The Hall family stood together in the parking lot outside a First-Year dorm at St. Lawrence University, saying their goodbyes. Pictures had been taken in front of the building, in the dorm room, with the roommate (one Jeff Curtis), in the lounge and in the stairway as the menfolk lugged the mini-fridge up to the room. Now Norma Hall was refusing to release her hug on her eldest son. “Keep in touch.”
“I will, Ma.”
“Call us with your mailing address as soon as you can, so we can send you stuff.”
“I will, Ma.”
Joseph Hall grinned as he watched his son’s growing antsiness. For some reason that he had never explained, Ryan had always wanted to go to St. Lawrence. That sat well enough with Joseph. It was a good school. Still, he couldn’t help but think his son was passing up some good opportunities. After all, Harvard had accepted him. And why not? Valedictorian of his class and 2300 on his SAT’s. But Ryan had just said: “I always go to St. Lawrence, Dad. I have work to do there.”
Ryan had never explained that. But then, after a certain point, Joseph Hall had learned to stop looking for explanations. Ryan had known how to read practically from the womb, he’d known which stocks would make the Hall family financially comfortable for generations to come and he’d known that Joseph was having a heart attack at his thirty-eighth birthday and needed to get to the hospital immediately (as opposed to staying at the party and hoping some antacid would make the pain go away). And the only explanation he had ever offered was “it always happens this way”.
(Accompanied, in the latter case, with a reproachful “…because you never listen to me about your stress and cholesterol levels until it does.”)
In any case, it didn’t matter. Ryan was finally here. He’d been packed since July, and nearly insane with anticipation all week.
“C’mon, Honey,” He said, putting his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I think he’s kind of eager for us to get out of here.”
“Oh, don’t put it like that, Dad.” Ryan protested.
Joseph just grinned.
* * *
Joseph Hall couldn’t help wondering, as he drove away, how his odd son would fit in at college. Sure, he’d fit in all right (in his own unique niche) at High School, where the students were still children and as cruel as children can sometimes be, but those children had at least one advantage over the students and faculty of St. Lawrence University: they’d grown up with Ryan Hall from the age when they believed in magic.
* * *
Finally, Ryan thought with an exasperated sigh as he watched the van drive away. I thought they’d never leave – though of course, they always had. On the other hand, he’d also been sure that he really was going to throttle his sister on the way up this time, and that hadn’t happened either.
He had other predictions to make that would be a tad bit more accurate.
* * *
Ryan paused as he entered the dorm’s back door, just as a tiny, slender girl with dirty blond hair and an elfin face stepped out of her room. It made for a much better first meeting that way; the first time he’d run into her.
“Hi, Jacki,” he said as she held out her hand and opened her mouth to introduce herself.
Her jaw dropped the rest of the way open for a moment. “How did you know my name?” She asked as he took her hand. “You’re the first person I’ve met in this dorm.”
“I know. I usually am.”
“Say what?”
“I’ll explain later,” He said as he hurried on his way. “I’ve got to—“ Then he paused as something occurred to him. He leaned into the room across from Jacki’s. “Hey, Ron,” he hailed the muscular, bearded young man within. “My name’s Ryan. I wish I could stay and talk, but I’m kind of in a hurry right now. You should go upstairs to room 209. My roommate’s from Alaska, too. You two become good friends.”
Jacki and Ron watched him go, then looked at each other across the hall. “Weird,” Ron said at last, returning to his unpacking with a shake of his head.
* * *
Ryan sighed softly as he walked away. After the first few times, he’d learned that it was important to establish a reputation for “knowing things”, so people would be more likely to listen to him. Unfortunately, doing so usually gave him a reputation as a creepy weirdo. Still, some things were worth the sacrifice. He didn’t have time to worry about that right now anyway. His first—and one of his most important—stops was only a little further down the hall.
The Indigo Girls’ Galileo was playing from the open door, just like it always was. He smiled as he heard the familiar lyrics: How long ‘til my soul gets it right? Can any human being ever reach that kind of light?
How appropriate, he thought as he knocked on the door.
“Hi!” The room’s occupant chirped as she opened the door and stuck her hand out. “I’m—“
“Naomi Bloomberg,” Ryan finished for her as he took her hand. “You’re native Hawaiian, but you were adopted by a Jewish family, and you grew up in Ithaca, New York. ”
“How did you know that?” she asked. “Is that some kind of trick?”
Ryan shook his head. “No trick. Even if it was, magicians never tell their secrets. But it’s not. I just know things.”
“Sure you do,” Naomi said, nodding, her tone saying that as far as she was concerned, he’d just offered to sell her some ocean front property in Arizona.
“Listen. I have something very important to tell you.”
“You tell fortunes, too?” She enthused. “Why don’t you do this as a show for the dorm? What are you going to do, read my palm or something?” Her hand, palm up, shot out and practically hit him in the nose. “Or did you already do that when we shook?”
Annoying as ever. “Naomi, I am trying to tell you the most important thing you will ever hear in your life, so will you please just pay attention?”
“Jeez, no need to get snippy—“
“Naomi. For years now, you have snuck out to go party at the fraternities at Cornell and Ithaca College.”
Naomi stared at him.
“More than once, you’ve drunk yourself into a stupor and stayed over, but you’ve been lucky. No one ever touched you, and you didn’t even get alcohol poisoning. But your luck won’t hold here.”
She was starting to back away from him. She was scared. That wasn’t so bad—they never became close friends anyway. Please, God. Just let her listen this time. “Follow all the little safety rules they’re going to give you at orientation, about staying with a friend at parties. Don’t leave your drink unattended, or take what someone gives you. If you don’t follow this advice, you die at a party at the Phi Kappa Sigma house on September 28th. At first it looked like alcohol poisoning, but an autopsy discovered that you died of a Roofie overdose. One of the brothers was inexperienced with the stuff, and didn’t allow for how little body weight you have.”
He stood in silence for a moment, watching her back away from him, her eyes bright with fear and her mouth working helplessly. “You probably don’t want me to stay any longer,” he said. “That’s okay. I have other errands to run. Just please, please, remember what I just told you.”
He was on his way out the door when something occurred to him. “Oh, by the way,” he said as he turned back.
“Uh?” Was all she could muster.
“You aren’t fat. In fact, you could use a little extra meat on your bones. If you make it past that party, your face clears up by next year and you become very pretty. Also, don’t let Jacki start calling you “Bloomers.” She never stops. Twenty-fifth class reunion and she still won’t use your name. It’s irritating as hell, and not just for you.”
* * *
Ryan Hall had tried a number of different approaches with Naomi Bloomberg before finally deciding – regretfully – that scaring her worked best. Once he’d steeled himself to that fact, however, she was a relatively simple case.
His next “case” didn’t scare quite so easily, and dealing with her was anything but simple.
* * *
“So you know my name, my boyfriend’s name, and that my parents are dead. Big fucking deal. I can eavesdrop too, asshole.”
“I didn’t eavesdrop,” Ryan said, backing away, hands up. Kim Santiago was taller than him by an inch or two, and very muscular despite her slenderness. He didn’t think she’d hit him this time, but it would hurt if she did. He knew that all too well.
“So I’m supposed to believe you’re some kind of psychic? Fine.” She stuck out her right hand. “Tell me my future.”
Ryan couldn’t help but chuckle, but it was mostly nervous laughter. He was past the point where he usually got thrown out (often literally), but he wasn’t safe yet. “You know, you’re the second person to do the palm-reading thing,” he said. “But why’d you give me just one hand? Real fortune-tellers use both. That’s what impressed you about the one in New York who told you that your life moved in cycles of seven years, and that you’d be pregnant by twenty-two.”
Kim went rigid.
“Still think I eavesdropped?”
Without a word, Kim stepped past him and closed the door. “What was it you wanted to tell me?” She said.
* * *
Ryan let out a gusty sigh as he left Kim’s room. No matter how many times he did that, she always managed to surprise him.
And now she would never tell the “two hands” story. Dammit, that had been one of his favorite moments with her the first time around.
* * *
Ryan had completed his errands. If everyone had listened to him, he had averted two first-semester flunkouts, several car crashes (one fatal), three rapes (one of them Kim’s), one drug bust and any number of lesser problems—including the hell of boredom that was the convocation ceremony.
If, he thought with a regretful sigh. He suspected that Sheila Walters was going to get pregnant and drop out again next year, and Marcus Nelson was going to lose those toes again this winter—he never took his doctor’s advice about that circulatory problem seriously, why would he take Ryan’s?
Maybe he’d try again later, after giving his reputation a little time to do its job. Sometimes that worked. He couldn’t worry about them right now, anyway. Right now, he was moving toward the moment he’d been waiting for all of his life.
He walked down the hallway, his heart fluttering in his chest and his breath coming short and shallow. All his life, everything had been just as he’d known it would be, just as it had been before.
What if, this time, it wasn’t?
No more time to think about it, here he was: at the door of one Carah (“Sarah with a ‘C’” she’d said at a dorm getting-to-know-you function several lifetimes ago and several hours in the future) Rodriguez. Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door. It opened, and he looked straight into a pair of eyes the color of a tropical night. The eyes were bright, friendly…and blank. She didn’t recognize him. She didn’t know him.
Of course she didn’t. Why should she? She hadn’t dated him throughout college. He hadn’t given her that rose and bottle of Midol to help her through one of her painful, irregular periods. They hadn’t walked over that moonlit bridge in Venice while on tour with the Laurentian Singers. She hadn’t sat up beside him in the hospital all night while he was delirious with pain and painkillers, waiting for his appendix to be removed.
They hadn’t moved to New York after graduation and spent four years working two jobs apiece just to make ends meet. He hadn’t worked as a secretary by day and a Blockbuster shelf-rat by night, while she sold group packages for a theatre company and worked as an usher at night just to stay close to the theatre she loved so much.
They hadn’t married near the end of the fifth year and had a masquerade-ball reception at Belhurst Castle on the shore of Seneca Lake.
She hadn’t been killed in a car accident less than a year later, when some drunk ran a red light and hit the taxi she was taking home after a late night of rehearsing with an amateur theatre group she’d just gotten involved with.
Nor had she been shot in a mugging a few weeks after avoiding that car crash, walking home from a dinner celebrating the show’s success.
Nor had she been hit by a runaway van while standing in a farmer’s market several months after the show’s closing, having taken a cab home from the celebratory dinner.
Nor had she…
None of that had happened. She had never met him before.
While all of this was stampeding through his mind, he continued to speak, his mouth running on automatic. “Hi, I’m Ryan Hall. I live right up in room 209, and I’ve just been going around trying to meet everyone.”
She smiled and held out her hand. “I’m glad to meet you. My name is—“
“Carah Rodriguez,” he interrupted absently, pronouncing it correctly.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “Almost no one gets it right the first time. How did you know that it wasn’t pronounced ‘Kara’?”
He tried to drag himself out of his panicked, racing thoughts and put on as bright and brave a smile as he could. “I know a lot of things,” he answered.
She quirked her eyebrow at him. “Really? What other ‘things’ do you know?”
I know that you’ve never been happy living this life, he thought. I know that you came to this school because it offered a good financial-aid package, but the theatre program is weak and won’t teach you what you need to know or get you where you want to go. I know that if you stay here with me, you’ll die without ever getting close to your dreams.
“A lot of things,” He repeated. “About you, and about the future. I know—“ That if you transfer to Mary Washington College in Virginia, you’ll find the theatre program that you want, the one that you spend so much of each life wishing that you’d attended. One that would set you on the right road, put your dreams in reach. “—that we could get to be very, very close.” Great start. Sounded like a cheap pick-up line.
Apparently she thought so, too. “And how do you know these ‘things’?”
“I’m a fortune teller.”
And if I tell you one fortune, you’ll stay and I’ll have those ten precious years with you—but those ten years will end the same way. I’m death to you. If I tell you the other, you’ll have what you’ve always wanted, but I’ll miss you so much.
Try again or let you go. After dozens of lifetimes of trying to set things right…what I want to be right, anyway…I could accept that sometimes you only get one choice and finally, truly let you go.
That brought a smile. “Oh, really?” Now she thought he was interesting, or at least somewhat amusing.
Sometimes, you only get one choice.
“Yeah, really. Here,” He held out his hands. “Let me see your palms.”