I looked up to find her staring at my face, her brow furrowed into a twisted knot, her crazy eyes burning into the very essence of my being. I think I jumped a little. I looked back down at my hands, then up to her. Her face hadn’t changed.
I cleared my throat. “So, what do you see?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Mo leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw one leg over the other.
“You need to do some meditating,” she finally said.
“I do?”
“White light.”
“White light?”
“Surround yourself in white light.” She made a lasso motion above her head, indicating such.
My arms trembled now from holding my palms up. I wasn’t sure if I should release the position yet. “White light,” I repeated.
“You have a spiritual blockage,” she said, in the way someone might say, “Your fly’s open.”
“I had leftover pizza for breakfast, it’s probably just that,” I said, but Mo didn’t laugh.
Rose suppressed a snicker.
“I’m serious. You need to meditate. Surround yourself in white light to keep the bad spirits out.”
“Got it. So do you see anything in my future?” I asked. “Besides the spiritual blockage, I mean.”
Mo looked to Rose and back to me. Then her face untwisted. She leaned on the table with her elbows. “I see a long walk. I see a sunny afternoon. I see holding hands. I see smiling faces.” Her face released into a Grinch-like grin, showcasing her smoke-stained teeth. “But you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you?”
Mo didn’t charge us for the visit. She said as long as my mom kept sending the leftovers, we could come back for a free reading anytime.
Rose gave me plenty of guff for my psychic shortcomings the second we were out the door. I didn’t have much ammo for retaliation since Mo had been spot-on with Rose’s reading. The first thing she’d said when Rose sat down was “You bring joy to people’s lives.” I obviously couldn’t argue that point. She’d also been right about the musician thing, and even about living by a large body of water in the near future, though I tried not to think about it. Rose and I had spent the last week avoiding the topic of the Manhattan Music Conservatory, and I was glad to do so.
Enjoy today, you might be dead tomorrow.
Rose and I walked hand in hand through downtown Buffalo Falls. We didn’t have anything else to do that day, and Mo’s premonition of a long walk seemed like a good idea. Puffy white clouds dotted the sapphire sky, occasionally providing shade as they drifted in front of the sun. A digital sign hung from a bank over the sidewalk, letting us know it was seventy-eight degrees—just right.
We passed a playground overrun with little kids who looked to be around Grub’s age. It was a birthday party. I tried to picture my brother playing with them—climbing across the monkey bars, going down the slide, on the swing set—but all I could picture was him belly-crawling around the perimeter with his Nerf gun.
I smiled to myself.
“What?” Rose asked.
“I was just thinking about my brother, and how since moving here his best friend is a ninety-one-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. What’s with that?”
“It’s kind of sweet though.”
“It is,” I admitted, “but I feel bad for him, too. He actually had friends his own age in Chicago. Now all he talks about are his missions with Blackjack.”
“It’s probably just his way of coping with the change.”
“I guess.”
We crossed a street and passed a small bookstore where a short-haired girl our age was cleaning the glass on the other side of the window. She smiled when she saw Rose and waved at us.
We waved back.
“Friend of yours?”
Rose nodded. “Tracie. She was my first friend here. I didn’t know a single person and I felt so out of place—we were the only Filipino family in Buffalo Falls. For the first few days of school I didn’t know who to sit with at lunch so I went to the library instead. One day, this girl sits down next to me and slides me a book of poetry by Mary Oliver. We’ve been friends ever since.”
“She sounds great.”
“She is. Super smart, kind of quiet, but really funny once you get to know her.”
“Sounds like someone I know,” I said, lightly leaning my shoulder into hers.
Rose leaned back and suppressed a smile. “Is that so?”
“Very so.”
We waited for a stoplight, then headed through the downtown park, passing the Lincoln fountain where we’d made wishes the night of our dinner disaster. It seemed like forever ago and yesterday at the same time.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure Grub will be fine,” said Rose, circling back to our earlier conversation. “He’s a good kid. He’ll find a friend his own age soon. Someone who appreciates his quirks and charms.”
I chuckled. “That’s a nice way of putting it. I hope you’re right.”
“I’m always right, Mr. Gunderson.”
“Does always being right qualify as a quirk or a charm, Miss Santos?”
“Both.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“See?”
We walked for over an hour, never once letting go of each other’s hands. Occasionally, I’d squeeze her palm and she’d squeeze back, silent code for “I’m here” and “I’m here, too.”
As we approached the four-lane bridge leading over the Stone River, Rose asked me if I believed in dreams.
“You mean the ones where your teeth fall out? Or you’re suddenly at school in your underwear?”
“Ha, you have those, too?”
“Way too often.”
“They’re the worst. But I don’t mean those, specifically. Just dreams in general.”
“Sleeping dreams, or ‘what you want to do with your life’ dreams?”
“I don’t know, both.”
I thought about it for a bit before answering. “This morning, I dreamed I was lying on a twin bed in a dark room. There wasn’t anything else in the room except for me and that bed. But then I noticed a little kid, maybe two years old, sitting on a blanket on the floor across from me. At first, I couldn’t figure out who he was, but then I realized—the little kid was me.”
“So you were both people in your dream?”
“Yes, and it gets weirder. The kid looks at me and says, ‘Hi, Zeus,’ and I reply, ‘Hi, Zeus.’ So, you know, I’m having this conversation with my younger self. And then I start thinking, oh my God, I have to tell my younger self all the things that will happen to him. To me. I have to tell him that when he’s in third grade he should avoid the sixth grader on the bus who’ll punch him, and that he’ll have a brother in a few years who will be a little odd, but he’ll love him anyway, and that when he’s sixteen he’s going to move to a new town and he won’t want to, but it’ll be worth it because he’ll meet this awesome girl there.”
Rose squeezed my hand again.
“And I’m telling my younger self all of these things, but it’s like he’s not understanding. I’m not understanding. I’m like, ‘Listen man, I’m giving you the answers, I know what’s going to happen to you and you’re just sucking your thumb.’ And then I woke up.”
Rose didn’t say anything, but turned her head and looked at me.
“What?” I asked. “What do you think it means?”