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her legs and curled between the chair’s armrests like a cat.
    Once she’d settled on the couch, Mrs. Bobot shuffled the cards. “Remember that the cards represent the hero’s journey—the hero, in this case, being you.” She smiled at me. “Are you ready?”
    I nodded. Realm snorted.
    “I assume you want to know if …” Mrs. Bobot lowered her voice. “If everything will turn out all right? With your mother?”
    I nodded again.
    “What’s wrong with Alice’s mother?” Realm asked.
    “It’s none of your concern,” Mrs. Bobot said.
    Realm sat up. “Where is she anyway?”
    “Overseas,” Mrs. Bobot and I answered. Then Mrs. Bobot swept a hand through the air. “Now close your eyes and focus on the question you’d like the cards to answer.”
    I closed my eyes. Because I had no faith in this card-reading thing, I didn’t focus on my mother’s situation. Instead, I thought about Skateboard Guy. Tomorrow morning he’d skate past. Maybe I’d take a shower extra early and get dressed. Maybe I’d go out to the porch and pretend to be reading the newspaper. I could act like it was a surprise to run into him. But why would I do that? After all, I’d turned him down, told him things were complicated .
    But I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
    “Okay, let’s get started,” Mrs. Bobot said.
    I opened my eyes. Realm leaned over the La-Z-Boy’s armrest. Mrs. Bobot had laid the cards in a line. She flipped over the first card. The card’s illustration was a naked man hanging by his foot.
    “Hmmm.” Mrs. Bobot opened the instruction pamphlet that had come with the cards. “It’s the hanged man,” she explained. “The first card in the formation represents you, Alice, and the hanged man represents a person facing a crisis.”
    “Give me a break,” Realm said. “Her mom’s totally famous and rich. That doesn’t sound like a crisis to me.”
    Mrs. Bobot tapped a finger on the coffee table. “Shall we continue?”
    I stared at the next card lying facedown on the table, its message waiting to be revealed. Suddenly the reading felt creepy, like a ghost story around a campfire or a séance in an old house.
    “What’s the matter, dear? You’ve gone pale.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “If you’re uncertain, I could take a peek at the last card,” Mrs. Bobot suggested. “To see how your journey will end. How about I do that? If it’s good, and I’m sure it will be good, then we’ll look at the other cards.”
    “Isn’t that cheating?” Realm asked.
    “Shhhh.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    Mrs. Bobot peeked at the tenth card. Then, after referring to the instruction pamphlet, she smiled. “The end of your journey is very good.” She turned the card over. “It’s Apollo, the Sun God.” A young, bronzed man held a shield and wore a wreath on his head.
    “How come all these guys are naked?” Realm asked.
    “Because these are Classical illustrations, dear. The Greeks and Romans appreciated the human body.” Then Mrs. Bobot read from the pamphlet. “Apollo, the Sun God, represents a rosy dawn, which is rebirth.” She looked up. “While you start in crisis, you end in rebirth. That’s very good. I don’t think you could end a journey in a better way. Let’s turn over the rest of the cards to see about the journey itself.”
    One by one, she turned the eight remaining cards faceup. Each was identically illustrated with a naked guy holding a bow and arrow. “Curiouser and curiouser,” Mrs. Bobot said, referring to the pamphlet again. “There’s only supposed to be one Cupid in the deck.”
    “Weird,” I said, remembering the little floating cupid and the cupid figurine. “I’ve been seeing cupids all day.”
    Mrs. Bobot picked up one of the Cupid cards and examined it. “I wonder what all these cupids could mean?”
    “I’m no expert,” Realm said, turning the television back on. “But I’d say that Alice has some love coming her way.”

The sun woke me. Its rays pierced the