You are stuck in the mud. Grab a shovel and start to dig.
“Forget about your schedule.” That’s the first thing the psychic says to me when we enter her billowing tent. All right, so it isn’t really a tent. It’s a converted storefront with a whole lot of fabric draped around. From the outside it looks like any other store on Twelfth Avenue. Just like any other store, except for the neon placard reading: MADAME JAKARTA, PSYCHIC and the flashing image of a hand.
On the inside, however, the shop looks nothing like any other store on the street, or anywhere else in America, as far as I know. The place is decorated like an Arabian tent from the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. There’s so much fabric hanging from the ceiling and tacked up against the walls that Jennifer and Tanisha could have saved themselves the trip to Cleveland to buy material for our costumes if Madame Jakarta would have parted with even an eighth of what she has flung around her shop.
To make a short story long, I’d dropped off my mom’s sewing machine at the Sewing Emporium on the way to school. When I called Wednesday night in a tizzy, just as they were closing, Wanda Feines, store owner and repairwoman, offered to open early to take a look at it for me.
The tuxedo shop does a lot of business with Wanda. We only do rentals, but Wanda makes custom tuxes on the side. Most of her clients are referrals from us. When my mom was alive, Wanda was her closest friend.
Over the phone, Wanda diagnosed the problem. “The 212v belt is busted,” she informed me. She made that assessment without astrology or palm reading. Wanda simply listened to my reenactment of the noise the machine made right before it shut off.
Wanda had to get the part from her second store out in the suburbs. She said I could come pick the machine up after six. They were closing at eight so I had a two-hour window.
Checking my typed schedule, I figured if I dropped off the machine before school, Adam and I could take a brief study break after school, get the machine, and be back before the nightly nine p.m. sew-a-thon. Wanda’s sewing machine repairs would fit smoothly into my schedule. I’d barely notice the blip.
So, after I finished reviewing my English notes for Friday’s quiz and Adam completed his European History reading, we headed out. Once again, Adam was absolutely willing to support my fixation with staying on task: fifteen minutes to go get the sewing machine, ten minutes to return home. That left us with another hour and thirty-five minutes to go over our chem lab results.
Adam really is the ideal boyfriend. His acceptance of me at my nuttiest makes me like him even more than I already do. I’m hoping like mad that sometime soon, he’ll finally ask me to the dance.
It was precisely seven o’clock when Adam and I were on our way to the sewing store.
Which, happens to be next door to Madame Jakarta’s Psychic Shop.
Madame Jakarta has been reading palms on Twelfth Avenue for as long as I can remember. When I was young, she was old. Now she’s even older. She usually wears some sort of floral-patterned muumuu with a matching turban, but once I saw her in jeans and a T-shirt at the supermarket. That was just plain freaky.
We were holding hands and casually walking to the sewing shop when who did we see coming at us from the other direction?
Cherise. She was with Nathan Feldman and like us, they were holding hands, too!
To say I was shocked would be an understatement.
I opened my mouth to speak, but there were no words. I didn’t know where to begin. Luckily, Adam took over.
“Hey, Cherise.” He gave her a little hug. “Nathan.” He pushed out his knuckles and Nathan butted his own fist against them.
As if seeing Cherise and Nathan together wasn’t enough of a stunner, the fact that, of the two of them, it was Nathan who spoke first, confounded me further.
“Hey, Adam. How’s it going?” Nathan said.
Nathan’s actually a pretty good-looking guy. Wavy brownish-red hair. Freckles. Glasses. Straight teeth. And to my utmost surprise, he also has a nice voice. Deep. Soothing. Mellow.
“Hi, Sylvie.” Nathan opened his arms and gave me a half hug. The kind you give when you aren’t sure whether to hug or not.
I know it’s rude, but I couldn’t help myself. “Excuse me,” I said when at last I found my speaking voice. “I need a minute with Cherise.”
Thing is, I hadn’t actually programmed an extra minute into my plan. To Wanda’s and back. That was the deal. No additional time to find out what in the world was going on between Cherise and Nathan. (And definitely no contingency plan for what to do when that one minute with Cherise morphs into half an hour with Madame Jakarta.) Once again, my schedule was out the window.
Cherise and I moved into the doorway of Madame Jakarta’s. I was practically dragging her by the arm. I’m certain she’d have come willingly, but I was asserting my “best friend’s right-to-know” clause by pulling her along.
“How?!” That one word got the ball rolling.
“Well …” Cherise had a sheepish smile on her face. She glanced over her shoulder to where Adam and Nathan were sitting on a bus stop bench. They were in a heated discussion about something. Maybe sports. Maybe Darfur. Nathan was waving his arms as he talked. And talked. And talked some more.
Once Nathan gets started, apparently he can’t be stopped.
“You and Nathan?” I prodded her attention away from Nathan and back to me.
She shrugged. “I was interested in that Jewish group working against the genocide in Darfur. So I called Mrs. Feldman to see if I could go to a meeting, even though I’m not Jewish. She said she thought it was fine and gave me the address of the temple.”
Cherise stole another glance at Nathan. There was a certain look in her eye; I think it was pride.
“Turned out, their next meeting was that same Sunday night. So I went and laid low in the back of the room. Nathan was leading a discussion of how to start an Internet petition to send to members of Congress.” She rotated on her heel to face me more fully. “A woman named Rachel introduced herself to me and within minutes, she’d dragged me to the front of the room, volunteering the two of us to put up ‘Stop the Genocide’ posters in local coffee shops. I went with her on Monday afternoon.” Which explained why she couldn’t stay at the doctor’s to drive me home after I had my stitches out.
“Are you getting to the Nathan part?” I asked impatiently. “I’m your best friend. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about him!” I felt a bit angry that she hadn’t been open with me. Cherise should have told me why she couldn’t have driven me home from the doctor. She could have mentioned something at lunch or at the café after school or on the phone or by stopping by the apartment.…
When I thought about it, I vaguely recalled seeing her standing with Nathan in the hallway at school a few times this past week. But since that was hardly unusual, I didn’t connect the dots. I just assumed he was muttering and lending her stuff her like normal.
“I didn’t want to take the focus off of you and Adam,” Cherise explained. “I figured I’d have plenty of time to catch you up after Adam asks you to prom. This is your special time, Sylvie. The stars are aligned for you to be falling in love, not me.”
I know Cherise was speaking from her heart. It was so like her to think of another’s happiness before her own. How could I be mad about that? My anger slipped away on the cool night breeze.
I asked her if she checked her own star signs regarding Nathan. She told me she did, but nothing indicated she’d meet someone special. In her case, unlike mine, it was pure coincidence.
“Go on,” I pressed. “I want to hear the rest.”
“At the meeting, I went up to Nathan to tell him I was going to help out with the posters.” Cherise brushed a loose hair back over her ear. “At first he clammed up like usual, but pretty soon he began to loosen up. After the meeting, he asked me if I wanted to grab a bite. We went to the Corner Café for chocolate cake.”
Cherise’s face suddenly broke into a full-fledged grin. “He walked me home and we kissed goodnight,” she told me. “It was magic.” Cherise paused as if recalling the kiss. “Pure magic.” With a toss of her head, she floated back to Earth. “Nathan asked me right then and there to go with him to the Spring Fling Prom.”
Being totally selfish, my first thought was, How come Cherise gets magical kisses and a date to the prom without astrology? I get okay kisses and no date, though the stars are supposedly “in my favor.” It seems grossly unfair.
“I’m happy for you,” I told her, burying my selfishness to discover a warmth growing in my stomach. It’s that joyful energy surge you feel when a friend shares really great news. Cherise hasn’t been on the same no-boy scholarship diet as me, and yet she hasn’t had a date in the same number of years. And everyone knows Nathan absolutely worships the ground she walks on, and has for practically forever.
“If you’re going to the dance, you’ll need a costume,” I said. Not that I wanted to squeeze in sewing another costume, but I couldn’t make them for Jennifer and Tanisha and not for my best friend.
“Taken care of,” she told me. “We’re going as doctors from Doctors Without Borders. Nathan’s dad is giving us scrubs. We only need a couple of stethoscopes.”
“Now that you’re going to the Spring Fling,” I declared, “I’m definitely going to ask Adam. As a future astronomer, I promise the universe will be perfectly fine. We can double date!” Jennifer and Tanisha thought that I was triple dating with them, but if Cherise was going, I’d rather go with her and Nathan.
The happy look on Cherise’s face turned to sudden fear. “You can’t ask Adam!” she exclaimed with a shiver. Then softer, “It would be mocking the stars.”
“I’m not mocking them, I’m giving them a swift kick in the—”
“No!” Cherise was practically begging. “Look,” she said, raising her eyes to Madame Jakarta’s neon sign. “I haven’t had time to check the Mercury table to find out exactly when Adam will be asking you to the dance. Let’s go in and ask Madame Jakarta.” Cherise pulled on the shop door. “She might read palms instead of stars, but Madame Jakarta’s definitely in tune with what’s going on in the cosmos. I’ll pay.”
As Cherise stepped inside, I told her I didn’t have enough time or energy for more woo-woo.
“It’ll be painless,” she promised. “And it’ll only take a minute. We’ll pop in and ask the one question: When is Adam going to ask Sylvie to prom?” She shouted over to the boys to meet us in fifteen minutes at a nearby tea house. “Come on, Sylvie. It can’t hurt to ask.”
“It can’t hurt.…” Those are some famous last words.