It was a dark and stormy night — no, really, it was — when I passed the psychic on my way to the subway. It's the same route I take every day, only this time instead of a mysterious storefront with its purple cursive neon sign, the subject herself was sitting outside on a fold-out chair, smoking a cigarette, bored. She wore a bulky gray sweatshirt and a long batik skirt. A sign beside her read: "Psychic readings — $2."

Now, there are some things I would not spend two dollars on. I would not spend two dollars, for instance, to take heroin, or to be injected with some strange and shuddering exotic ailment. (I don't care how many book deals are in it.) But here is what I will spend two dollars on: pretty much anything else.

"Two dollars? Really?" I asked. I glanced at my cell phone; I was a tad early for my dinner date. "How long will it take?"

"Not long," she said, opening the door to a cramped, colorful room with two chairs. A little boy — scrawny, black-haired, laughing — burst into the room, saw me and scuttled back into the room from which he'd come.

"Not now," she snapped at him and then scolded him in an exotic language I could not place. "Ready?" she asked.

I shrugged and walked inside. Seriously, now: Wouldn't you?

promotion

I had been to a psychic exactly once before, at thirteen. The psychic told me I would marry someone with the same characteristics of the guy I was crushing on. The most cunning part about that experience was what she told me before she left: "If you tell anyone about this, it might not come true."

Since then, I've never had the urge to go again. I have friends who go as regularly as Nancy Reagan, and I suspect they'd rather I not identify them. Still, it had been a terrible day. And come on: two dollars?!

"Okay, can you turn your palm over for me?" she asked. I opened my right hand. It looked small, tender, pinkish.

"Your life line is long," she said, and I was embarrassed to find myself relieved. I'd been thinking recently about people taken too soon, people taking themselves too soon, thinking about the things I'd yet to accomplish:

So far, my future life was awesome.

family, kids, books, a trip to Africa.

"Well, that's a good start," I said with a sigh.

She smiled. She had crooked teeth. She looked to be about twenty-six, twenty-seven. She spoke with a nasal New York accent and the efficiency of someone who had done this many times before. "You're going to have children. Two children, in three to five years. Closer to three now that I look at it."

So far, my future life was awesome. I did, in fact, want kids in three years, at thirty-eight, far enough away to fall in love with someone, travel with him to ridiculous locales and have enormous amounts of sex before our lives went the way of spit-up bibs and messy diapers.

"I see that you're a leader, not a follower," she said. "You find it easier to give advice than take it. You put on a front that you're happy all the time, but you have sadness" — which is true. Suddenly I became painfully curious what script she was following, what type I had been ascribed. Me, with my hot pink iPod and my cheap leather purse from Target, my cute knit cap and streaked blonde hair and my eyes swollen from crying. It's a kind of litmus test for how strangers view you, isn't it? What was I to her? Alpha female with a side of crazy?

"You have a soulmate," she said. "He's come back into your life recently."

I had, in fact, been talking to Nick that afternoon, a sweet and wonderful and tough conversation, like every conversation we have since he broke up with me eight months ago.

"He cares deeply about you still," she continued.

I nodded. I found myself wishing she wouldn't call Nick my "soulmate," and then I realized, darkly, that she had not.