She yawned and stretched her arms above her head, arched her back. Her shirt rose and revealed a slice of skin, concave stomach, the twin bones of her hips.

“Why don’t you sit down, let me give you a proper reading?”

“What, so you can steal from me again?” I tried to stand a little taller, but there was a flutter of nervousness in my voice. I was curious but terrified that she might see in me things I didn’t want to see myself: My desperation. My fear.

“Here.” She pulled out an old folding opera chair covered in gold velvet. The shop didn’t seem to have air-conditioning and I knew it would be uncomfortable—to listen to her read my cards, to sit in that hot, dusty room—but I found myself taking off my blazer and sliding into the chair.

Up close, I could see that the tablecloth was a bolt of fabric that had come off a roll from a fabric store. No one had bothered to hem the raw, frayed ends where it had been cut away. Clara had her back to me, busy arranging something in the glass cabinet. She turned over her shoulder, smiled. I wasn’t sure why. Her braid was coming a little loose, and for a second she looked almost like a girl her age should look, like she had just been laughing with friends over strawberry smoothies at the mall or running across a soccer field after school. I tried to imagine her face underneath the heavy foundation and the thick strokes of black eyeliner: earnest and sweet.

“How old are you? Sixteen?” Clara frowned and I knew I had guessed right. She sat at the table, tamped the cards in her hand the way people do with packs of cigarettes.

“Twenty-one.”

“I don’t believe you. Your mom just lets you do this?”

“Oh, God. Des isn’t my mom. She’s just my aunt.”

“Your guardian, then.”

She ignored me and shuffled the cards, turned one over on the tabletop. It showed a man in a tunic and tights suspended from a tree branch, dangling by a single foot.

“That’s the Hanged Man.”

“What’s a Hanged Man?”

“He usually means that you need to go through discomfort or pain in order to grow or achieve change.” She flipped another card. This one showed a hand extended from a cloud, holding a star-shaped symbol. She turned another one over: three women hoisting golden cups in the air.

Clara ran her fingers over the edges of the cards and nodded. “Three of Cups, Ace of Pentacles. Hmmm.Yes, this all makes sense.”

“What all makes sense? It’s just a bunch of pictures arranged in a random order. How does it make sense?”

“It means that you’ll fall a little further before you can rise again.” Her voice shifted into a deeper register, self-serious and solemn.