Dad goes over to his friend’s house after dinner to help again with the calves, and I can’t keep my eyes open long enough to stay up for him. I need to keep my promise to Stephen, but now it’s morning, Dad is sleeping in, and Mother is taking me to my play date with Tarin.
We’ve only driven a few minutes down the gravel road, clouds of dust billowing behind us, when Mother slows down and signals even though there’s no other car in sight. We turn into a bumpy driveway and there, on the edge of what isn’t exactly a yard but more of a field, is a tiny white house. There are a few sheds, the paint mostly peeled off, and a small dirt patch that must be a garden in the making.
When I’d called Tarin, she said, “It’s about time! Get your butt over here already.”
“We probably could have walked here,” Mother says. “It’s less than a mile. But I’ve got that soup on the stove to get back to.”
She’s waiting, hands tight on the steering wheel, and it hits me: she wants me to go in. Alone. I look at that little place and suddenly my breakfast isn’t sitting so well in my stomach. What do I have in common with this girl other than a few random moments spent in a hospital lounge?
Mother reads my mind and opens her door. “Well, I guess I could go say a quick hello to Mrs. Meyer, if she’s up for it.” When I don’t move, she comes around to my side and peers at me through the window. I try to make her proud. I get out and walk beside her up the rickety steps to the front porch, where a fat calico cat looks at us lazily.
Mother knocks on the screen door, and a few seconds later it pops open. A large lady with a gray braid that nearly reaches her waist smiles and waves us in.
“Come in, come in,” she says. There’s no real entrance—we’re standing right in the kitchen, and it smells like cooked cabbage. She introduces herself as Gloria, who I guess must be Tarin’s mother, but I don’t see any resemblance at all. This woman is more hippie than vampire. Gloria explains that her mother is taking a nap, but invites my mother in for tea. Tarin is downstairs, she says, waiting for me.
I open the door to the basement and walk down the stairs slowly, peering into the semi-darkness, but there’s no sign of life. When Tarin appears out of nowhere at the bottom of the stairs, I lose my balance a little and grip the railing to keep from falling. I truly am an overly dramatic freak, and it’s embarrassing.
“Welcome to my dungeon,” she says. I make it to the last step and follow her around the staircase wall, trying to seem casual as I glance around. A bed, a dresser and a desk barely fit into the space, and a colorful woven rug covers the concrete floor. The walls are concrete too, but a few posters of seventies-style pop art liven things up. Two huge bright-orange cushions lie on the floor. Not too bad for a dungeon, actually.
“Want something to drink?”
I nod and Tarin pulls back a batik wall hanging beside the dresser to reveal a mini kitchen: bar fridge, wooden shelves with mugs and saucers, and even a hot plate sitting on a milk crate.
“This used to be my uncle’s bachelor pad,” she explains as she takes a can of soda out of the fridge. “I’ve added the feminine touch, of course. But I’ve got all the conveniences of home right here, even a small bathroom on the other side of the staircase. Barely need to go upstairs if I don’t feel like it. And I usually don’t.”
“So you mostly hang out down here?”
“Except when I go for walks, yeah. My mom knows by now not to try and force me to do all that fake family-bonding stuff. We got over that a long time ago, when she married my stepdad.”
“Oh,” I say.
“He’s a butthead,” she explains. “To put it lightly.”
“When do you see your boyfriend?” I ask.
“He lives on the coast,” she says. “It’s a long-distance thing.”
I glance around again. “Do you get bored down here?”
She shrugs. “Not really. I like being on my own, thinking and reading and whatever. I’m a loner, I guess.”
I try to get my head around it. She doesn’t go to school, doesn’t hang out much with her mother or grandmother. Maybe she’s like me—napping and watching old home videos and talking to the dog all day. Is someone else really that pathetic?
“Mostly, I’m relieved that I’m not in school anymore. This way I get to avoid all the lame stuff like prom and cheerleading and year-book committee.” She sticks her fingers down her throat in a fake gag.
“Hmm,” I say. Right now I can’t imagine liking all that either. But once upon a time, I was in there like a dirty shirt.
She leans a little closer. “You used to hang out with that Megan girl, hey? And her friends?”
I nod. “You know them?”
“Only a little. I’ve seen them a few times, in town. Gran told me you’re tight with them.”
“Apparently.”
“No offense,” she says, “but I can’t picture it. They seem so sugar-coated.”
I shrug. “Maybe I was the rebel of the group.”
Her eyes narrow. “Sure.”
This would be my chance to bash them, to tell her that they’re phonies, especially Megan. But some of the Girl’s loyalty must linger inside me, because I don’t. “So are you staying here for the rest of the summer?” I ask.
“Don’t know. Mom changes her mind every thirty seconds about whether Gran is ready to take care of herself again. We’d take Gran back with us, but she’s dead set on staying here in the middle of nowhere. God knows why. No offense.”
“None taken.” I sip my drink, wondering if Mother is still upstairs or if she’s taken off to tend to her soup.
The room is quiet, and Tarin gazes at me with her dark eyes. I brace myself for some kind of deep question, but instead she asks, “Want me to read your palm?”
I’m taken aback for a second, but then I laugh. “You mean, like tell me what all those lines mean and stuff? You can do that?”
“Kind of. I read a book about it when I was a kid, and I’ve been practicing on all willing victims since. It’s sometimes amazingly accurate. I can also read auras.” She moves closer to me, picks up my hand and flips it over. I flinch when she runs her finger down the line at the top of my palm.
She pauses. “This okay? It won’t hurt or anything.”
My whole body is tense, so I take a deep breath and nod. “Knock yourself out.”
She examines my hand, running her finger down all the lines. She mutters “hmmm” and “interesting,” then finally clears her throat and looks me in the eye.
“This is amazing, actually. Your life line is split in two.” She holds my hand up higher. “See?” She points to the line that starts halfway between my thumb and index finger and curves down to the bottom of my palm. It’s true—the line begins solid and deep, then breaks off into two sections about one third of the way down.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I’m only interpreting it, of course. But you’ve had a major change in your life, with the coma and everything. You’re starting again, in a way. So your life line now has branched off, a sort of split between your old self and new self.”
It does make sense, I guess. But all I want is for her to tell me that somewhere past the edge of my palm, in a place we can’t see, the lines will rejoin and become more solid than ever.
My face must look way too serious, because she looks back at my hand and laughs. “But hey, what do I know? It also says you’re going to have seven kids!”
I force myself to smile, but pull my hand away and fold it tightly with the other one in my lap.
“Think my mother is still here?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “That was dumb.”
“No,” I say. “It was interesting, actually. I’m just a little off today.”
“No worries,” she says. “Next time we’ll do something more exciting. I’ll take you to my secret hideout. If you promise not to tell anyone about it, of course.”
“Cool,” I say. She is an interesting person, and I should try not to be so stiff around her. We make chitchat about stuff like TV shows and how lame Katy Perry is, and then Mother calls down the stairs that she should head home before the soup explodes, but I’m welcome to stay.
“I’m coming too,” I yell back. There are polite good-byes at the door, and Tarin tells me not to be a stranger.
“I didn’t mean to rush you,” Mother says when we’re in the car. “Did it go all right?”
I nod, because I guess it did.
Mother clears her throat. “Gloria told me Tarin takes courses online. Maybe you should try that for a while, until you’re ready to go back to school.”
“All right,” I say. I’m surprised that Mother would even think out of the box like that, and relieved that she’s not pushing the school thing on me. But even though I know I’m being a loser, the only thing I care about right now is what Tarin told me. About my split life line.
First I have an abnormal brain. And now this?