Page 59 of Good Half Gone

“So, you can smell auras?”

“What I do is not psychic, it’s purely scientific.”

“Predictive knowledge?”

He shrugs, looking pleased that I’m asking. “There’s no voice in my head telling me things.” He examines his boiled egg before he bites into it.

“Okay,” I say. “I believe you. How am I going to die?”

He glances up. “Is that really what you came here to ask me?”

This time I shrug. “One of them…”

“Fair,” he says. “Pass me that butter…”

I slide the plate of condiments over to him, and he grunts. My leg is bouncing under the table where he can’t see it. I want to get back to the topic of Jude, but I’m also curious about how he’ll answer my last question.

For a moment, I see myself absorbed into the totality of his answer. How he says I will die, I will die. We’ve both lost it.

“I’m not a fortune teller,” he insists.

“I don’t think you are a fortune teller, V, I think you know things.”

Pleased with my answer, he dusts the egg from his hands, nodding decidedly. What’s left of his hair clings to the back of his head in wispy tassels. “I’ve thought about this a lot actually. Some people have bad health written all over them. I know a gut parasite when I see one. Thyroid problems—don’t even get me started…” He makes sure no one in the vicinity is listening, then in a low voice says, “My grandmother read tarot. I loved my grandmother, she was a no-bullshit kind of lady. I believe in a little woo-woo,” he admits. “Don’t tell.”

I zip my lips.

“Sick people have a stink about them. Rotten livers smell different than, say…prostate cancer.”

“I don’t know what facial expression to make,” I say. “I feel awkward.”

“Healthy people have a smell too—like roses,” he continues.

“Really?”

“No, actually they smell like my childhood friend, Meredith. She liked roses.”

“So your nose is psychic.”

“No, that’s not it.” He frowns. “Will you let me finish?”

I zip my lips again.

“You don’t have a smell at all, dead or alive—there’s no pulse to your smell.”

“I feel that,” I say. “But also, what are you actually saying? Am I dead already?”

I’m only half kidding.

“No…”

“You’re lying.”

Tilting his head sideways, he considers this, then shakes his head. “No…it takes a long time for a broken heart to die.”

“Sounds like you’re on the fence. Why was Jude out of unit D?”

Vespa doesn’t falter. “I’m not on the fence…” And then, “He lets himself out.”

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