I sit in my room and turn over tarot cards, and nothing makes any sense. I don't get why everything I try to read these days is like this. It's like someone splashed water all over the later pages of a novel and now I'm trying to piece together blurred letters or something. In my tarot cards, the Magician keeps showing up, and the High Priestess, and the Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes the Empress is there, and sometimes the Hierophant, and sometimes the Chariot. Sometimes Strength, and sometimes the Hermit, and sometimes the Moon. Sometimes Judgment, and sometimes the World. The Hanged Man shows up with a frequency I don't like, and Death, and the Tower. But never the Lovers. In fact, it seems like the Lovers is the only card that never shows up, no matter how many times I shuffle the deck.
I know better than to believe that cards tell us the future. Nothing tells us the future. Nothing on this world, Mom likes to say. But the cards can give you a feeling, like the stars on a good night. These cards aren't giving me any feelings though. These cards are all over the place. These cards are just a mess; they are everything and nothing all at once.
Mom knocks on my open bedroom door. Mother's working late, so Mom looks a little bit like she doesn't know what do with herself. Mother gives Mom balance. If my yin and yang war inside of me, Mom's and Mother's yin and yang coexist nicely.
"Reading cards?" she asks.
"Oh, trying to, but they're being…nonsense."
"Well, you know how cards can be," Mom says, wandering in. "Deal them for me."
I do as she says—Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hierophant, Strength, Judgment.
Mom's eyes flick over them, and she goes super pale. Confused, I look back at the cards.
"Mom," I say, because I feel some need to reassure her, she looks so stricken. "They're just cards."
"Deal them again," says Mom.
I don't know that I want to, given the way she's looking, given the tone of her voice. "I don't know if—"
"Deal them again," Mom practically snaps at me. Which she never does. Mom's not like that. Mom is all shanti at all times.
I swallow and brace myself and deal the cards again—Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hermit, Judgment, Death.
Mom makes this squeak of a noise. I get the sense it would have been a scream if she'd let it out all the way.
"Mom," I say, trying to be soothing. It's not a job I usually have, soothing Mom. I wish Mother was here; I feel like she'd be much better at this. "It's nothing. You know how cards are. They're just—"
Mom snatches the cards up. "Don't deal them again."
She was the one who just demanded that I deal them again. "Okay," I say slowly, looking up at her frantic face. Really, what is her deal? I think of the Death card and wonder if she's taking it really seriously. "Mom. You know that cards don't really tell the future, right?" I've been going along with this idea my whole life, but I don't know that it's anything more than just finely tuned intuition, like Mother says. I've been humoring Mom, thinking she wasn't really serious, that it was just elaborate playacting, like making jokes about Santa Claus, but right now it seems like there is nothing more deadly serious than tarot cards for Mom.
Mom's pale eyes are sharp and intense and burning. She seems nothing at all like my easygoing hippie Mom. "Don't deal them again," she says flatly, and turns on her heel, my deck still in her hands, and marches out of my room.
· · ·
I don't bring up the tarot cards again, but it doesn't matter: I feel like I'm walking on eggshells now around Mom. She and I usually have such a good rapport. We're a lot like each other, and that makes for not a lot of tension. I know many teenage daughters have roaring fights with their moms and slam a lot of doors and are totally misunderstood, and I've always felt very lucky that my mom and I aren't like that.
But I feel like we are making up for all of the previously missing tension now. I feel like our lives are nothing but tension. We are like a guitar string that's been tuned too tightly and is going to snap if touched. I don't play the guitar, but I assume that's how that works. We barely talk at the yoga studio, other than for benign pleasantries, because I'm scared to bring up anything more serious, scared she'll get that look in her eyes again, scared of the merest brush against the taut guitar string of our relationship.
Mother notices. Of course she does. Mother notices everything, especially about me and Mom.
Mother knocks on my door when I am in the middle of looking at the stars through my lashes. They are not dancing tonight. They are not doing much of anything. I feel like I've lost a little piece of myself, without the tarot cards and the stars. I don't dare go down and get salt. I'm realizing that, in a weird way, Mom and the stars and the cards and the other odd stuff in my life have always been my friends. And now I've lost them. And I don't really have other friends.
"What are you up to, Mer?" Mother asks. She asks it almost breezily, as if she wants to be able to pretend that there hasn't been tension all through our house for the past few days.
And now that Mother's here, in my room, giving me an opening, I find that I want to tell her everything. Why was I resisting this before?
"Did you talk to Mom?" is how I start.
"No." Mother sits on my bed. "She won't talk. She keeps telling me there's nothing wrong, but I don't believe that for a second."
"I dealt tarot cards the other night."
Mother lifts an eyebrow. Effectively: So?
"And I don't know what happened but Mom, like, went a little crazy. She took the cards and told me not to deal again, and ever since then, she hasn't really talked to me."
Mother looks thoughtful. "What was the deal?"
"The deal?" I echo.
"Yeah. When you dealt the cards, what did they show?"
"Well…I don't know. I mean, you know how the cards are. It's not like they can actually tell the future or anything. They're just cards. I was only dealing them to see about this boy at school who—"
It tumbles out of my mouth before I even realize it, and then I want to take it back, because oops! I didn't want to bring up Trow, given how stupid I've behaved around him and the fact that nothing has really happened between us since he blew me off about yoga. It seems silly to talk about Trow when anything with him is basically completely nonexistent. I really am the worst military tactician ever. It's a good thing I found this out over a boy instead of in some kind of, like, real battle situation.
"This is the boy?" Mother asks. She looks curious. Not mocking. And I consider. Mother gives good advice. Maybe I should have asked Mother for advice earlier. Mother is good with plans. And my Operation Trow could desperately use some help, let's face it.
"Yes. The new boy. Trow."
Mother smiles now. "Trow. Nice name. And you like him?"
Yes. "I barely know him," I say honestly. "He's just…" I search for the proper adjective.
"Cute?" Mother suggests.
Yes. He is. Definitely. But… "Nice," I correct.
"Nice," says Mother, and her smile widens. "Even better."
"But it's not like we've really… I mean, he meditated with me one day."
"That's a good start, right?"
"Yes. I guess. Except that then I asked him to yoga and he didn't seem into that at all and now I don't know what to do. We basically say hi to each other in the morning and that's it. How am I supposed to…" I make a noise of utter frustration and trail from the window over to my bed, where I collapse melodramatically. "How do other people do this?"
Mother chuckles and brushes the rainbow hair away from my face. "Mostly luck."
"That's what I figured. That's why I was dealing the tarot cards."
"Maybe yoga was the wrong way to his heart," remarks Mother, smiling.
"But it's yoga," I protest. It is part of my heart. I feel like he should see that if we are meant to be. If we are written in the stars.
"Right, but it's not everyone's cup of tea, and sometimes you need persuasion to try things you're not used to trying. I remember when I met your mom, she was always going on about yoga and trying to get me to go with her, and I thought she was a lunatic with all this talk about lion poses and cobra poses. It's not like yoga was our first date. Yoga might have been our hundredth date, honestly. But now I like it—it just took some time. So I'm just saying that maybe yoga wasn't your best opening."
I consider this. "What was Mom's opening with you?"
Mother smiles, remembering a time that is so long ago that I feel like it ought to exist in fairy tales. "You know that story. She came to me for help with her misdemeanor for writing 'Love more, hate less' on a city bus."
"I know, but I mean, what was her opening? If it wasn't yoga?"
"Well, it was my opening," Mother says. "Mom didn't do anything at all."
"Okay. So what was your opening?"
"Coffee," says Mother, and smiles and then ruffles my hair like I'm three years old, which I let her do because I'm super nice like that. "Don't worry about your mom and the tarot cards, Mer. I'm sure it's nothing."
· · ·
Coffee. Coffee seems doable. Not that I drink coffee, but maybe Trow does and I can find something else to drink. It doesn't feel like me, because it just feels so normal, and I have never felt normal, but maybe Mother's right. Maybe I just need an opening to convince Trow to give me a second look. To think me of that way.
And to be honest, to make sure I want to think of Trow that way too.
So the next time he's in school, I don't give myself time to overthink it. Operation Trow's new mission is: ASK HIM OUT FOR COFFEE AS SOON AS YOU SEE HIM. So that's why he hasn't even sat down yet before I blurt out, "Do you want to go for coffee?"
He blinks at me and says, "Oh. I. When? Now?"
I think I'm probably blushing. "No. Not now. Whenever. I mean. Sometime in the future, of course."
Now he looks amused. "Well, I didn't think it would be in the past."
"The near future," I amend, hearing myself talking more and more and more to try to make it better. I keep doing this with him! Talk more and more and more to make it better and I end up just making it worse! "Like, maybe, after school. Can you do after school?"
Trow hesitates. He drops his eyes from me and looks out the window. I always know where Trow's eyes are looking because I love when they're looking at me and I resent when they're looking at anything else. Even though whenever they do look at me, I make a complete idiot of myself. "After school's tough for me," answers Trow finally.
"Today?"
"Every day," he says, and then he looks at me.
And now I wish he weren't looking at me, because I'm sure that the impact of what he said is visible on my face; like a hot iron being slapped against my cheek, it burns and stings horrendously. This is another magic power that it would be useful to have. Some people have it and I am phenomenally jealous of them: the power to stop blushing.