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Hugging my pillow, I let the tears flow.
“We should start drinking Turkish coffee,” Kayla announces, sliding into the chair across from me in our brightly lit kitchen.
I rub at my eyes. I know they’re red and swollen, like on most mornings these days. “Why would we want to do that?”
“To tell our fortune. Nothing better than Turkish coffee, because you boil the coffee with the water and just pour it into your cup without a filter. Then,” she sticks her tongue out to me when I make a face, “you let the coffee powder settle, drink the coffee, and upturn the cup in its saucer. It leaves streaks and symbols you can read. I saw it on TV the other day.”
Her blond-streaked hair is caught up in two pigtails. Her pajama shorts are fuchsia and her tank top green.
My eyes really hurt now.
“What happened to good old palmistry?”
“Passé.” She waves a hand at me dismissively and grins. “We need new methods. Vosprung durch Technik.”
“Isn’t that the ad for a car?”
“Amber.” She sighs. “Advancement through technology. That’s what it means.”
“And Turkish coffee counts as technology, I assume?” I roll my eyes at her.
“You assume correctly.” She grabs my cup before I manage to take a second sip. “But meanwhile we make do.”
“Hey!” I reach for my cup, my very filtered coffee sloshing. “I’m not done.”
“I’ll help you.” She gulps down the rest. “Our fates are intertwined anyway, what with living in this apartment together and whatnot.”
“Christ, Kay. You’ve been watching too much TV.”
“You can never watch too much TV,” she intones and studies the inside of the cup. “Ah-huh. I knew it.”
“I’ve had enough.” I get up, tugging down my blouse over my boy shorts, and turn to go.
“You love him.”
I freeze on the spot by the kitchen door. “Say again?”
“Jesse Lee. You’ve gone and fallen in love with him, despite all my warnings.”
I turn slowly towa
rd her. “Shut up, Kay.” I sit back down, my vision blurring. Awesome. And here I thought I had no more tears to shed. “I’m not in love with him.”
“Not what the cup tells me.” If she’s noticed my tears, she doesn’t give any signs. She turns the cup in her hands slowly. “Here is the heart, and it’s a double one. Man, I really wish we had Turkish coffee, this filtered stuff is crap for reading fortunes.”
I laugh, choking on tears. “Whatever.”
“It’s fuzzy. Not easy to work with. I mean, look here.” She points with her little finger at a smudge inside the cup. “See that? I can’t be sure, but it looks like a cat.”
“A cat.” This is stupid, but it’s a good distraction. “Really.”
“Yeah. See the tail? And I think…” She gasps. “No, it’s not a cat. It’s a lion.”
My turn to gasp. That’s a funny coincidence. I think again at the pendant I wanted to give Jesse, still tucked inside my purse—the stone lion I carved.
“No idea what a lion means,” she muses, frowning, twirling one pigtail around a finger. “Anyway. I also see a conflict. A collision. See here, this explosion thingy. You will collide with something from your past. And here… I see flowers. Roses, most probably.”
“Most probably?” I arch my brows, suspicious. “What are you up to, girl?”
