Sean looked me in the eyes as he flipped the first card. It was strange; on its surface was a man in a robe holding what looked like a wooden cane with another one sticking out of the ground beside him. In the hand that wasn’t grasping the pole, he held a small globe. I kept trying to figure out the canes, though, because they weren’t even canes: there were leaves sticking out of the limbs. Almost like he was holding two branches, but straight, narrow ones.
“This is the Two of Wands,” Sean said. “This represents your past. It symbolizes a plan for action. Goals. So, according to this card, your past was a time when you wanted to move forward and you thought about how to make that come true.”
Oh my God, I thought, my voice frozen in my throat. The hairs on my arm stood on edge and I felt the faint, cool prickling of goosebumps hardening along the surface of my arm. My mind flashed to the list I’d made that, even now, was scrawled in chalk on my bedroom wall. A plan for how to make my goals come true.
Without giving me much more time for reflection, Sean flipped the second card: my present. I examined it: it was an image of a man atop a horse, a large goblet in his hand. Sean chuckled and my eyes flashed back to him. Heat was spreading through my cheeks.
“What?” I snapped. I didn’t know why I was so mad about something I didn’t even believe in, but it felt like a slap in the face that he was chuckling away at something that was supposed to symbolize my whole life.
“It’s just the Knight of Cups is such a stereotypical girl card,” he said with a shrug. He must have seen the look in my eyes because he went on hastily, “When you have the Knight of Cups, it means you think with your heart. So, what this is saying is that in your past, any time you have had the choice to make, you have wanted to choose love.”
I thought about how I’d been chasing after Lennox and gasped. How could these cards already hit me so close to home, with so much truth? I had the thought that maybe Marley was in on this; that she had given Sean an overview of what had been going on and he was just making stuff up based on her stories. But I knew even as I thought it that it wasn’t possible. Marley might be stubborn and thick headed, but in all our years of friendship, she had never done anything deceitful.
“It’s not a bad thing,” he said, his voice steady. “Keep in mind that none of these cards are a judgement, even if they feel like it.”
My eyes narrowed into slits. He was good at this whole thing. I mean, not necessarily reading the cards because as far as I could tell that was just a matter of flipping a card and reciting some memorized speech. No, Sean was good at the delivery. So much more even and thoughtful than I ever remembered him being. I nodded him on, eager to see what my future would reveal.
He flipped the last card: the words “the lovers” were scrawled along the bottom. There was a man and a woman, nude, standing with their palms outreached to each other. Smiling down on them was what I could only imagine was meant to be God. He was larger than them and his head was popping down from the clouds, so that pretty much lined up with what I had always assumed God would be like.
My heart thumped in my throat as I waited for Sean to explain the meaning of the card. It had to be good, right? A card with lovers on it had to mean that I would have one.
Sean cleared his throat. “So, your future is represented by the lovers, a card that suggests harmony in a relationship.” He paused and looked at me with narrow, searching eyes. It felt like he was looking for answers, too, but the moment passed, and he went on. “In your future, you will find a partner that brings you balance and harmony. Someone that will be easy to love and find it easy to love you.”
My heart caught in my throat.
It couldn’t be Lennox, then. If there was anything that was hard for Lennox, it was letting herself love me. The tears beaded hot and hard in the corners of my eye and I told myself this was the last time I would let them form. Lennox was never going to offer me that kind of easy love. I had come to Sean’s to get answers and now I had them: it was time to move on.
I told myself I wasn’t going to spend any more time dwelling on Lennox. I had plenty of real problems and the way they’d popped up on me just when I was feeling a nagging complacency made me feel like I had brought them on myself. Be careful what you wish for and all that. Now, instead of being the girl whose life was one mundane day after another, I was the girl who had no clue what was happening or how to navigate her own life. I didn’t know what I was going to do about my dad, I didn’t know how long I could keep everything a secret from Ari, I didn’t know whether I was mad at my mom. Lennox, no matter how amazing, was a distraction that I couldn’t tolerate.
So, what should I do instead? Put a pin in the whole dating idea until life settled down? Sit in my bedroom pining away on the off chance that Lennox would stop fighting herself and messing with my head and we’d be together? I couldn’t do it. If she wanted to be unhappy, that was on her. If she wanted to spend her teenage years in the closet and alone, she got to make that choice. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t going to be a sixteen-year-old version of my mother, spending night after night curled up in an armchair with nothing but the newest thriller novel for company. If she couldn’t let herself want me, I’d find someone who did.
It felt wrong, logging onto a dating site. There wasn’t a chance in Hell for Lennox and I now, but somehow it felt like a betrayal. How could I think of letting someone else into my heart so quickly after her? There was so much hopelessness in the way she talked about what it would be like if we were together. There was too much giving up for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told myself it wasn’t my job to worry about any of that. I told myself that I couldn’t make her be ready to admit who she was. I tried to tell myself all these things as though they had changed anything, but my skin still burned where she had touched me hours before. How could I sit in this chair, knowing that I was falling in love with her, and actively search for someone else to be with? How could I just give up on her when I’d seen how much pain she was in?
Swallowing down my own doubts, I told myself it didn’t matter how it felt. Fake it until you make it. I was sitting cross legged in my desk chair staring at the dating site I’d read about on the entertainment blog Pulsestream. Lavender Menace was a new site that was designed specifically for LGBT teens and I liked the way it was laid out; you could input certain preferences on things like politics and body type like on other dating sites, but there was also a feature that searched for keywords so you could filter out people with similar tastes and hobbies. It had taken me about thirty minutes to set up my own page. I had hated every minute of the process of setting up my profile because I was too in my head to make any decisions or enter any information without typing it out in full and deleting it at least five times, especially when I got to the point where I had to pick a username. Usernames are always this chance to make this clever, funny first impression, but I wasn’t really feeling like I was either of those things. Every effort I made felt forced. Deciding to keep it simple, I went back to what everyone had called me in childhood: HanHan.
Next came the fun part. I had never been all too excited to pick a name that would be the sum total of my online persona, but I was really excited about my profile picture. It was one that Marley had taken of me the night before school started this year when it was still sticky hot, and we’d been at the park with slushies from the convenience store down the road.