Iris frowned. “How are you going to know what your surprise from Jordan will be? It could be anything . . . anywhere.”
“I’ll just know,” Emily said as they walked off the dance floor. Only . . . would she? Jordan could have hidden a secret message in one of the four Van Gogh–decorated cakes around the room. She could have stitched it into a hand towel in the bathrooms. She could have subliminally recorded something on one of the DJ’s tracks. It was like looking for a needle in one of Van Gogh’s Haystacks.
She looked around the room for the fifty-millionth time. Jordan would know what a daunting task it was and try to make the surprise something Emily would gravitate toward anyway, right? Then again, everything in the room was interesting and worthy of another look. The bouquets of flowers on the tables. The animal ice sculptures. The teenager-height, papier-maché stars. The henna tattoo artist in the corner, the fortune-teller by the stairs.
“It’s conga line time, everyone!” the DJ called out, breaking Emily from her thoughts. A large easel was wheeled to the front of his booth. “Where are our prom king and queen?”
“I is prom queen!” called Klaudia Huusko, the exchange student, her words slurred. She staggered toward the stage, the prom queen crown askew atop her golden locks. When she was almost at the DJ booth, she tripped over the hem of her dress and the crown went flying. Everyone giggled. Klaudia’s dress slipped down her body, showing off a push-up bra and—horrors—a girdle. Everyone guffawed.
Emily’s gaze returned to the fortune teller. Their second day at sea, Emily had used the ship’s slow Internet to log onto an astrology site to get her daily horoscope. When she told Jordan that she did it every day to see if things were going to be good or bad, Jordan had looked at her like she was crazy. “What if the horoscope tells you not to leave the house?”
“Then I don’t,” Emily joked. She gave Jordan a playful shove. “But they never say that. Even if you’re going to have a bad day, they say it’ll be challenging. Or a learning experience.”
“And you really buy all that stuff?” Jordan asked.
“I do,” Emily had said.
Jordan had touched the tip of her nose. “I love finding out things about you.”
Now, Emily checked the clock on her cell phone: 9:53. As most of the kids on the dance floor were forming a long conga line, she drifted toward the fortune-teller’s table. The woman had long, scraggly, gray-streaked brown hair, a mole on her nose, and oblong-shaped glasses with purple lenses. She eyed Emily calmly and steadily, like she was drinking Emily in slowly, all the way to the last sip.
Finally, she smiled, grabbed Emily’s hand, and kneaded her palm. “You have smooth fingers, which means you’re artistic,” she started out. “Your thumb is strong, which means you’re logical. And you’re in good shape and able to overcome obstacles, aren’t you?”
Duh, Emily thought. That was an understatement.
The woman went on to say that Emily would have a love affair but never marry and that she’d live a long, happy life. Emily kept waiting for some sort of reference to Jordan, but the woman didn’t mention her. After about five minutes of kneading, she patted Emily’s hand. “There you go. Go forth and be happy.”
Emily cocked her head. “So . . . you don’t have anything else to tell me?”
The woman frowned. “No, that’s all.” She pulled out a rubber stamp from under the table, pressed it on an ink pad, and stamped Emily’s hand. “It marks that you’ve been here already. I don’t do repeats.”
Emily stood, unable to hide the disappointment on her face. This challenge suddenly felt like the I Spy books she used to look at in the school library. She would drive herself crazy trying to find the hidden snowman or tiny lamb charm or pink apostrophe in the cluttered photos, feeling unobservant and unintelligent when she failed. Or maybe Jordan just didn’t know her that well. Maybe Emily didn’t know Jordan that well.
She trudged over to Iris, who was marching in the conga line. Iris let Emily cut in, then looked at her strangely. “What’s on your hand?”
Emily peered at the stamp the fortune-teller had given her. “No repeats,” she mumbled. But when the strobe light flashed on it, she noticed the stamp was a large black circle with the initials JR in the center. She stopped short. Could that stand for Jordan Richards?