I just saw my psychic. I call her my psychic not because I see her regularly, but because the only way I’ll ever feel justified in paying her sixty dollars for a half hour of predictions is if I can also refer to her with the first person possessive.

My psychic is a fraud. Do not see my psychic.

She works on the fifth floor of a building on Tremont Street, where half the stores are pawnshops and the other half are boarded up. Her business is somehow solvent, but it could also just be a front.

My psychic is very pretty. She self identifies as a creative type, but I don’t know what that means. She is slender and blonde, and is covered in tattoos and cheap costume jewelry. I have only come to see her because a friend had invited me, and because I love card tricks. I’m hoping that she will do the trick where the card was in my wallet the whole time. But she doesn’t. She just tells me to pick three cards and then stares blankly at them.

After a long sigh— which at her rate costs a quarter—she looks up from the cards. Instead of explaining what they mean, which I am paying her to do, she asks me a series of questions: Where am I from? Where do I go to school? Is there anything I can tell her to make her job easier?    

Initially, I am eager to tell her about my life. I think that maybe if I tell her enough she will double as my psychologist, and this will make up for the exorbitant rate she charges.

Then she begins to interpret the cards. She holds up what she says is the “family card,” but what is actually just a drawing of a unicorn in a waterfall.

“I’m sensing conflict,” she says, “Do your brothers tease you?”

“No.” I say, “They do not.”

“What about in the past—did they ever tease you in the past?” I say sure, because she looks visibly upset over the prospect of a three by five paper card with a mystical animal on it not accurately portraying my relationship with my siblings.  

“Yes. That it what the cards are sensing.” she moves onto the next card, as if that was a satisfying prediction. “So you want to be a writer, but you study government?” This is true. I’m impressed—she remembered what I told her five minutes earlier.

She thinks for a moment, as if contemplating something morally ambiguous. The plastic bangles on her wrist jingle as she toys with my card. “I know it might be difficult,” she finally says, “but you should stay in school.”

This is good advice, and I appreciate it. However, I have no intention of dropping out of Harvard with only one year to go. I tell her this, and she agrees. “Yes, stay in school. After you will become a successful writer. What kind of writer do you want to be?”

“Any.”

“Like a playwright?”