The Diviners

“There are always exceptions.”

“What if that isn’t true at all? What if evil exists? What if it has always existed and will continue to exist, an eternal battle between good and evil, always and forever?”

“You mean, like God and the Devil?” Mabel shook her head. “I don’t believe in that. I’m an atheist. Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

“Karl Marx,” Jericho said. “Also not your own opinion. Do you believe that because you actually believe it, or do you believe it because you heard it from them first?”

“I believe it,” Mabel answered. “Evil is a human invention. A choice.”

“Jericho believes we are doomed to repeat our existence,” Evie said, waggling her eyebrows to show just how seriously she took this theory. “Nietzsche.”

“I guess I’m not the only one influenced by other people’s opinions.” Mabel sniffed.

Evie tried to hide her laugh with a cough. She glanced at Mabel and tapped the side of her nose surreptitiously, a signal. “Oh, dear!” Evie said with mock concern. “I seem to have lost my bracelet.”

“No, you haven’t!” Mabel blurted out. She went to kick Evie under the table and got Jericho by mistake.

“Ow,” he said, eyeing her.

“Sorry.” Mabel’s eyes went wide in horror. She looked to Evie with a Please do something quickly expression.

“Do you know what I believe? I believe we should have pie,” Evie announced and signaled for the server.

They fell into near silence, the only sounds around the table the chewing and slurping of food. Evie tried to have a conversation with Mabel, but everything felt forced and awkward. Afterward, they rode the elevator together in uncomfortable silence, all of them watching its gold arrow tick the floors off one by one.

Mabel practically leaped from the elevator when the gate opened on her floor. “Good night,” she said without turning around, and Evie knew she’d hear all about it later. The first stage of Operation Jericho had been a certified failure.

When they reached their own floor they found that Uncle Will had tacked a note to the door: Gone to see Malloy—WF. It was pure Uncle Will, from the brevity to the initials. Evie crumpled the note and slammed the apartment door behind her. She glared at Jericho, who had just made himself at home in Will’s chair with his book.

She moved to the couch and glared at him from there. “You didn’t need to be so rude, you know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jericho mumbled.

“To Mabel! You could at least try to be polite.”

“I’m not interested in being polite. It’s false. Nietzsche says—”

“Leave Nietzsche out of this. He’s dead, and for all I know he died of rudeness.” Evie fumed. “She’s very smart, you know. As smart as you are.”

Jericho deigned to look up from his book. “She’s under her parents’ thumbs. She thinks what they think. What she said tonight about society making monsters—that was her mother talking.”

“So you were listening!”

“She needs her own opinions. She needs to learn to think for herself, not just parrot what other people say.”

“You mean the way you hang on Uncle Will’s and Nietzsche’s every word?” Evie swiped the book away from him.

“I do not,” Jericho said, taking it back. “And why are we having a conversation about Mabel? Why is it so important to you?”

“Because…” Evie trailed off. She couldn’t very well say, Because Mabel’s goofy over you. Because for the past three years, I’ve gotten letters full of her longing. Because every time you walk into the room, she takes a breath and holds it. “Because she’s my friend. And nobody is rude to my friends. Got it?”

Jericho let out a sigh of irritation. “From now on I will be the picture of politeness to Mabel.”

“Thank you,” Evie said with a bow. Jericho ignored her.

LIFE AND DEATH

Memphis tore out the page from his notebook and crumpled it in disgust. He’d tried working on the poem again, the one about his mother and her coat of grief, but it wouldn’t come, and he wondered if he was doomed to be a failed writer as well as healer.

The wind whistled through the fall leaves. It had been April when his mother died, the trees budding into flowers like girls turning shyly into young ladies. Spring, when nothing should be dying. Memphis’s father had roused him from sleep. His eyes were shadowed. “It’s time, son,” he’d said, and he led the sleepy Memphis through the dark house and into his mother’s room, where a lone candle burned. His mother lay shivering under a thin blanket.