s mission statement to form young minds into contributing members of society. That is, until Summer and her trust fund rolled in freshman year. Daddy Rawlins donated enough money to completely renovate the school’s aging library, and Summer got to nurture whatever pet project she wanted. And that project had been building a cheer squad from the ground up.
Summer’s two minions watched the cards over Summer’s shoulders with rapt attention and too-wide eyes. Their lips glistened with the same shade of lip gloss Summer preferred. Their nails were painted in complementary colors. Coordination. It was their thing.
With a flourish, Tamsin turned over the card. Summer gasped as a prone figure, run through with ten long swords, was revealed on the card’s face.
“The Ten of Swords,” Tamsin said, injecting every ounce of doom she could muster into her voice. A draft gusted at the candles, making the shadows in the corners of the room jump. Summer jumped with them. Tamsin swallowed a smile. She couldn’t have asked for better theatrics.
The Ten of Swords was widely regarded as the most pessimistic card in the deck. It was synonymous with misfortune, defeat, and backstabbing—both literal and figurative. Oftentimes, it symbolized the lowest point in a seeker’s life.
For Tamsin, it meant an easy way to scare an extra twenty bucks out of fools with more money than sense.
“That’s not good, is it?” Summer’s voice was more of a squeak than a question. “What does that mean? Am I gonna die?”
Tamsin shrugged. “We’re all gonna die, Summer. The real questions are when and how.”
Summer squinted at the cards, then at Tamsin. “Can you tell that?”
“Some mysteries must be left to the universe,” said Tamsin. “But we can consult the cards and see if they’re in the mood to elaborate.”
“Okay, good, so do it,” Summer said, with the air of a girl who was accustomed to getting her way.
Tamsin directed a pointed look at the ceramic dish. “The cards tend to be chattier when they’ve been fairly compensated.”
“Fine, whatever.” Summer rummaged in her backpack for a moment before yanking out her wallet and dumping another twenty in the dish. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were scamming me.”
Through sheer force of will, and maybe even a little divine intervention, Tamsin held back the laughter threatening to bubble up her throat. “Then it’s a good thing you do know better.”
Tamsin said a quick prayer to whatever deity might be listening that the next card at the top of the deck be a nasty one. It would make Tamsin’s day to have the distinct pleasure of ruining Summer’s.
She turned over the card and bit her lip to hide her smile.
The Lovers, reversed.
Excellent.
The face of the card showed two figures with their arms intertwined. They were gazing, not at each other, but at the ground. Above them floated an ominous face in the clouds, staring down at them, its gaze heavy with judgment. Beneath the image were scrawled two words …
“The Lovers,” said Summer. “That’s good, right?”
Summer’s big blue eyes slid to the first card she’d drawn.
The Ten of Swords.
“Or maybe it’s not … ?”
“It’s not,” Tamsin confirmed. It took everything she had not to cackle like the witch she knew they liked to say she was.
“So … what does it mean, then? I paid you, you can’t not tell me now.”
And now it took everything Tamsin had not to roll her eyes. The Rawlins family thought that money made the world go around. The truly disappointing thing about it was how often they were right.
But still, Tamsin could have some fun.
“Upright, the Lovers represents unity and balance. Harmony within the self and in relationships. Reversed, well. Reversed, it means just the opposite.”
That was actually true.
“And when it follows the Ten of Swords, a card that signifies treachery … Well, I hate to be the one to bear such unfortunate tidings …” Tamsin knew she was laying it on a bit thick, but sometimes she simply couldn’t resist. “But I think your relationship isn’t heading in the direction you probably hope it is.”
Summer leaned forward, her expertly manicured eyebrows pinching. “Are you sa
ying he’s gonna break up with me?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Tamsin insisted. “I am but a humble messenger through which the arcana speaks.”
Definitely too thick.
“So, how do I get him to not break up with me?” Summer pressed. “Nobody breaks up with me.”
And now the real fun could begin.
“I might have something to help with that,” Tamsin drawled. “A special remedy to keep the heart true. But, as the saying goes, nothing good in life comes free.”
A frantic energy had seized Summer, making her nearly quake with its force. “Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”
Of course she would. Money was no object to a Rawlins. Tamsin would come up with a suitably absurd price once she decided what innocuous ingredients she was going to toss into a glass vial later. Her mother had started mixing her own essential oil blends to sell in the shop recently. She was bound to have a few extra bottles lying about.
“Tomorrow,” Tamsin said. “Meet me here after eighth period.”
Summer and her minions pushed themselves to stand on shaky legs. Tamsin bit back a smile. She did so enjoy striking fear into the hearts of Maplethorpe’s student body.
“I’ll have what you need, but first …” Tamsin reached into the velvet pouch beside her and took her sweet time sliding out the most impressive of all her tools. A silver blade set in an ebony handle. Her athame. It had started life as her great-grandmother’s letter opener, but a little sharpening had transformed it into something altogether more intimidating. Tamsin relished the way Summer’s eyes widened as she took in the blade. “I’ll need a little something from you.”
She didn’t, of course, but Summer didn’t need to know that.
Hana Sakamoto was haunted by numbers.
The sight of the numbers shining on the digital scale in the bathroom that morning buzzed through her mind as she walked through the crowded halls of Maplethorpe Academy. She had missed morning assembly because of figure skating practice, so she headed straight from the front doors to her first-period class—Advanced Placement Biology—without pause. Now she dragged her heels toward the cafeteria, knowing full well she wouldn’t be eating anything they served there. She was half a pound heavier than she’d been the day before. Her parents had roped her into an overly filling dinner, insistent in a way they rarely were.
Her mother had gotten it into her head to make her mother’s okonomiyaki, a dish heavier than anything Hana had eaten in weeks. Months? She’d only consumed half of the layered monstrosity of cabbage, flour, egg, and pork, but the damage was done. It sat like a stone in her stomach, weighing her down, even after the 150 crunches Hana did before bed in a vain attempt to compensate.
The scale wasn’t fooled. The scale told the truth.
Numbers never lied.
They couldn’t. It simply wasn’t in their nature. Numbers were absolute truth, unadorned. They managed to strike a delicate, pristine balance between brutal honesty and elegant simplicity.
And the truth was that she would have to work much harder if she wanted to qualify for nationals this year. She’d missed last season because of a stress fracture in her right foot—her doctor had mentioned something about low bone density and malnutrition, but Hana had tuned him out after he said she would have to skip the season.
The silver medal she’d won at her last competition—junior nationals, two years ago—was still rattling around in the bottom of her skate bag. The display case at the Sakamoto home was reserved strictly for gold. Silver and bronze had no place of honor behind that particular glass exhibit. Those medals were relegated to a box shoved to the back of Hana’s closet, alongside her wrinkled ribbons from horse shows of years long past, before she’d settled on figure skating as her sport of choice.
Her parents were both champion equestrians, show-jumping victors in back-to-back Olympics. Her mother still competed, with Hana’s father coaching her. They’d made sure she knew how to ride about as soon as she could walk, and hadn’t tried to contain their disappointment when Hana hung up her riding boots in exchange for figure skates.
Still, it wasn’t long before they’d hired the best coaches and choreographers in the country to mold Hana into a champion.
The molding was not going nearly as well as Hana suspected her parents desired. Oh, she’d started out strong. She’d shown prodigious talent as a child, picking up the fundamentals after mere moments on the ice. Within minutes, she’d learned how to stroke and glide and balance on one foot. After a few sessions, Hana was spinning and performing little bunny hops from one skate to the other. By the time she was eleven, she had all her triple jumps—though the clean edges of some of the takeoffs continued to elude her. She was on the road to Olympic stardom, ready to bring home a gold medal to match those of her parents.
And then, puberty hit. And it hit hard.
When her body changed, her balance changed. Suddenly, she had to learn everything from scratch, but this time with an entirely new center of gravity. On the ice, she grew slow and sluggish, her blades heavy and loud as they scraped the surface, so different from the gentle whispers they’d produced before her body betrayed her.
“It’s your curves,” her coach, Dmitriev, had informed her after a particularly clumsy practice eight months ago. “They’re slowing down your rotations.”
“So, what do I do about it?” Hana had asked, winded in a way she never had been before.
“You have two options. You can bulk up and build enough muscle to give yourself more height and distance on your jumps.”
Hana had barely even considered it. She’d always wanted to be a Nancy, not a Tonya. What appealed to her about figure skating was its ethereal nature. When she was skating, she felt like a nymph, skimming across a frozen pond. No one wanted to look at a bulky nymph.
“And my second option?”
Dmitriev shrugged and took a sip from the travel mug he carried so often. Hana wouldn’t have been surprised if it were soldered on to his hand. “You can become more aerodynamic, but I would not recommend it. Already you are too thin. You need muscle.”
She’d tuned him out after aerodynamic.
The first ten pounds came off easily. Every time she stepped on the scale in her bathroom, her body sizzled with the thrill of victory. But eventually, she hit a plateau. Hana knew this extreme slimming down wasn’t what Dmitriev meant for her to do, but her tangible progress was too seductive to ignore.
Numbers didn’t lie, and the scale told her that if she wanted to make progress, to become as aerodynamic as possible, she was going to have to make some sacrifices.
Sacrifices didn’t involve okonomiyaki, no matter how delicious it was.
Having arrived at Maplethorpe Academy long after the morning’s hubbub died down, Hana hadn’t even realized there was a hubbub until she overheard two girls discussing it on the line for lunch. A lunch that she had no plans on eating.
“Can you believe it? I mean, I live for start-of-the-year drama, but like … what a weird way to go about it,” said one girl whose name Hana had probably known at some point in time but had long ago forgotten. She never paid much attention to the other students at Maplethorpe. Her life revolved around the ice. Everything outside that was extraneous. Unnecessary.
Hana turned around, just enough to see the girls behind her.
“Sorry, what drama?”
The two girls slammed the brakes on their conversation, their dual gazes settling on Hana as if she were a bug that had smashed herself on their window.
“Um, the graffiti?” Girl Number One said slowly, as if she were reminding a very stupid child of something exceedingly obvious. “On the front doors?”
“I was late today,” Hana said. “I didn’t see anything on the doors.”
Girl Number Two offered Hana a small, chilly smile. Hana wondered if she knew about the special permission Hana had received to skip morning assembly for the sake of her practices and resented her for it. “Some idiot with a can o
f spray paint wrote ‘The ratings are not real’ on the doors this morning. Nobody knows who did it.”
“Oh,” Hana said, for lack of anything better. The girls were already turning away, bending their heads even closer together to resume the conversation she so rudely interrupted. “Thanks.”
They ignored her, picking up again at a much quieter volume so Hana could neither overhear nor be tempted to insert herself into the conversation.
It was such a silly thing for someone to write. The ratings are not real. The ratings were numbers, and numbers never ever lied.
“What’ll you have, dear?”
Hana jerked her attention from the frantic buzz of the whispered conversation behind her to the lunch lady across the counter. It was the same woman who had held the position since Hana’s freshman year. There was something calming and maternal in the soft lines of her plump figure. Hana loved and loathed her in equal measure. She looked like a woman who found enjoyment in food, a thoroughly foreign concept for Hana. Though Hana wished she understood the comfort other people experienced in eating, all she ever felt was anxiety that gnawed at her gut even more than her hunger did. Her strength of will depended on her rock-solid association with food being detrimental to her physical and mental health. She knew, objectively, that this notion was unsound, but it was best left unanalyzed, lest the entire fragile structure come crashing down around her.
Hana let her eyes rove over the options presented to her. The literature Maplethorpe provided to prospective students and their parents boasted of their nutritious meal options, but everyone knew that teenagers wouldn’t sustain themselves on quinoa and kale alone. There were cheeseburgers and fries—with the option to drench them in cheese and gravy should one desire to clog their arteries before they could legally vote—and mozzarella sticks, deep-fried and slathered in marinara sauce.
Her stomach lurched at the sight of all that food, either in protest or trembling desire. Hana was never quite sure these days.