13 1/2

Excerpt

She walked to the side of the road and stuck out her thumb.
 
The man who picked her up was going to Bourbon Street. "Bourbon ain't no
place for a kid," was about all he said in the two hours they rode together.
The rain had stopped but, with the darkness and the trees, there wasn't
anything to look at but the furrow cut by the pickup's headlights.
Polly stared at it and felt as if she were falling down a long tunnel, and
she wondered if there were worse places to end up than a trailer park in
Mississippi.
 
When the lights of New Orleans lifted the night something akin to hope-but
not so grand-lifted Polly's spirits. The man stopped at the corner of St.
Ann's and Chartres, or so said the street signs. "Jackson Square," he said.
"There's a pay phone on the corner. Call your folks," he said. "Go home."
 
Polly got out of the truck. "I don't have any folks," she said.
 
"Suit yourself."
 
Polly didn't watch him drive away.
 
Except in a picture book she'd had once of a little girl getting her tonsils
out, she'd never seen anything like Jackson Square. The square in the book
had been somewhere in England and clean and friendly. Jackson Square was
like that place had been stomped until it looked like the fairgrounds after
the fair moved on: the dirt full of ground-in sno-cones, cotton candy, and
cigarette butts.
 
She wasn't alone but the people, mostly men, were what her mother would call
"white trash." Most of them were smoking and looking around like they were
waiting for somebody. There were a few women. Even green from Mississippi,
Polly knew they were hookers.
 
One wasn't. She was sitting at a table with candles on it. She looked as if
she'd stepped right out of a storybook: turban, many-colored skirt, hoop
earrings. On the rickety table were a crystal ball and a deck of cards. The
good churchgoing folks in Prentiss, Mississippi, preached that foretelling
the future, playing with the Ouija board, or dressing up as an Indian
princess instead of a favorite apostle on the thirty-first of October begged
Satan and his minions to stampede in and snatch up the soul. The desperation
that had given her the courage to run from Prentiss had dulled. Polly could
feel fear trying to break through. On the long drive she'd had to work hard
not to think about scary things: food, shelter, money. Now,
Satan.
 
People could tell the future; Polly knew that. Men in the Bible did it all
the time. It was okay when they did it, but not okay when a regular person
did it. Not that her mom was a big churchgoer but a girl didn't grow up in
Prentiss without knowing there were about a zillion ways to go to hell and
dabbling in black magic was a big one.
 
The gypsy woman looked up as if she'd felt Polly's eyes on her and smiled.
"Come on, honey. Let me read your cards," she called. "I'll tell you your
fortune."
 
If ever somebody needed to know what was going to happen to her, Polly was
that somebody.
 
Satan's hell couldn't be all that much worse than Hilda's.
 
From 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr