by A. E. Snow
After I saw the fiery scene of my dad’s death, I snapped. I thought telling my mom would make it better, but it only made it worse. She was terrified of me.
After a few more days of visions and fear, I decided to do something. I got out of bed still wrapped in a quilt and sat down at my desk. My old laptop took some time to fire up. There had to be someone who could help me understand my dream or flash or vision, who could help me figure out if it was real or not.
I’d been afraid to do any real research about visions and the people who have them, but they weren’t going away. I got online and typed ‘visions’ into the search bar. The search brought up tons of results, clairvoyance being one of them. According to Wikipedia, some people called it having the ‘second sight,’ which meant that you have an additional sight along with regular sight. Apparently, they, or we, are found in every culture in the world time immemorial. I didn’t know if I had the second sight or just the crazy. According to Google, it could also be a religious experience but I doubted that.
The search turned up very few local results. Small towns in the mountains tend to view this sort of thing as the devil’s work. Finally I found a tarot card reader who wasn’t too far away, I decided I would call her and make an appointment after school.
I pulled on jeans and went downstairs to see if anyone had made coffee. The first thing I saw when I went in the kitchen was the bouquet of flowers which had been relocated into a mason jar. Reaching into my back pocket, I got the note. Even though the police don’t seem to believe me, I wondered if I should go straight there. I read the last line over again. “You might even lose someone you love,” I whispered. I couldn’t afford to lose anyone else I loved.
The keys jingled in my shaking hand as I stood by the front door trying to decide if I should go to school or not.
Andrew rushed down the stairs, pulling his shirt on as he went. “Let’s go,” he said and grabbed his bag. “I can’t be late.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have overslept.” I followed him outside. I guess I’m going to school then.
At school, I was distracted all morning. I jumped every time someone dropped a pencil or coughed. It was a relief to go to the library at lunch. My usual corner had a view of the entire library and I sighed with relief when I sat down my back to the corner. I placed the note on the table in front of me and stared at it with a wrinkled brow. I chewed on my lip as I tried to puzzle together who RB was.
“RB,” I muttered. “Who can that be?”
After a moment, a thought entered my head. I hurried to the other side of the library where the yearbooks were kept. I returned to my seat and flipped through the last year’s memories. Except no one, not a single person, had the initials RB. “How is that possible?” I asked myself. “I guess no one wanted to sign their real initials. So what does it mean?”
I wracked my brain but when Mason slipped into the library with just a few minutes left of lunch, I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I slipped the note into my back pocket and smiled up at him. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He sat down across from me and dropped his bag on the floor. He raised an eyebrow at me. “You okay? There’s like zero color in your face.”
“It’s winter.” I forced a laugh.
“Yeah, but it’s like beyond a normal winter pale.”
“Oh. I have a headache.”
He nodded. “Me too.” He tapped on the table and we sat in silence. Twice, he opened his mouth to say something. Twice, I started to show him the note. But in the end, neither one of us said a word.
When the bell rang, he jumped up. “See ya later.” He was gone before I had a chance to stand up.
“That was weird.” I gathered my things and joined the throngs of students in the hall.
I waffled back and forth about going to the police all day. On the one hand, it was evidence and not turning it in was probably a crime. On the other hand, I was terrified. RB was a maniac and a murderer. By the time the last period rolled around, I’d changed my mind ten times. When the bell rang, I packed my things up slowly. As it was a Friday, the room emptied quickly.
“Bellamy?” Mrs. Hopper said.
“Yeah?” I focused on zipping my backpack.
“Mr. J stopped by before class. He asked to see you right after school.”
“Oh. Did he say why?” I asked.
Mrs. Hopper shook his head sympathetically. “No, I’m sorry. He didn’t say.”
“Okay, thanks.” The hallway teemed with people making evening plans. I slid by them and into the office.
“Mr. J wanted to see me?”
The secretary nodded. Two minutes later, I sat in Mr. J’s office. Once again, Officers Lewis and Jackson and I all sat together.
My first thought when I saw them was: How did they know about the note?
“Bellamy.” Officer Jackson’s mouth was drawn in a thin line. “We got the DNA results back from the lab for the hair.”
“Oh,” I said, unable to process what she’d said.
Lewis cleared his throat. “It was a match. The hair you found belonged to Jenna.”
I froze. I’d prayed and wished and hoped that it was a prank. That some horrible, evil asshole just thought it would be funny to scare the shit right out of me.
“There’s more.” Officer Jackson’s voice was cold and hard.
My heart stopped. “What?”
“The only fingerprints found were yours. We compared them to the ones in your school file. The handwriting is yours too.”
The handwriting? Was mine? How? In the end, I didn’t have to ask those questions out loud.
“Bellamy, I’m not sure why you thought it would be okay to fake a note. Did you do it to get back at Cam Walker?”
“Why would I need to get back at Cam?”
“For teasing you? You did bring his name up once before. Maybe you expected him to get into some kind of trouble, and when he didn’t, you decided to get revenge on your own.”
I had no words. I stared at her with my mouth hanging open but nothing came out.
She pursed her lips and then cocked her head to the side. “But the real question is: How did you get the hair?”
The world went fuzzy. Darkness crept around the edges of my vision and I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Put your head between your knees.” Jackson jumped up and helped me put my head down. The world thundered and rattled while I waited, my face by my knees, for this whole thing to disappear. I counted to thirty out loud. When I got to thirty, the dizziness had passed enough that I sat up. My hands shook so much I tucked them under my legs.
“Why did you do it?” Officer Jackson said again. She perched on the desk right in front of me.
“I didn’t,” I said in a small voice.
“The evidence is not in your favor.”
“Someone is setting me up.” It was a weak protest but it was the only thing that made any sense at all.
“Instead of the other way around? Who?”
I was at a complete loss. Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t know.”
No one spoke. Finally, Officer Jackson shook her head and stood up. “I want to believe you, Bellamy. I really do, but . . .”
“I didn’t do it,” I said again, crossing my arms in front of my chest. After silently debating whether or not to tell them about the flowers, I decided against it. Unable to see whether it would help me or hurt me, I kept my mouth shut.
“Since your dad died, you’ve been acting out. Right?”
I nodded, blinking back tears.
“Officer Lewis and I agree. You aren’t a bad kid. But everything you do . . . you do it to be seen. The breaking in, the drugs, the drinking, and the getting caught. Those are all cries for attention and for help. Was this just you taking it to the next le
vel?”
“I—” I started to protest.
Jackson cut me off. “We don’t think you’d actually hurt Jenna so for now, we are going to treat this is a joke. A very bad joke and in very poor taste, but a joke. We know you’ve been spending time with Mason. Did he help you get the hair?”
My eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t do it. Mason didn’t do it.”
“Is there anything else? Any other ideas?” Officer Jackson said, leaning forward in her chair.
With a sigh, I shook my head and gazed at my feet.
Lewis spoke up from the corner where he’d been observing the conversation. “We are going to let this go, for now. You better hope that no other evidence against you surfaces.”
“Can I leave?”
Officer Jackson frowned but waved me out. “Keep your nose clean, Bellamy.”
I burst out of the office barely able to contain my tears and anger. Smashing every window in the school wouldn’t be enough to get me through the rage. Once I made it outside, cars, trees, other students, everything took on a red hue. I put my head down and rushed to the car. I thanked God, or whomever, over and over again that it was my day to have the car and that Iris had a meeting after school with her academic competition team. I focused on the car and put one foot in front of the other.
The old wagon stood like a safe haven in the middle of the emptying parking lot. I grabbed my keys and reached out to unlock the door.
“Bellamy!” I heard Mason calling from a distance.
Closing my eyes, I rested my head on the car.
“Bellamy!” he called again and jogged up next to me. “What’s wrong?”
As soon as he asked, tears began to pour out of my eyes. He grabbed my arm and pulled me to him. I knew it was a bad idea, but I let him hold me for a moment before turning away.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Can we talk?”
I looked up into Mason’s warm brown eyes. I wanted to tell him everything, but I couldn’t. Shaking my head, I said, “I can’t now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mason. We can’t hang out anymore. Something’s happened and I can’t talk about it. Just know that we can’t right now.” I glanced back at the school. I’d half-expected to see Jackson and Lewis following.
“Okay . . .” He stepped back, hurt written all over his face.
“I’m sorry.” I got into my car and left, watching him in the rearview mirror. When he was gone, I opened the card again, my hands shaking. The handwriting was identical to mine. “Oh God,” I breathed. “How did I not notice before?”
I stared in disbelief at the familiar scrawl on the white background. I read the words over and over again, attempting to find something, just one little thing, that might give me a clue. Finally, I threw it onto the floorboard in frustration and peeled out of the parking lot.
When I got home, I called the tarot reader, Miss Octavia. Her soft, accented voice agreed to see me the next morning.
Chapter 15
The next morning, I made my way to Miss Octavia’s, which was two towns over. The address she gave me was that of a nondescript house, small and white with black shutters. It was a regular house in a regular neighborhood except this house had a small sign in the window that read TAROT READINGS HERE. I climbed the stairs to the front porch and stood with my finger lingering over the bell. Before I had a chance to ring the bell or change my mind and leave, the door opened. The woman who answered was petite and older. She reminded me of someone’s grandmother.
I almost smiled. I hadn’t known what to expect but she wasn’t it. “Hi, I’m Bellamy. I have an appointment.”
“Come in, dear. Follow me,” she said.
I followed her through an old-fashioned but immaculately kept entry and living room into a cramped little nook off the kitchen that had a folding table and chairs set up.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat across from her in a folding chair that looked older than Miss Octavia and banged my knees on the table which were the wrong height for the chairs.
She just sat and peered at me like she was trying to see me through fog for what felt like about an hour. Unsure of where to look, I stared back at her. Miss Octavia’s eyes were dark brown, almost black, and I couldn’t read them at all. Her mouth was kind and almost smiling. Laugh lines had settled into her dark skin.
Neither of us spoke. I waited, unsure of what to do or say. I thought maybe she’d fallen into a trance with her eyes open but she nodded suddenly and got a candle and a bundle from the shelf behind her. Reaching into her apron, Miss Octavia lit a match and held it to the wick. She waited a moment before opening the package, which turned out to be her tarot deck wrapped in a beautiful, old, red and blue scarf. The edges of the cards were worn and bent but gold-plated. Handling the deck carefully, she shuffled them, humming to herself. The tune sounded familiar, though I couldn’t grasp how I knew it.
“Shuffling the cards purifies them,” she explained.
I nodded. The clock ticked and the shuffling continued until she placed the cards on the table in front of me.
“Cut them and hold your question in your heart.”
I tried to think of a question while my hand hovered over the stack of cards. “Help me?” I asked silently, unsure of who the question was for. I blew my bangs out of my eyes and hesitated a moment more before cutting the cards.
Miss Octavia sat with her hands in her lap. “Now choose five cards and lay them out in a horseshoe.” She nodded very slowly as I chose five cards and laid them out per her instruction.
She pointed to a card. “Flip it.”
I did as she asked and put it down on the table. It was a beautiful card. Ten golden cups stood in front of a tree branch with pink blossoms. Doves hovered overhead.
“The Ten of Cups.” Miss Octavia peered at me with her brows drawn and her forehead wrinkled. “You’ve risen, Bellamy. You’ve risen above pettiness and matured. You are in a place to create the life you want. Trust your wisdom.”
I swallowed hard. “Okay.”
“Does that speak to you?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.
I stared at the beautiful illustration. “I think so.” I’d have to trust the visions. I couldn’t doubt them if I was going to find out what happened to Jenna.
“Next card.”
I flipped the card over to reveal a woman holding a baby with trees growing out of her head.
“The Ace of Wands. You have discovered something, a new philosophy perhaps. You feel the energy and you want more. This is your call to take up the wand.”
Chill bumps popped up on my arms. Something way down deep inside of me began to stir.
Reaching for the next card, I flipped it before Miss Octavia had a chance to tell me to.
“The Emperor.” She paused and didn’t speak right away. “Both order and structure and enthusiasm and energy. Someone in your life is demanding and unreasonable. Or charismatic and charming. Or both.”
Uncomfortable, I shifted in my chair but it wasn’t the sort of discomfort that went away by rearranging my body. The Emperor. The emperor was the killer, and I knew him, though I was no closer to knowing his identity.
The next card. “Ah, the High Priestess. This is a time of solitude for you. A time to trust your instincts. Things long secret will be revealed in visions or feelings.”
I gasped and put my hands up to my face. I don’t think I actually believed I would get any answers but that had to mean something.
“Does that sound familiar?”
“Yes.”
“There’s more. There are hidden dangers. You sit in the tenuous place between light and dark but the secret path will be revealed to you and the secrets will be illuminated.”
Nodding again, Miss Octavia pointed to the last card. I flipped it, holding my breath. My heart pounded in my chest so hard I could hear it.
“The Star.” Miss Octavia laughed and let out a whoop. “Hope. Healing. Let your hope be your sustenance during the dark times. All will be well.”
Stunned, I sat back in my chair and blinked at the cards. I never thought I believed in the cards but each one answered my question in some way.
“Do the cards mean something to you?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes. They all do.” I paused, unsure of how to explain.
“Why are you really here?” Miss Octavia clasped her hands and put them on the table.
“I, um, I have a problem and I have no idea who to talk to about it.”
“It’s about your ability,” she said.
She already knew. Good grief. Relief bloomed in my chest like a flower slowly unfurling its petals.
“I guess so, yeah.” My eyes filled with heavy tears and I blinked them back.
“Does anyone know?” She spoke in the same accent that most people around here did only hers was even thicker.
“Just my best friend,” I said.
“And your father.”
“Yes. But he’s dead.” Silence filled the room. I closed my eyes and drew in a ragged breath when I saw my dad’s truck engulfed in flames again. The memory of the vision was almost as vivid as the vision itself.
“Tell me.”
“I keep having this vision, or a flash of a picture, and I kind of think it’s related to this missing girl over in Louisa, where I live, but I’m not sure.”
“You are sure,” she stated, her voice firm.
“Okay. I am sure,” I agreed. “But my problem is that I don’t know what it is I am seeing or why it matters.”