Some Trick

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?”

“Probably not.”

“TV?”

“Sure.”

“Yes! The cards see you writing a television show. You will probably live on the East Coast, or the West Coast,” she continues, “but not in the middle. Now pick three more cards.”

She frowns at my cards. This is disconcerting, and I am worried that one of the cards that looks like a baby on a horse to me is actually the tarot card of death.

“No,” she says, “You do not have a brain tumor. The cards just want to talk more about your family. I sense that your brother is going to get married soon.”

I laugh, slightly out of relief but also because neither one of my brothers is even in a relationship. I tell her this.

“Is it possible that one of your brothers hasn’t told you about his girlfriend because he is in a secret relationship?”

I nod. Theoretically, it is possible.

“It’s that then!” She beams, “I predict that he is going to surprise you with his engagement.” She moves on.

“I’m seeing lots of boys,” she continues. “Not in your future. Your brother’s, they are going to have lots of sons. You, however, you will be single for the rest of college.”

I’m laughing now, hysterically. I am angry, not because I am going to be alone for another year (or forever, depending on the length of my graduate program) but because I could have told her this. In fact, I probably did. I had basically told her everything that she had predicted.

I was paying to have someone listen to my life and then reconfigure it into something that could apply to a card with a picture of a forest on it. She was just an under qualified psychologist, or an overpriced mirror. I guess that this is the true mystical power of the psychic: listening comprehension.

I tried to blame myself. I wanted this to be a PSA about over sharing, and about how when we are too eager to share our lives with strangers—via iPhone apps, editorial articles, and small talk with psychics—we make it too easy for people to impersonate soothsayers and rip us off. But this is not true. This is not my fault. This is not Twitter’s fault! My psychic is just a fraud. Imagine how vague my reading would have been if I had given her no information with which to work with. She probably would have just told me that I had green eyes. Even that’s not true; they’re hazel!

No. There is only one conclusion that comes from this. Never pay to see a psychic. If you want to see a card trick, go to a magic show, and if you want someone to tell you to stay in school, call your mother, or, just ask anyone really, any stranger on the street.

Nicole J. Levin ’15, an FM editor, is a government concentrator in Dunster House. Her column will appear every two weeks this summer.