The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I’m on the point of saying this to the punk girl, but I stop myself. What if she comes here all the time? Maybe she takes it seriously. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I peer at her face, probing it for clues, trying to read what she wants me to say. But besides a lip piercing that I didn’t notice before, all I see is a girl’s warm smiling goth-made-up face.

“I guess it was interesting,” I hedge. “I mean, I hadn’t been before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. But it was kind of cool, I guess. I liked when the candles all went out. That was freaky. What did you think?”

“Eh.” She shrugs, hoisting an army surplus backpack over her shoulder. “I don’t really care. I just come here to sleep.”

“What?” I blink.

“It’s okay,” she says, taking my elbow. “Madame Blavatsky”—she gives the name ironic emphasis—“never remembers me.”

I was going to ask the medium to sign the release form that Professor Krauss told us to use for any projects that we want to put on the web—and I know Tyler’s going to put this on his Vimeo, because he won’t shut up about it—but this girl is dragging me by the elbow and anyway the medium’s busy talking to the girl with the baby. I hesitate. I don’t want Professor Krauss to tell us we can’t use the footage without the release. But then I think, Screw it. It’s just a summer school project. Nobody cares. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to see it anyway, besides at workshop.

“I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t remember you,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t.

The tattooed girl gives me a coy smile over her shoulder, takes my hand in hers, and leads me to the door. I’m dragging my feet, because I haven’t seen the other girl yet, and I really wanted to talk to her. I thought for sure she’d . . . I mean, the way she looked at me, I thought . . . But I guess, if she wanted to talk to me, she’d have stuck around.

I’m weirdly disappointed. I mean, I didn’t even talk to her. Not really.

“That was a nice line,” the girl with the bangs says as she drags me down the stairs to the street. “Almost like you didn’t even plan it. Come on. I’ll let you buy me a slice.”

The first floor of the psychic parlor’s building houses a no-name pizzeria, one of those places with Formica counters and fluorescent lighting and a good-size plate of garlic knots for a dollar. I spot Tyler on the sidewalk outside, our camera equipment heaped around his feet while he looks at his phone. He hasn’t noticed us come out.

“Okay,” I say. Pizza is good medicine for disappointment.

It’s a hot night, damp from summer rain, and the pizzeria doors are propped open to the street to capture any passing breeze. I don’t even realize how hungry I am until the smells of cheese and garlic hit me. Saliva springs to my mouth, and I’m instantly starving.

We spend a minute staring slack-jawed at the menu board overhead, and then we’re at the front of the line and a guy in a stained apron is yelling at us. He chucks our slices into the oven, jerks his thumb at the lady behind the cash register, and by the time she’s taken my ten bucks the slices are out, paper plates and puddles of orange grease and fistfuls of tissue-thin napkins.

She gets pepperoni and garlic. Two slices. She doesn’t even make a thing of getting two. My high school girlfriend was so weird about food, it drove me crazy, but I was always too afraid of ticking her off to say anything about it. I like that this girl eats garlic. And I like that she doesn’t seem to care if I like that she eats garlic.

I get the same, and we pick two seats at the counter facing the street. The window is open, but the air is dead.

“So what were you guys doing up there? Are you making, like, a movie or something?” the girl asks through a mouthful of pizza.

Outside the window Tyler spots me and throws his hands up in a what-the-hell-man? gesture that I’ve come to know pretty well over the past month.

“Kind of. I guess,” I say while chewing. “It’s for school. Like a project?”

“Oh yeah? Where do you go?”