Fifty

My mom wove her way through the parking lot toward me. She stopped to pick up my cap. I stood there shaking as she drew closer. There was no point in running.

“Are you okay?” She brushed dust off the cap and handed it back. “Did you get too hot in there?”

“It was you.” In my mind I’d pictured myself yelling out the truth in her face, but the words came out soft and hushed.

Mom sighed, but didn’t respond. She knew I knew.

“You aren’t even going to deny it, are you?”

Mom jerked her head toward the playing field and the empty bleachers. “Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

I laughed. “Are you kidding?”

Mom rolled her eyes, “Candi, there’s no reason to turn this into a drama queen situation.” She walked past me over to the bench seat. She carefully tucked her skirt under her.

I stood there for a beat, staring at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes. I took a few steps back toward school and then stopped. Where I was I going to go? I walked over to her and crossed my arms over my chest. “Why?”

Mom motioned for me to sit, and I sank down on the bench next to her. “Let’s just say I had another vision about Paige, about what happened to her,” she said. “Do you want to hear it?”

I wasn’t sure if I did. “Yeah,” I finally croaked.

She looked out over the field. “The . . . person who did this. They didn’t intend for it to happen.”

I focused on breathing in and out. “You’re saying it was an accident?”

“Paige was going to break. No way she would have kept that story going. Once she came back and there was real pressure and questions, she would have given in and left you holding the bag. And if she hadn’t, what was her dad going to do? You think he wasn’t going to want to know where that money went? You would have gotten caught in the fallout.”

Was she trying to tell me she’d done this for me?

“In my vision she said if she went down, so would you.” She looked away.

“So—” My breath caught in my throat, and I had to swallow over and over to get control. “So this . . . person confronted Paige, then killed her to keep her quiet.”

Mom blinked and then shrugged. “I guess they panicked. Things would have happened fast.”

“Detective Jay you said you got the way she died wrong. Why?”

Mom tucked her hair behind her ears. “There’s a line between accurate and too accurate.”

“Paige was innocent; she didn’t deserve to die.”

Mom shook her head, her hair flying back and forth. “Paige was a lot of things, but she wasn’t innocent. She knew what she was doing.”

I pulled off my gown and wadded it up.

Mom grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me so I was facing her. “Stop. I was protecting my daughter. In both our cases, things went farther than we wanted.”

I pulled free of her grasp. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Because you didn’t have to.” Mom pushed the hair out of her eyes. Her hands were shaking. “Paige laughed at you, you know. She had you wrapped around her little finger. You were just a means to her end.”

“I thought—” My voice cracked, and I had to pause to clear it. “I thought maybe you had real abilities.” A bitter laugh came out of my mouth. “How’s that for karma? I made fun of people for believing in me, but I fell for your story.”

Mom wiped her palms. “I heard you on the phone. After you left, I went into your room and found the notes and figured out what happened. I realized then I had to do something, so I drove out there. You wrote down exactly where to find her.”

Guilt dropped heavy onto my chest. I’d basically drawn her a map to Paige. “I believed you.” Tears ran down my face.

“You believed what you wanted. You always have.” Mom reached up and wiped my cheek. “Oh, Skye, baby. We’re going to be okay.”

I pulled away from her. “We are not okay. There is nothing about this situation that is even remotely okay.”

She stood. “Let’s go home.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” Then I turned and ran.

The library was quiet. I went to the bathroom to wash my face. When I closed my eyes, an image of Paige rushed into my head. A hot rush of bile came up, and I spun, slamming the stall door open just in time to vomit the strawberry Pop-Tart I had for breakfast into the toilet. My stomach clenched until there was nothing but sour spit in my mouth. I went back to the sink and splashed more water on my face and swished my mouth out. I threw my cap and gown in the trash and buried them under paper towels. Screw the deposit.

I made it to the reference room by keeping one hand on the wall, as if the library had turned into a boat on storm-tossed waves, but I was the only thing that was unsteady. I sank into a chair and ran my hands over the scarred table. I felt impossibly old. Every joint, bone, and muscle ached. It was as if my entire body were bruised.

I was surrounded by reference books, but there wasn’t anything that could explain how things had gone so fundamentally wrong. I wanted to reach back, step by step, and figure out how I’d found myself here. If I could identify what step had led me to this place, then maybe I could figure out what to do next. It was as if I were in the middle of a minefield. My next move could move me to safety or blow things completely up.

How had I not seen it? She must have always suspected something was off. Deep down, no matter what she said, she always knew I wasn’t psychic. At first she wanted to believe, but she must have wondered what was happening. Then she did what she always did when she didn’t know something—she snooped. I couldn’t be sure when she finally put it all together, but it was likely when Paige wasn’t at the cabin when I’d predicted she would be.

Detective Jay told me that Mom had made a prediction about Disney. She’d left it general. She hadn’t used the word Pluto. She’d seen the notes between Paige and me, overheard our conversations—she would have known the name. She thought of the dog, not the planet. She didn’t know it was an alias that Paige came up with—she thought it was a nickname. That’s why she mentioned it in her vision—she thought it would be an easy hit. She’d found my hiding places before. She’d listened at doors because she liked to know what I was up to, like a nosy sister.

I pulled out my deck of tarot from my purse and shuffled. The sound of the cards whispering as they touched was oddly soothing. I dealt three cards. I closed my eyes and formed the question in my head. What should I do? I flipped the center card.

The Hanging Man. Appropriate. That was me, the hanging girl, always trying to turn things upside down and see them in a new way.

I flipped the card on the left, five of cups. A card for loss and grief.

I stared at the card still lying face-down. Was I prepared to do whatever the card said?

I flipped it quickly as if I wanted to sneak up on my future.

The Wheel of Fortune. Fortune turns—sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn’t.

I tapped the card on the table. It didn’t really tell me much. It was all in the interpretation. If I believed in destiny, then whatever I was going to do had already been decided on a cosmic level. What happened next was already determined and there was no point in being anxious or upset, because whatever I did would still lead me to where I needed to be. What happened next had been set out as my future from the moment my mom pushed me out into the world. Instead of fighting against destiny, perhaps what I needed to do was surrender to the universe. Time to stop sitting on the sidelines and join the action.

Or maybe that was just a cheat. Saying it was destiny was a way to justify my own actions. To give me an excuse to do what I wanted.

Fate and destiny might be what you make of them. And what you’re willing to live with.