was a supremely accomplished actress—a necessity when your livelihood depended on parting strangers from their money—she’d never been able to fake tears.
Vivi abandoned her packing and took a few steps across her cramped bedroom toward her mother. “It’s going to be okay, Mom,” Vivi said. “I won’t be gone long. Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.”
Her mother sniffed and extended her pale arm. Vivi shared her mother’s fair coloring, which meant that she burned after fifteen minutes in the desert sun. “Look what I drew as your cross card.”
It was a tarot card. Daphne made a living “reading the fortunes” of all the sad, wretched people who sought her out and forked over good money in exchange for bullshit platitudes: Yes, your lazy husband will find work soon; no, your deadbeat dad doesn’t hate you—in fact, he’s trying to find you too . . .
As a child, Vivi had loved watching her beautiful mother dazzle the customers with her wisdom and glamour. But as she grew older, seeing her mother profiting from their pain began to set Vivi’s teeth on edge. She couldn’t bear to watch people being taken advantage of, yet there was nothing she could do about it. Daphne’s readings were their one source of income, the only way to pay for their shitty apartments and discount groceries.
But not anymore. Vivi had finally found a way out. A new beginning, far from her mother’s impulsive behaviors. The kind that had led them to uproot their whole lives time and again based on nothing more than Daphne’s “premonitions.”
“Let me guess,” Vivi said, raising an eyebrow at the tarot card in her mother’s hand. “Death?”
Her mother’s face darkened, and when Daphne spoke, her normally melodic voice was chillingly sharp and quiet. “Vivi, I know you don’t believe in tarot, but for once, just listen to me.”
Vivi took the card and turned it over. Sure enough, a skeleton carrying a scythe glared up from the card. Its eyes were hollowed-out gouges and its mouth curved up in an almost gleeful leer. Disembodied hands and feet pushed up from the loamy earth as the sun sank in a blood-red sky. Vivi felt an odd tremor of vertigo, like she was standing at the edge of a great precipice and looking down into a vast nothingness instead of standing in her bedroom, where the only view was the neon-yellow WE BUY GOLD sign across the street.
“I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you,” Daphne whispered. “You have an ability to see beyond the veil. It makes you a target for dark forces.”
“Beyond the veil?” Vivi repeated wearily. “I thought you weren’t going to say stuff like that anymore.” Throughout Vivi’s childhood, Daphne had tried to draw her into her world of tarot and séances and crystals, claiming that Vivi had “special powers” waiting to be unlocked. She’d even trained Vivi to do simple readings for clients, who’d been mesmerized by the sight of a small child communing with the spirits. But eventually, Vivi had realized the truth—she didn’t have any power; she was just another pawn in her mother’s game.
“I can’t control which card I draw. It’s foolish to ignore a warning like this.”
A horn honked outside and someone yelled an expletive. Vivi sighed and shook her head. “But you taught me yourself that Death is a symbol of transformation.” Vivi tried to hand the card back to her mother, but Daphne’s arms remained resolutely at her sides. “Obviously that’s what it means. College is my fresh start.”
No more random midnight moves to new cities; no uprooting themselves every time Vivi was about to finally form a real friendship. For the next four years, she could reinvent herself as a normal college student. She’d make friends, have a social life, maybe sign up for a few extracurricular activities—or, at the very least, figure out what activities she enjoyed. They’d moved around so much that she hadn’t had the chance to get good at anything. She’d been forced to quit the flute after three months and abandon softball midseason, and she’d given up Intro to French so many times that all she knew how to reliably say was Bonjour, je m’appelle Vivian. Je suis nouvelle.
Her mother shook her head. “In the reading, Death was accompanied by the Ten of Swords and the Tower. Betrayal and sudden violence. Vivian, I have a terrible feeling—”
Vivi gave up and tucked the card into her suitcase, then reached up and took