Goldfish in the Palm

The carnival lights blurred through my tears. I was running before I even realized my legs were moving, escaping the disaster that was my first kiss. Tyler had leaned in, and I'd panicked—full-on, deer-in-headlights panic—and basically head-butted him. The basketball game went silent. Tyler's lip was bleeding. I was out of there.

Now I was staring at a plastic bag with a goldfish inside, won from some rigged game I'd played while hyperventilating behind the Tilt-A-Whirl. The goldfish—Cornelius, I'd named him in my crisis brain—swam in tiny circles, looking as trapped as I felt.

"Hey." A hand touched my shoulder. Maya, the girl who'd been watching me play the ring toss like my life depended on it. "You okay? You kind of fled the scene."

"I'm the worst," I groaned. "I'm never going back to school. I'm going to live in the woods with Cornelius. We'll eat berries and never speak to humans again."

Maya laughed, but not mean. She pulled me toward a tent with a neon sign: PALM READING—MYSTICAL MADAME ZONA.

"My aunt runs this," she said. "She's actually just really observant, but teens eat it up when they're drama-ing out. Let her read your palm. It'll distract you."

I let Maya drag me inside. Madame Zona turned out to be a woman in a sparkly turban eating a sandwich. She grabbed my hand, tracing the lines with greasy fingers.

"You're running from something," she said around the sandwich. "But here's the thing about running—you always end up somewhere else. And that somewhere else might be exactly where you need to be."

She pointed to a tiny bag in my palm. "Also, that fish needs a bigger tank. And you need to give yourself a break."

Maya was grinning. "She's good, right?"

I looked at Cornelius, then at Maya, then back at the tent where Tyler probably had ice on his lip and an ego wound. "Yeah," I said, and for the first time all night, my chest didn't feel tight. "Yeah, she's good."