“So you, like, tell people about their futures and stuff?” Nina asked.

“Oh! Do Noelle. Noelle, see if Ava knows whether Nick will finally ask you out.”

“Shut up.” Noelle elbowed Lucy in the ribs. “Nick Hart. You know him, Ava.”

“Ava used to like Nick Hart!”

“No, I mean, maybe. He’s fine. But I don’t like him anymore, obviously.” If only they knew what my life was like now—that in a few days I’d probably go out on a date with a strange, grown-up man. But for a second I let myself picture how Nick would look in the prep uniform, the navy blazer with brass buttons, a crisp blue button-down shirt the same color as his eyes.

“You and Ava have to duke it out, Noelle,” Nina said.

Noelle’s smile was small, catlike. “We’ll probably see him at the party tonight. Actually, we should get going. I gotta do my hair.”

“Yeah, I need to get home, too,” I said. Around these girls, I felt like a sliver of myself. Maybe because they had known a different version of me: quiet, mousy brown hair, good at math. They could see the ways I’d changed, the versions of myself that I had left behind. That itchy, tingling feeling crept up my stomach, and I rubbed at my shirt, hoping they wouldn’t see.

Noelle and Nina whispered back and forth to one another. Nina giggled. “You should come with us,” Lucy said, which made Noelle snort.

“Really, I’ve got to go. Have fun, though.” I hated them, their stupid, perfect, easy lives.

My face burned as I walked on. I turned once to see the girls recede down the boardwalk, their ponytails swinging. Noelle held up my card and the three of them exploded into laughter. I stomped to the closest trash can and threw the rest of the cards away, retreated to the shop without raising my eyes from the ground. Once I was back, I sat at the table, cutting the tarot deck and stacking it again, watching the people stream past, and out farther, to where the waves broke into white foam near the shoreline. Dark clouds collected in the sky above, and I pleaded for them to break into rain, but they blew past, and we were left with the skin-blistering heat.

The next day I was sitting at the table in the shop again—thinking about those messages I’d seen on Julie Zale’s Facebook page—when I heard the tap tap tap on the doorframe, so faint that at first I thought I had imagined it. A woman stood behind the beaded curtain. I called to her to come in. “Are you here for a reading?”