Aces by Ian Rogers Page A

her?”
    “I don’t care if people disrespect me. They can say whatever they want about me. They can write it on the bathroom walls—they could write it in neon on the front of the school, for all I care. But tarot isn’t something to be laughed at. The cards don’t like it. They told me so.”
    “Uh-huh. So what happened?”
    “I dealt out her spread. Then I sat there for a while staring at her cards, looking like I was concentrating really hard on them. I knew the longer I took the more agitated Tara would get. So I started her reading—her
joke
reading, I might add. It wasn’t real. I made it up. I just wanted to take her down a peg, and in front of all the jerks she was trying so hard to impress. I put on this serious expression and shook my head, telling her I didn’t like what I saw. I began asking these medical questions, like if there was a history of heart problems in her family, is her father a smoker, stuff like that. Tara started getting freaked out. I had her cards laid out facedown, and I was flipping them over one at a time. The first card I turned over slowly and smoothly, barely making a sound, but each one after that I started snapping them louder and louder. When I flipped the last one—a card I slipped to the top of the deck on purpose without Tara noticing—it sounded like a gunshot, and Tara actually jumped in her seat. She was really scared, Toby. That last card was Death, which, as any self-respecting tarot reader will tell you, doesn’t actually mean death but change.”
    “I would say death is a fairly big change.”
    Soelle’s shoulders twitched in a small shrug. She was tall for her age and tended to slouch, which gave her the appearance of someone expressing perpetual indifference.
    “Tara wanted to know if I was making it up. I told her I wouldn’t do something like that. I told her that the cards would turn back on me if I read them incorrectly. I’m pretty sure that’s bull, too, but it didn’t matter much because Tara wasn’t listening anyway. She stood up and started flapping her arms like she had to pee or something. She was breathing really fast and looking all around the room. She looked at me with these big saucer eyes and asked how she was going to die. Then I realized why she was looking all around like that. She was seeing death everywhere. I told her I didn’t know how she was going to die, that the cards weren’t that specific. Maybe she’d slip in the shower and break her neck. Or maybe she’d get kidnapped and chopped into little pieces.”
    “Or get hit by a bus,” I added.
    Soelle shrugged again. “Or that.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “Some of the others were trying to calm her down. They tried to get her to sit back in her chair, but she pushed them away. She started saying something really fast. I didn’t understand all of it, but I think she was worried that one of the chair legs was going to break and she was going to fall backwards and fracture her skull. She started moving down the aisle toward the door, turning around and around. She bumped into Jack Horton, who was just coming back from sharpening his pencil, and she started screaming at him, accusing him of trying to kill her. She was absolute loony tunes. She started spinning around pointing at the chalkboard, the globe, even Blinky the classroom iguana—screaming about death, death everywhere. Then she ran out of the room. Nobody followed her, but some of the others went over to the windows. A few moments later we saw her come running out of the school and into the street. The buses were just arriving and”—Soelle drove her fist into her palm—“el smacko.”
    “You sound real broken up about it.”
    “Tara Denton wasn’t my friend. She was some twit I sat next to in Algebra who believed too much in tarot. I didn’t like her, but I didn’t kill her.”
    “And yet you got kicked out of school.”
    “They’ve been waiting to do that for a long time,” Soelle said, with a