Aces by Ian Rogers

ACES
    Soelle got kicked out of school for killing one of her classmates.
    They couldn’t prove she actually did it, which was why she received an expulsion instead of a murder charge, but there was no doubt among the faculty that she was responsible.
    Soelle told me she didn’t care if they kicked her out or put her in jail. She just wanted her tarot cards back.
    * * *
    At dinner that night I asked her if she wanted to talk about it. Our parents should have been the ones dealing with this, but we hadn’t seen them in four years.
    “Talk about what?” Soelle snapped. “Tara Denton is such a baby. I read her cards wrong on purpose. She wasn’t really going to die!”
    “But she
did
die,” I pointed out.
    “Yeah, because she ran in front of a bus.”
    “So you did predict her death.”
    Soelle tilted her head to the side and gave me a long-suffering look, as if she was the older sibling and I was the younger. “We all predict our own deaths, Tobias.”
    “Nice. Where did you get that?”
    She frowned. “
Ghost Whisperer
?”
    “Why don’t you tell me what actually happened.”
    Soelle blew a strand of her straggly blonde hair off her forehead and dropped her fork on the plate with a loud clink. She was going to be sixteen in August, but she still had the mannerisms of a young child. Most people grow up; Soelle was growing inward.
    “It was Algebra and I was so bored I could die. I was feeling fidgety so I took out my tarot deck and started shuffling it, practising some of those fancy shuffles you taught me. I started snapping cards down on my desk—maybe a bit too loudly, I admit—and Tara, she was sitting beside me, started giving me these dirty looks. I shot one right back at her and asked if she wanted to play. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘I don’t gamble.’ Like she had never seen a tarot deck before. What a zero. Anyway, Mrs. O’Reilly put some big complicated problem on the blackboard and said she had to step out for a few minutes. I heard she’s a drunk, so I figured she was heading off to the boiler room to get juiced. Robbie Moore said he saw her in the parking lot one time and—”
    “
Soelle
.”
    “So the teacher left and I turned to Tara. She was kind of pissing me off at that point. I snapped down a few more cards, some of the trumps, and I said, ‘Do these look like
playing
cards to you, sistah?’ I was expecting Tara to say something smart, but she surprised me; she actually picked up the cards, one at a time, and looked at them. She asked me what they were, and I figured, what the hell, and I started explaining what tarot is. We weren’t bonding or anything—I was still thinking she was a twit—but she seemed seriously interested. I could tell because she looked kind of scared. She probably heard some the rumours about me that are always floating around. . . .”
    I nodded. “Go on.”
    “So I asked Tara if she wanted me to give her a reading. I told her she had to ask me to do it or else it wouldn’t work. I don’t think that’s true—in fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t—but it sounded kind of occult, sort of vampirish, and she seemed to eat it up. By then a few of the other kids had gathered around us, and Tara must’ve known it was too late to back out. So she started acting smarmy, telling me to play her cards and read her future, or am I too scared. I didn’t like that. First she says ‘play’ her cards, right after I told her they weren’t playing cards, and she says it in this joking tone, not for my benefit, or even hers, but because we had an audience. Then, to top it all off, she asks me if I’m scared, which I found doubly insulting since she was the one who was actually afraid. But then I figured out what the problem really was. What
her
problem was.” Soelle paused for a moment, possibly to take a breath, more likely for effect. “I realized she wasn’t scared
enough
.”
    “So that’s what you did?” I said. “You scared