"We're getting our fortunes told?" Georgie said, and already I could tell she was in that mode that I hated; she would feign boredom, rolling her eyes and sighing real loud because whatever we were doing didn't quite match up to what Georgie wanted to be doing.

"Well, yeah, Sunshine! Both yours, then mine!" Dad said. He smiled at the lady who sat inside behind a table, resting her head on her hand. She was chewing something.

"It'll be fun, Georgie! You're allowed to ask questions about the future, and about what's going on with you now, like at school. Like with Thomas!"

Well, gross misstep on my part. Georgie flashed her stink eye at me, and her face got all red. I should probably have kept that Thomas Crush thing quiet.

The lady's name was Zana, and she was pretty. I remember her eyes, at first so bright and cheery, like she was excited to finally be reading for kids who would maybe believe in her magic more than a grownup would. She had shiny red hair that hung in Shirley Temple kind of ringlets. They bounced all around her face and I whispered, "Boing, boing, boing," while I watched her move.

Sitting three in a row on an over-stuffed couch that afternoon, with the snow wisping away in front of Zana's big paned windows and the storefronts still shining with post-holiday lights, I watched my dad being Dad as his true self for the last time. He was kind of flirty with Zana, which made me squirmy in my seat, but it was hard to stay uncomfortable, listening to Dad's bark of laughter. He slapped his knee, threw his arms around us, and squeezed.

"What are you planning for my Princesses today, Miss Zana?" he asked.

"Well, you had mentioned on the phone that you wanted to keep it simple today for you three," Zana said. Her eyes were closed, and her hands rested on her deck of cards. "So I'm just planning on a one-card pull." Her eyes opened. "Some people do a one-card pull every day, to help direct their path and bring them clarity about the stuff that life is sending their way. You can come back anytime for a full reading, which is much more complicated."

"And more expensive, I'm sure," said Georgie, ever the skeptic.

Zana smiled and dipped her chin. "Yes, it does cost more, in both time and dollars. You are astute."

"What's a stute?" I asked.

Georgie turned to me and rolled her eyes, and even though I'm pretty sure that she didn't know either, she could tell that a stute was something good, so she perked up a little bit. Any kind of positive attention, and Georgie perked up.

Zana did me first, which made me feel uber-special, since I was the youngest, and usually the second to go at anything.

I made myself comfy in the chair across from her while she shuffled her cards. She didn't shuffle those things like you would on poker night, that's for sure. She pulled sections out from the middle of the deck slowly, like at least seven times, then handed them across her table to me.

The cards were big and heavy and their edges were golden. Zana told me to split them, cut the deck, as many times as I wanted, and then she had me spread them all out like when we play Fish, like the cards were a pond. Then she leaned over the table with her eyes closed and blew.

You heard me. She blew on those things like they were candles on her birthday cake. Then, once they were all back in one stack again, she picked up a little black bell on the table and rang it over the deck.

I picked out a card that felt right, and she kind of prayed over it for a little bit. I held my breath as we both leaned over my card.

"See this lady here?" Zana tap-tap-tapped her finger. Her fingernails were painted purple, my favorite color. The paint was chipping off, but so what? I never dreamed you could even get purple nail polish.

I had to give myself a little shake to get myself to focus.

I nodded and stood up to see my card better. A pretty woman with a long red robe and a crown on her bowed head sat on a fancy chair under some kind of fruit tree.

"She's telling us," Zana said, "that you are much more powerful than you think you are." She nodded, as if listening to the actual woman on the card, who was holding a giant star on her lap, the kind of star we put on the top of our Christmas tree.

"See how she's surrounded by leaves and branches that are laden with fruit?" Zana asked. I nodded again. "That means you have a special tie to the earth, nature, plants, and animals. But look," she said, pointing to the bunny who sat at the woman's feet. "This rabbit? He's telling me you probably have all kinds of energy. Is that right?" I nodded again.

"The rabbit is here as a warning. He's telling you that even though you have great potential to be successful, you must be careful not to leap before you think." When I looked up, Georgie was church laughing into her hand. I gave her my best stink eye.

I cleared my throat, my mouth suddenly dry.

"Do you sometimes talk before you've thought things through?" she asked.

I nodded, but when I opened my mouth, it made that awful sound a mouth makes when it needs spit.

"A cup of tea, maybe?" Zana looked at me with one eyebrow up and one eyebrow down.

I was amazed. "Did youâ?"â?"can you read minds or something?"

She smiled, a nice smile, but with yellow teeth. "Sometimes, sure. That's why I'm here, right?" She got up, opened a tiny refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of water. This was fascinating to me; we always drank straight out of the tap at home.

"I always use bottled," she explained, and again I got the shivers up my spine, thinking she must have heard me thinking again. I tried to put my mind on neutral so she'd stay the heck out.

She poured the water into a mug that had lots of tall buildings on its side, some that I recognized, like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, because duh, I lived right here. But I also knew the Eiffel Tower, because I loved the Madeline stories that happened in Paris, because duh, Madeline was my name.

There was a giant pyramid on the mug, too, with that cat god in front of it, the Sphinx. I touched my finger to the mug to read the words under the sands of the desert that spread beneath the giant cat and the pyramid.

"The Magic of Las Vegas," I read out loud.

"Hm, yes," Zana said. "There's magic there, for sure. Vegas is like a man-made vortex."

"Vortex?" I didn't want to look stupid in front of this lady, but I hated not knowing what words meant.

"A vortex, hm." Zana leaned in so our faces were close and I could smell what I was pretty sure was peanut butter on her breath. I started breathing through my mouth. "A vortex is a special spot where energy is either entering into the Earth or projecting out from Earth's plane. Like Stonehenge. Or Giza, where the real pyramid is. Anyplace that makes you feel its mystery and cosmic force."

"Like New York City?" I asked.

She laughed as she swung around to get a wooden tray filled with a whole bunch of different kinds of tea bags. "Except like Vegas, New York is a manmade vortex, not a natural one, right? Pick a tea, any tea!"

I didn't want to take too long because I could hear Georgie starting up with her sighing.

One time, my mom took Georgie to her yoga class, and Georgie learned about Ujjayi breathing, where you make the sounds of waves on the beach as you breathe in and then out. Georgie made Ujjayi breaths whenever she was feeling bored or times like now when she just wanted people to hurry the heck up. When Zana offered her the tea bags, she held both her hands up and shook her head no, even while she kept on doing the ocean thing.

I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping he'd catch my drift. He just gave me a grin with half his mouth.

I picked the red raspberry teabag because who wouldn't? She popped it into my mug of cold water, put it in the tiny microwave that stood beside the tiny refrigerator, and just stood there motionless, staring at the red numbers on the seconds as they ticked away.

What should have been an awkward moment was actually a very comfortable silence, like the four of us weren't strangers, like we weren't paying her money to tell us things about ourselves at all. Just friends gathered on a wintry day for a cup of tea and some light tarot.

Zana cut the thinnest slice of lemon I had ever seen and made a slit in it so that it could perch right there on the lip of my mug. Then she picked up a plastic bear filled with honey and raised her eyebrow at me. I gave her just the hint of a nod and she squeezed a couple drops into my mug, then slid it over the table.

I watched the steam rise and breathed it in so that my throat and mouth would stop being dry and it worked. When I gave her a shy smile, she continued, even seeming to enjoy the accompanying Ujjayi breath that Georgie was doing louder and louder.

"So basically, then, my dear, I'll tell you this, for what it's worth: You should cultivate that love of the Earth you have. Enjoy nature. And maybe take a deep breath, sort of like the ones your sister is making right now, before you react to what people have said to you, yes?" We took a moment, just Zana and me, to sit with our tea and our silence, and I deliberately let that silence grow before I smiled up and nodded at her.

"Your turn!" Zana said, and she made a graceful turn of her wrist toward Georgie.

Georgie, all positive and suddenly raring to go, swished her hands to make me sit back on the couch, then she pulled up the chair to Zana's little table.

"I'm tall enough, so I don't need to stand at your table like a little kid," she said, swishing her hair behind her and throwing me a sneer. She took her good old time picking out her card. Zana leaned over it, bit her lip, and looked over at my dad before starting in.

"Your card, for today, is The Tower. Now, I know it looks a little scary at first, but bear with me and we'll squeeze lemonade out of this lemon." She gave a nervous kind of giggle, and I stood up to look at Georgie's card. Georgie put one hand in front of my chest and pushed me hard, but I got to see the card for just an instant.

"See how the building is being hit by lightning?" Zana said. I licked my lips and sat back down with Dad. There had been fire coming out the Tower's windows, and people were falling, maybe jumping out of it.

Georgie sat like a stone.

Zana went on. "Well, this card usually needs to be taken in context with the cards that surround it. Maybe a one-card pull wasn't the best idea, after all. Most people who do one-card pulls do it on an everyday kind of basis, you know?" She looked up and her eyes went first to my dad, then back to Georgie, who still hadn't moved.

"Let's just do our best with it, though, hmm?" Zana bent over her table with her eyes closed and touched The Tower with little tap tap taps of her fingers.

"The Tower signifies changes in plans, sometimes rather drastic changes," Zana said. "Usually, it stands for a shakeup in your perceived reality." She stopped here and looked at my dad again.

Perceived reality? What the heck did that mean?

I looked up at my dad to make sure that last part didn't come out. I had a problem talking out loud to myself. Kids made fun of me.

But no, I hadn't said it out loud. Following Zana's advice, I took a deep breath. Then I put my tea up to my lips, thinking maybe keeping them busy would help me stay quiet.

Dad cleared his throat and exchanged a glance with Zana, who took a big breath. I sensed a wrap-up coming.

"Ultimately," she said, "you just need to be aware of your surroundings. Sometimes The Tower serves us well, in that it raises our consciousness to the here and now. It allows us to watch out for our bodily and spiritual safety. Just be cautious. Watch yourself as if you were watching...um, maybe Sabrina the Teenage Witch on television, instead of your own life, from an objective stance."

"I don't watch that show. It's stupid. It's for little kids. Maddie watches it," Georgie said, and at that, she turned and glared at me.

I shrugged, like, So what? It's a popular show! And then I made slurpy sounds with my tea.

"Well, ha!" Zana said, swishing a couple of crazy red curls over her shoulder. "You get what I mean, though, right?"

"I guess so?" Georgie said. "Not that I believe in any of this stuff, but what you're trying to say nicely to me is that something bad is going to happen to me?"

"No, not necessarily, no," Zana said. "I mean, bad things happen all the time, right? More often than not, the cards point to your internal life, not just what is 'happening' to you, coming from external sources. And dramatic changes are not always what we would label as 'bad'." She stopped and took a drink of water.

"Think of it this way. The Tower could represent a prison, a jail of sorts, and sometimes it takes something traumatic in our lives for us to realize that we need to break out of that prison, even if we might hurt ourselves temporarily in the process."

"Huh?" Dad finally spoke up. "Georgie's twelve years old. You think she's got enough baggage that she's already had time to build 'internal prisons'? Look, don't you think maybe the card could have an opposite foretelling? Isn't that the way these cards work? That everything has a reverse meaning, no matter what the card stands for?"

His voice was getting louder like it does when he's really happy or really mad.

"Well, um, sure. Sure!" Zana did a little show here that almost made me giggle. She curled her fingers into an 'OK' sign and made her lips move like she was talking to someone, but I know that move; she was talking to herself.

"The reversal of any card carries with it caution and awareness, like I said. Maybe this is a simple case of a love interest that needs to be reevaluated?"

This is where I couldn't stop the laughter from coming out, and I think it might have been what relaxed everyone, at least the grownups, because they both seemed to lower their shoulders and their voices from then on.

Georgie's latest crush on Thomas Hunter was her biggest secret, one that I kept coaxing out of her, little by little, without her realizing it. Some of the story, the inside gooey feelings of it at least, were pretty much out there for anyone to see. She left her doodles of his name in places right out in the open, and once she even inked a tattoo of his name on her arm, so I figured she secretly wanted me to know about him.

It wasn't unusual, seeing Georgie with steam coming out her ears. She got mad at the drop of a hat. After I laughed and the grownups untensed, her face was all red and her eyes filled up with water and her hands clenched.

"First of all," she said with her teeth still together, "I do not have a 'love interest.' Second of all, this is a stupid game and you don't really know what you're talking about and you're probably a fake fortune teller just like the Wizard of Oz. And third of allâ?"â?" I have to go to the restroom. If you even have one of those, that is."

Gosh, she was mean.