to my shop," she calls out. "How can I help you today?" She looks unimpressive as well—motherly and average, with a dumpy figure and curly, gray-peppered hair. She's wearing leggings and a tunic, much like your average soccer mom would, with a dark scarf artfully tossed around the neck.
"I want to get my fortune told," I say, striding forward before Sherry can silence me. "I have questions."
She goes very still, and her gaze moves up and down over me for a long moment. Her eyes widen, just a little. "Who are you?"
I suck in a breath and step forward, forgetting all about Sherry. She sees something. I know she does. I'm in the right place. I’m so excited I can hardly breathe. “What do you see?"
The woman shakes her head slowly, never taking her eyes off of me. "You have a very…strong energy surrounding you. It's like nothing I've seen before." She moves to the back of her little store and pulls a tapestried curtain aside, gesturing. "I can give you a card reading. Give you some of the answers you seek."
Yes! Answers! I could cry, I'm so relieved. "How much?" I ask, getting out my wallet.
"Oh, come on," Sherry hisses at me, grabbing my arm. "This is crap, Faith. Of course she's going to say you have a strong aura. She wants you to spend money!"
It might be crap…but it might be answers. I shake my head at Sherry. "You can go back. I'll be there soon, I promise."
Sherry's lips tighten in a thin line and she crosses her arms over her chest, but she doesn't leave.
I give her a smile to reassure her, then follow the woman into the back room. Sherry follows at my heels, and the woman drops the curtain behind us. "Have a seat."
The room isn't much to look at. There are folding chairs—two on my side of the table, and one on hers. The table itself is covered in purple crushed velvet, and I bet if I peeked underneath the garish tablecloth, I'd see it's a folding table. Adorning the walls are a few posters of psychic-looking women and stars and planets and such. Crystals hang from strings on the ceiling. I don't know what to make of this. It looks more like the cheap carnival fortune teller than the last room did.
But she sees something in me. On me. Whatever. And I'm so desperate for answers.
"A hundred dollars," she tells me, sitting across from me at the table. "Cash. No credit cards, no checks."
"This is crap," Sherry murmurs in a singsong voice as she sits down next to me.
Maybe it is. Maybe this woman's taken one look at my skirt and low heels, my white blouse and my blonde ponytail and decided that I have money to spend. I mean, she’s completely wrong about that, but I guess I could see the mistake, seeing as how we’re in the business district downtown. Lots of corporate business professionals around here.
Doesn’t matter. I'm willing to blow some stupid cash if I can get answers. I pull five twenties out of my purse and hand them over.
She takes them from me, careful not to touch my fingers. Odd.
"Put your purse away," the fortune teller says to me as she picks up a small wooden box and sets it on the table in front of her. She pulls the lid off with both hands and reveals a deck of long-looking cards. Tarot cards. There’s a spiderweb design over the back of each of them. "I'm not going to give you a typical reading. You need something different than mumbo-jumbo and a few platitudes, don't you?"
I nod, wide-eyed. It’s like she’s reading my mind. ”How do you know?"
She wiggles her fingers in the air before pulling the cards out of the box and setting the stack on the table. "I see it around you. There's something that's different about you than your friend. Like I said, I've never seen it before. It’s like an aura. No, not an aura.” She frowns. “It’s like you’ve walked through a spiderweb of some kind and you’re covered in the residue.” She wags a finger in my direction. “I’ve never seen that before, which tells me that there's a story behind it."
"Everyone has a story," Sherry says, her tone almost sulky. I think she doesn’t like being called normal.
“Everyone does,” the fortune teller agrees. "But not everyone has energy pulsing around them like your friend."