With a Wicked Pack of
Cards
©2010 The Angst Guy (theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Daria and associated
characters are ©2010 MTV Networks
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me,
whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: In an alternate universe, in their senior year at
Lawndale High, Sandi and Quinn discover that Tiffany has a hidden talent for
cards—Tarot cards. But Tiffany is not
using her deck for mere card tricks…
Author's Notes: This tale
was inspired by the image of an adult Tiffany Blum-Deckler in a “Miss
Cleo”-style commercial for psychic services, shown at the end of Is It College Yet? When I first saw this image
around Thanksgiving 2002, I thought, how would it be possible for Tiffany to
ever have a career like that? The basics of this story were begun at that time,
but not completed until now; parts of the original story were later used in an
unrelated story, “Winter in Hell.” The title of this tale
comes from a line from “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot, in the segment about Madame
Sosostris, “famous clairvoyante.”
Tiffany is using a Rider-Waite
Tarot deck.
This story makes use of a special font
for the title and chapter titles, a free true-type font with a nice (and
sophisticated) haunting flavor. The font is called Chaucer (one of several with
that name, make sure you get the right one) and is available as a free download
online, such as Fontage.com
or Searchfreefonts.com.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to MTV for the neat future ego.
Messing with the mind can be so dangerous.
—Tiffany Blum-Deckler, “Quinn the Brain”
*
“I mean,
talk about ironic,” said Quinn Morgendorffer, sitting at the desk to Sandi
Griffin’s left. “It’s like that song by the girl with that name. I can’t
believe Stacy would do such a thing.” She sighed, arms crossed over her chest.
“I just can’t believe it.”
Sandi
gave her red-haired best friend a sour look. The problem wasn’t entirely that
Quinn had said the same thing about ten thousand times over the summer before
their senior year. It was that Sandi could
believe it had happened, exactly as it had. Stacy Rowe was such a total ditz, Sandi couldn’t see how it could not have happened.
She
cleared her throat to make sure her voice box was still in working order. “What
runs around goes around,” she murmured to Quinn. “I hope the little traitor’s enjoying
her classes at Carter County High with the other mega-losers. I hope that she—”
“Shhh!” Quinn cut her off just in time. Sandi grimaced but left
the rest of that thought unspoken. The principal had a zero-tolerance policy against
threats and anything that vaguely resembled them. There was no telling which or
how many classrooms were bugged. Maybe they all were. Sandi exhaled in
frustration. The principal probably wouldn’t have heard anything anyway, with
all the noise from students filing into class.
Quinn shook
her head, looking both sad and resigned. “She in there with the addicts and the
gangbangers and the crazies, right while we’re sitting here talking. Poor Stacy.”
Sandi’s
eyebrows went up. “Excuse me? ‘Poor Stacy’? Quinn,
dear, are you saying she didn’t deserve
to be sent to reform school for what she did?”
“Nooo, I didn’t mean it like that! I mean, what she did was
really wrong, but she was so sweet, I just never thought she’d—I mean, I never
thought they’d actually send her to—”
“But she
did,” Sandi shot back, “and they did, and now she’s there, and that’s it. Good freakin’ riddance.”
Quinn sighed
and glanced around the rapidly filling classroom. The first day of each school semester
was the only day she and Sandi came to classes early, to stake out their claims
on the seats they always wanted in the back of each classroom. Quinn was
keeping the seat in front of her saved for Tiffany if she showed up. “I mean,”
Quinn went on, “that hoodoo thing she said she did so you couldn’t talk right
after—”
“I had a
virus,” Sandi interrupted. “That backstabbing little rat had nothing to do with
it.”
“Well, she thought she did. What she did was so
really wrong, but she felt really terrible about it and—”
“Oh, spare
me.”
“Well,
she did! I’m not defending her, Sandi, but she really was trying to fix things
when she made that drink with that cayenne pepper and that stuff with that big
long name she got off the Internet. She meant well, sort of, but it was still really
dumb and really wrong and—I mean, I know if Tiffany hadn’t taken the wrong
glass, then you’d—”
Without
warning the teacher strode in the door, tall and irritable and grim and gray as
an old lion. Sandi and Quinn automatically dropped their conversation and sat
up in their chairs. Here we go,
thought Sandi. One more year down the
drain before I blast out of this town and never look back. Bring it on.
“Take
your SEATS and can the chatter if you want to graduate next SPRING!” Mr. DeMartino
roared over the noise. The class bell rang that moment in the halls to nail
down his point. When the bell stopped, the only sounds in the room were those
of students putting away backpacks and settling down for class. Almost everyone
knew Mr. DeMartino from previous years and had little desire to attract his
wrath. Pens, paper, and history books appeared on desktops in place of cell
phones, purses, and car magazines.
Sandi
scanned the room from her vantage point in the rear. No sign of Tiffany. Damn,
was she back in that awful hospital where they made you wear those wretched gowns
that showed everyone your butt, or had she not yet returned from visiting her relatives
in New Orleans, as she had written she would do over the summer? As DeMartino
began calling roll, Sandi abandoned the thought and elected to give Tiffany a personal
visit after school, with Quinn in tow. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to put their
diets aside for once and go out for ice cream, if Tiffany’s injured throat
could take it, and the three of them could have a powwow over the whole episode
and put it behind them.
DeMartino
had almost finished taking roll when the classroom door opened and Tiffany
Blum-Deckler drifted in, wearing a simple but effective outfit of a black
sweater, pants, and low boots. She had a purse but carried no books. Delighted,
Sandi and Quinn forgot themselves and ran up the aisles from their desks to
give their mutual friend a welcoming hug. DeMartino growled and motioned for the
girls to return to their seats. Sandi and Quinn did so, but Tiffany hung back.
She withdrew a folded paper from her purse and gave it to the teacher, then
stood by as he read it in silence.
Mr.
DeMartino’s craggy face softened and his eyes grew wide. “My God,” he said in a
hoarse whisper. He looked at Tiffany in distress. “Is this condition permanent?”
Tiffany dropped
her gaze and gave a barely perceptible nod.
Sandi didn’t
breathe. She knew instantly what had happened. That treacherous pigtailed little saboteur, that rotten whoring little
shit, that—
Mr.
DeMartino gently tossed the note on the cluttered desk behind him. “Take a
seat, Miss Blum-Deckler,” he said softly. “Glad you could make it despite...
everything.”
Tiffany
nodded a last time, then took the desk in front of
Quinn at the back of the room. Sandi and Quinn both touched her shoulders for
comfort before the teacher thumped his desk for attention and began a lecture
on Colonial North American history. Tiffany put her hands over theirs but said
nothing in return.
She would
say nothing ever again. What everyone had feared all summer had come true. The
damage to her vocal cords from Stacy’s poisoned drink was irreversible.
Sandi found
she was literally shaking with rage. The only good thing—other than the fact
that Sandi hadn’t gotten the drink meant for her—was that Tiffany did not
appear terribly upset over her fate. Solemn, yes, certainly the black outfit made that clear, but apparently coping with the
disaster. Perhaps her relatives in New Orleans had given her comfort, a special
strength to carry on despite her loss. One could only hope.
Tiffany soon
released her friends’ hands. The hands withdrew.
It was
bad enough that it was a Monday, Sandi Griffin reflected as she reluctantly
opened her history book. It was bad enough that it was the first day of classes
at Lawndale High after summer vacation, bad enough that the Fashion Club had
broken up, bad enough that Sandi no longer had anyone to order around and the
halls of Lawndale High were still decorated with those atrocious Ultra-Cola
posters encouraging students to study hard and achieve their dreams while they
drank enough soda to give them gas for weeks. (Sandi wrinkled her nose.) It was
bad enough that Mr. DeMartino was already asking questions of the class as if
he expected them to know everything about colonial times already. That she had
come so close to taking a poisoned drink that would have destroyed her voice
forever, escaping nightmare by simple chance, and a friend of hers was struck
down instead by a traitor in their own little club, now that was just—
She
heard the faint snap and cackle of something being unwrapped, and she glanced
up. Tiffany was stuffing a wad of plastic wrap in her purse. She then opened a colorful
cardboard box of what appeared to be oversize playing cards and emptied the
deck into her left hand. After putting the box in her purse and her purse on
the floor, Tiffany began thumbing through the cards, looking at each in quick
succession. Her actions were concealed from DeMartino by the bulk of a football
player sitting in front of her.
Sandi
frowned. That was a weird-looking deck. The images on the cards were cartoony
but disturbing, pictures of people in long-ago clothes
surrounded by sticks, goblets, swords, and stars. Her examination of the deck
complete, Tiffany looked up to watch the teacher while her hands began doing
something below her desktop. By leaning forward a bit, Sandi could see Tiffany was
quietly cutting and shuffling the deck with expert hands. When and where had
Tiffany learned to shuffle like that? She didn’t even play poker.
“Kevin!”
called Mr. De Martino, turning to a football player known to everyone as a
moron and class clown. The teacher’s right eye appeared to enlarge as he
emphasized certain words in aggravation. “Given that this is the second time
you’ve taken this class with me, is there even the remotest chance that you
might know the AGENCY that early American colonists believed responsible for
acts of WITCHCRAFT?”
“Uh, the immigration agency?” While others in the class snickered, Sandi watched
Tiffany work the deck. The mute girl’s hands moved quickly and without error:
cut, restack, cut, reshuffle, cut, reshuffle, cut, restack.
What the hell was she going? Quinn, unable to see what Sandi did, was passing
notes to a boy in the next aisle.
“While I
am doing my best to be tolerant and nonjudgmental of your intellectual DEFICIENCIES,”
DeMartino snarled at Kevin, “each moment I find it more DIFFICULT to avoid
recommending that you be held back yet ANOTHER year!”
“Ms. Li
said I had to graduate this year no matter what,” said Kevin with confidence, “but
I can still come by and visit. If I’m not working or anything.”
“Please
don’t.” Mr. DeMartino scowled at the rest of the class. “Is there any hope of
ANYONE here knowing the answer to this QUESTION?” Mr. DeMartino’s pop-eyed gaze
swiveled in Tiffany’s direction—and stopped in surprise.
Tiffany
had stopped shuffling cards long enough to put up a hand.
“Miss
Blum-Deckler,” said DeMartino in mild embarrassment, “under the circumstances it
will not be necessary for you to—”
Tiffany
waved her hand insistently.
The
teacher gave in. “Very well,” he said in a more normal tone. “You may write on
the chalkboard if you like. Can you enlighten us, please, as to what agency the
early American colonists believed was responsible for witchcraft?”
Tiffany’s
raised hand again went under her desk to cut and shuffle her cards one last
time as she stared at Mr. DeMartino with unfocused eyes. A second later both
her hands came into view. She lightly slapped the deck of cards face down on
her desktop, then cut the cards, restacked the deck, and covered the deck with
her right hand. She then raised her hand and held it up, palm out, toward Mr.
DeMartino. A card was suspended between her fingers.
Mr.
DeMartino frowned and took a step closer, squinting at her hand. His eyes then
opened very wide. He moved back a step.
“That is
correct, Miss Blum-Deckler,” he said. His usual growl was soft with surprise. “An excellent trick. Unorthodox, yes, even uncanny, but you
are correct: the early colonists attributed supposed acts of witchcraft to the
Devil.”
Tiffany
dropped the card she’d held on top of her deck. It came to rest face up. Sandi
got a good look at it. Printed on the card was a bestial and obese figure with
goat horns on its head and hairy legs. An upside-down star was drawn over its
forehead. Written across the bottom of the card were the words: THE DEVIL.
A cold
finger ran down Sandi’s spine. Her mouth went dry. What the hell?
Tiffany
flipped the card over, then took the deck below her
desktop once more. Her fingers began working the deck, shuffling the cards over
and over again. Her face was again as blank as a blue sky on a sunny day.
“Now
that the magic show is over,” said Mr. DeMartino, regaining his momentum, “can
anyone else tell the class what the PENALTY was for a person convicted of witchcraft
in colonial TIMES?” He surveyed the room with a glare, noted that almost no one
was looking at him, and turned back to Tiffany—who once again had her hand in
the air.
“WELL!”
he said in a stronger voice. “It seems everyone is still hanging on your every
move, Miss Blum-Deckler. Perhaps you would humor us with one more demonstration
of your curious new TEXTBOOK. Tell us, if you would, what was the colonists’
penalty for WITCHCRAFT?”
The card
deck hit Tiffany’s desktop with a loud slap. Several students jumped. Sandi watched
with sudden stomach-churning dread as Tiffany cut the deck, restacked it, and again
picked up the top card to show Mr. DeMartino.
Seconds
passed. Mr. DeMartino’s face turned white. Everyone else merely stared with
open mouths.
“Correct
again, Miss Blum-Deckler,” Mr. DeMartino said in a rough whisper. “That is… exactly
right. Congratulations.” He shook himself, looked around the room, then said something no one ever remember him saying before.
“The remainder of this class will be spent silently reading Chapter One. We
will talk more about colonial times tomorrow.” He walked unsteadily back to his
desk and sat down in his chair, his face slack. He kept glancing at Tiffany as
if expecting something more, but nothing happened.
Tiffany
dropped the used card face up on her deck. On it, a knight in black armor rode
a white horse as he carried a dark banner. The face inside the knight’s black
helmet was a skull. DEATH was printed below the image in capital letters. Quinn
stood up to peer over Tiffany’s shoulder at the card. She gasped and sat back down
hard.
Sandi watched
as Tiffany took the deck from her desk to shuffle it endlessly in her lap. What
was going on? With half an hour left to the first class of the day, she was too
nervous to do anything other than think. Was that a trick Tiffany had learned?
Sandi was willing to consider the possibility that it wasn’t, because she had
lied to Quinn about having had a virus that took away her voice the previous
spring. The doctors had found nothing that could have caused her speechless
condition. It had not been a virus.
Knowing
this, Sandi was forced to conclude that Stacy Rowe really had cursed her to lose
her voice, after a sharp but trivial exchange between them at Stacy’s birthday
party. She’d had no symptoms whatsoever other than being unable to talk for
several months. Stacy had confessed everything after her failed attempt to give
Sandi a chemical-laced drink near the end of their junior year. Tiffany’s
hospitalization riddled Stacy with guilt, and she confessed her sins this time to
the police and was arrested. Now Stacy was a juvvie,
Sandi had recovered, and Tiffany was mute. Everything was messed up.
Sandi
came back around to the central issue: what had Tiffany just done with those
weird cards? Was she, too, capable of casting curses and doing other
horror-movie stuff?
Belatedly
Sandi noticed Quinn passing a note to Tiffany. Tiffany read it, took out a pen
to write a long response on the note, then passed it back to Quinn. Sandi
waited until Quinn had finished reading before bumping the redhead’s desk with
her left foot and nodding at the note. Quinn passed it over with an unreadable
expression.
Are you still mad at Stacy? read Quinn’s question.
She made me gain four pounds when I went to the
hospital, Tiffany had responded. It took me all summer to lose them again.
Sandi
nodded in understanding. Tiffany was pissed beyond belief, and she wasn’t even
so much angry at losing her voice as she was that Stacy had made her fat. Waif-thin Tiffany hated
the thought of being fat. Her weight hovered just above the level where school
authorities would suspect she was anorexic. Stacy had made her fat. That, in
Tiffany’s book, was unforgiveable. Sandi knew it for a fact. Tiffany rarely
held a grudge, but when she did she never let it go. She was doubtless still
trying to find ways to punish a caricature artist at a fair who, a year ago,
drew Tiffany to look ridiculous.
None of
this resolved whether answering Mr. DeMartino’s questions with card pulls had
been a trick or… something else. Something unearthly.
Sandi had heard that
Was
there one more trick Tiffany could do to…
She had
it.
Sandi
hunched over her open history book, letting her long brown hair fall forward
and block the teacher’s view as she wrote a note. Overcoming a moment of
indecision at the thought of doing what she was about to do, Sandi reached
forward and gently bumped Tiffany’s upper arm. Tiffany stopped shuffling to
reach back and take the note. She read it in a moment, then wadded it up and
dropped it in her purse.
Can you use your cards to punish Stacy for what she
did to us? the note had read.
Tiffany
slowly nodded yes.
Sandi
saw that her hands were trembling. There were only ten minutes left in class. Tiffany
could do it, or she thought she could. That was good enough.
As Sandi’s
nerve hardened, her hands stopped shaking. She was focused. Eight minutes left
in class.
Slowly,
to avoid attracting attention, Sandi leaned forward over her desk, looking down
at the history book without seeing it. Her hair shielded her face from view.
When her mouth was inches from Tiffany’s right shoulder, Sandi licked her lips
and mouthed three words with just enough breath to make them audible.
Then do it.
Tiffany’s
hands stopped moving. She did not glance back at Sandi. Her blank face did not
change.
Do it, Sandi
repeated. Make her pay. Do it now.
She
pulled back, face still down. After a moment she tossed her head, flipping her
long hair back. Quinn was giving her the oddest look. Sandi shrugged and shook
her head. It was nothing, she signaled. Nothing important.
Tiffany
remained motionless for long seconds before her fingers began to move again.
She was working the deck, but faster now than before. Her hands split the deck,
fanned the two sections together, re-cut and restacked it, repeated the above.
The colorful cards flew in her fingers, moving too fast to see. Cut, fan
together, cut, fan together, cut—
Tiffany
slapped the deck on her desktop, re-cut the deck, then snapped off the top card
with her left hand and gave it directly to Sandi without looking at it. Not
even trying to hide what she was doing, Sandi took the card and held it up.
Against
a night-black sky and ashen clouds, a bolt of lightning had struck the crowned
top of a great tower, blasting it apart and setting the ruins aflame. Two
figures in robes fell screaming to either side of the burning building.
Sandi
looked down at the caption at the card’s bottom. THE TOWER.
Sort of obvious. She had been hoping for the Death
card, but this one looked effective enough.
She
slowly gave the card back to Tiffany, ignoring the eyes of her classmates and
Quinn. At a thought, she glanced up at the clock over DeMartino’s desk,
memorizing the time.
The bell
in the hallway rang. The three friends moved on to their next class. Sandi did
not answer a single question Quinn threw at her, only shrugging them off and
claiming she had been curious about the cards.
Hours later they were eating lunch together in the
cafeteria when word ran through the student body that a former student, Stacy
Rowe, had just that morning hanged herself with her own belt in a girls’
bathroom at
After
school Sandi bought Tiffany and Quinn all the fat-free ice cream they could eat,
then went home, did her homework, and went right to bed. She could not wait for the next day of class to begin.
Her senior school year was going to be great.
Original: 11/29/02; modified ??/??/05, 03/07/10, 05/03/10, 05/19/10
FINIS