As she stand in the middle of an Applebee’s being dumped by a woman she didn’t realize she was dating, Logan Maletis has a realization: this is all Death’s fault.
The way that hunchbacked skeleton holding a sickle and crunching its way over carnage has stared up at her from the tarot card with accusation in its eyes…
She should’ve known better than to let a sixteen-year-old with a septum piercing read her future.
But it was the last week of school, and most of her sophomores were done with their end-of-year projects and were now signing yearbooks or staring blankly at TikTok. After working a sixty-hour week, grading 150 final essays, and dragging at least a dozen seniors, kicking and screaming, across the finish line so they could graduate on time, Logan was too exhausted to consider why it might be a bad idea.
And Arielle Soto was so proud of her hand-painted tarot cards, so eager to show her English teacher her newfound skills of divination, and Logan couldn’t say no to that find of earnestness.
So, Logan sat in a too-small desk across from her student and put her fate in those intensely manicured hands.
“Tarot doesn’t predict your future, Maletis,” Arielle had explained in her best woo-woo voice. “It’s best used as a tool for introspection and self-reflection.”
That seemed to much worse.
“Ask the cards a question.”
She’d overheard Arielle reading her classmates’ fortunes, sophomores who asked questions like, Where should I apply for college? and What should I do with my life? Those same students had gathered around to watch Maletis’s reading, and she couldn’t exactly ask a real question, like Will I ever move out of my dad’s house? or What should I do with my life? Instead, she closed her eyes and leaned into the theatrics. That’s her role at Vista Summit High School. She’s the fun teacher. The cool teacher. The teacher who doesn’t take anything too seriously. “Am I going to have an awesome summer?”
Arielle tutted disapprovingly and the rest of the class snickered. “You’re supposed to ask an open-ended question, like you make us do in seminar.”
Logan made a show of considering thoughtfully. “What awesome things should I do this summer?”
More adolescent laughter.
Arielle rolled her eyes at the rephrased question but flipped the first card anyway, and there was that skeletal bastard smirking up at Logan over a blood red background. The death card. Logan’s first thought was Joe, and she tensed uncomfortably in the tiny desk.
“It doesn’t mean literally death, Maletis. Don’t look so freaked,” Arielle reassured her. “It’s a metaphorical death, usually. An ending.”
Again, she thought of Joe, but she kept her smile broad for her student. “Like… the end of a school year…?”
“Or perhaps the end of an important phase in your life,” Arielle said in the same mystical Nd of your adolescence, perhaps?”
“I’m thirty-two.”
Her students laughed, but Arielle stared at her as though her heavy eyeliner allowed her to see directly into Logan’s soul.
Arielle continued, “Or, it’s possible it’s referring to the end of a relationship…”
At this, Logan relaxed a little. The boys made low ooo noises, and Waver,y Hsu singsonged, “Maletis has a girlfriend,” over and over again.
“Maletis and Schaffer sitting in a tree,” Darius Lincoln added, “K-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
This is what she loved about working with sixteen-year-olds; at turns, they watched both Euphoria and SpongeBob, tried to snort aspirin in the back of your classroom, and sang ridiculous nursery rhymes like innocent children at recess. They were goofy and weird, which meant she could be goofy and weird, too.
“Something in your life will come to an end, Maletis,” Arielle decreed, bringing the room back under her spell, and filling Logan with unexpected dread, “prompting a period of newfound self-awareness.”
