Chapter TwoCharlotteI was a nurse, and nurses knew what to do when things like this happened, right? Sure, but if there was a doctor around that was even better - and I was definitely leaving it up to the doctor.
“Stop pacing,” Ariana sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her. “You heard what the donkey dick said – Levi’s just fine,” she reminded me, and then added, “he’s a big pussy, but he’s just fine.”
I’d never been a superstitious person – well, up until I went to that damn party two years ago, that was. Now I found myself doing the stupidest things like throwing salt over my shoulder whenever it tipped over, or doing something else to erase bad luck whenever something like that happened. All the sites on my phone and laptop were open to subjects based on luck, old fables, and things like that, because I just wasn’t willing to take chances now. Well, with the exception of jumping out of a plane, obviously.
Judge away, whatever you want to do, but I was doing what I needed to do. I had a notebook full of good luck actions and omens, and I had another one with things that led to bad luck or warned of bad things about to happen. I didn’t look at these ones as often as I did at the beginning now, though, after Levi started doing my bucket list items with me. He’d read through these two at the same time and had told me, “All this constant bad and good luck shit stops now. No more throwing salt and being scared of life.”
He didn’t know the story, but apparently if you live your life like something bad will happen at any second, you won’t enjoy life - and the whole purpose of a bucket list was to enjoy life, right? So they were in a drawer now, and I only did a couple of items from them every now and then.
Then there was my third notebook with items for my bucket list. Well, I had two other notebooks, seeing as how I technically had two bucket lists. Bucket list one: the normal things. Things that were exciting and could be done in public.
Bucket list two: sex related things that I wanted to try. Item number one on it was to have sex, the rest were notes from online searches (again), porn, and from looking at things I’d found in sex shop sites online.
I wasn’t brave enough to try a majority of the two small pages worth of things, but my theory was - if others enjoyed them enough to buy the toys and do it in porn, then I should open myself up to trying them. In safety of my mind, that theory totally worked. Not surprisingly, the second one was hidden under my pillow and never left my home, but I took the first one with me everywhere so that I could add to it whenever something hit me.
How did I turn into this person who was looking at every minute like it may well be their last? Well, I wasn’t at that stage – I was at the ‘what if’ stage. What if something happened, and I hadn’t experienced as much as I could? Well, I’d end up sitting on my cloud, looking down on the world at everyone having fun and would most likely be pissed at the missed opportunities. I’d be like one of those spirits on a television show that wouldn’t cross over to the other side, begging people to let me hijack their bodies so I could just do what I needed to do, and I just didn’t want to be that spirit.
Sound dramatic? Well, let me rewind to the moment that led up to me becoming this person. Two years ago at my friend Amber’s birthday party, she’d brought in this familiar looking old woman and told us that we were all getting our ‘futures read’. The woman turned out to be her grandmother, and she’d made a big deal about how qualified the woman was, that she’d read the futures of celebrities and how big an honor it was for us to have her with us.
I was only nineteen, and we’d been drinking alcohol that we’d all stolen from our parents, but something about it just seemed off to me. I mean - not to mock what some people truly believed in - I found it hard to believe that someone’s future or destiny could be told by reading cards, tea leaves, the lines on their palms, or whatever else was being used to do it. It didn’t make any sense to me.
Regardless, I was the fifth person who was taken into the small room, and Amber’s grandmother laid out five cards in front of me, studied them, and then gasped and grabbed my hand to look at my palm. That’s when she laid it all out for me.