Palm Readings and Orange Tabby

The summer after sophomore year, I spent every Friday night at Jasmine's house because her parents were never home and she had the good snacks. That's where I met Leo—the boy who sat on the back porch with an orange tabby cat curled around his neck like a particularly judgmental scarf.

"You're going to be famous," he told me, taking my palm in his hand like he actually knew what he was doing. "See this line? It means you're gonna leave this town and never look back."

I laughed. He was cute, in that messy-haired, oversized-band-shirt way that made my stomach do weird little flips. "You're just making that up."

"Am not." The orange cat—its name was Mango, obviously—blinked slowly at me. "Animals can sense these things. Mango approves of you, so you must be legit."

That should've been my first clue that Leo was absolutely full of it. But I was sixteen and desperate for someone to see me as something other than "the quiet girl who sat in the back of English class," so I let him trace the lines on my palm with his thumb and tell me I was destined for greatness.

Three weeks later, I found out he'd given the exact same speech to half the girls in our grade. Including Jasmine. Including the girl who sat behind me in pre-calc.

But here's the thing—he wasn't completely wrong about the leaving part. Not because of any palm reading nonsense, but because sometimes you have to get your heart broken to realize you've outgrown the place where it happened. The orange cat still sat on that porch, but I didn't.

Last I heard, Leo dropped out of community college and was still telling people he could predict their future. Meanwhile, I'm three states away, and my palm looks exactly the same, but somehow everything's different. Funny how that works.