After I gave them a brief outline of what had happened, they got me what I needed, not even accepting one hundred dollars for it in exchange for regular updates from me and the promise that I’d contact them if I was ever in trouble. See what happens when you judge people incorrectly? You miss out on the beauty that we often think doesn’t exist in the world, and they almost restored my faith in humanity after the big old dump it had taken on me.
A month later I passed my exams, getting only one question wrong out of one-hundred-and-nineteen of them, and that night I climbed out of the window and got in the car the men had bought for me and left three blocks away from my house. I left a letter explaining that I knew my parent’s secrets - knowing that would deter them from trying to bring me home - and drove as far away from them as I could, until I finally drove through Gonzales, and fell in love with it.
After I found a place to live, I applied for my state license and three weeks after I got it I started work at the local hospital as a registered nurse.
Initially, Eric, Amber, and even my parents called and texted, trying to get me to go home, but after I laid my cards out, threatening to report Eric to the administrator of the hospital that he’d been offered a residency at – the same hospital that my parents worked for – suggesting that they perform a drug screen on him, and threats that I knew would hit the other three hard, they stopped, and I hadn’t heard from them since.During the drive from Portland to Texas I’d remembered the words of the lady who’d told me my fortune at the party – be careful of the men in my life that I trusted. Given that both Eric and my father had lied to me in the worst ways, this was true.
The fact that I would face heartache was blatantly true, too. How much more can a heart break hearing out loud that your parents didn’t want you, that you were adopted by one of them because you were the product of an affair with a woman who’d died?
And then to find your boyfriend and best friend fucking each other? She’d also said two people I trusted were keeping a life altering secret from me – well, duh. How about we make that two sets of two people who were doing that – one of which were being paid?
In the fourth one, she’d said that I would move hundreds of miles away, and that was maybe an understatement seeing as how it was technically two-thousand-one-hundred-and-forty miles, but I could forgive her for phrasing it as hundreds. Maybe her cards had a boundary line or something and she could only see so far?
Basically, everything she’d told me that night had come true which didn’t bode well for the fifth one. I was turning twenty-one in just over a year, and her advice had been to make the most of the time I had left because life was going to change after that.
And this was something that I’d spent hours - and still spent hours - agonizing over. Did she mean life was going to change as in I was going to die, seeing as how she’d phrased it as ‘the time I had left’? Was I going to lose my legs? Get hit by a car and end up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life?
What exactly did it mean?
And that’s when I made a hard choice. Everything she’d predicted had happened, it had all been true, so I was going to take her advice and live life like it was my last day. I was obviously more careful with how I lived – I crossed roads when the cars stopped, I refused to drive behind vehicles that were carrying loads that could come undone in a freak accident and impale me, I drove under the speed limit, I looked up every single superstition and good luck charm there was, and I did things that people thought brought them luck every damn day.
Some people freaked out when a black cat crossed in front of them, but not me. I just rubbed the rabbit’s foot in my pocket, knocked on the piece of wood I carried in my purse, and crossed my fingers. I also followed international good luck superstitions, sweeping the dirt away from my front door every night like they do in China on New Year’s Eve, and I Feng Shui’d the hell out of my house.
That was also when I started my bucket list. It started off with small things and was now moving onto much bigger things the further into twenty-one I got. Initially, it had been ear piercing, four small tattoos of good luck symbols, watching Bon Jovi in concert, sitting on the roof to watch the sunrise when I was afraid of heights but wanting to see it from up high… I made a list of all of it and worked through it one by one.