Dating Can Be Deadly

“What?”

“You’re doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

“That thing you do with your eyes when you blink a lot.”

“I do not blink a lot.”

“Uh-huh.” Jenny planted thick fingers on wide hips. “Yeah, well, tell your eyelids that ’cause right now they’re doing the mambo.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers and squeezed my eyes shut.

“What is it?” she demanded impatiently.

“Nothing.” I nibbled my lower lip and glanced nervously at a nearby tree. “Let’s go.” I whirled on my heel to beat a fast retreat.

“Whoa!” Jenny clamped her fingers on my elbow. “You had one of those premonitions, right?”

I sighed, “I don’t have premonitions. It’s more like a deep feeling of foreboding.” With the occasional bleary snapshot thrown in for good measure.

Jenny nodded vigorously. “Yeah, like the time you knew something was wrong at home and you found out your dad had just had a heart attack, or that time you knew Martha was preggers even before she did.”

I pulled my elbow from her grasp and crossed my arms over my chest. “Actually, it’s more like that feeling I got when you fixed me up with your cousin Ted and his leg-humping dog, or the time you told me the shrimp in your fridge were fresh.”

“Well, maybe this time your bad feeling is telling you that your purse is over there behind that tree and the bad part is that only the cash is missing.”

The feeling in my gut wasn’t exactly saying purse, it was saying something darker. Evil. I shuddered and wished I hadn’t quit smoking last month.

Then again, I reasoned, I’d had the same feeling when I was sixteen and Mom found me out behind the garden shed with Todd Verbicki’s hands down my pants. I relented and Jenny and I made our way across the mossy grass to the spruce that had garnered my attention. We walked around it.

“Huh. Nothing,” I said, then Jenny was suddenly doing deep breathing exercises behind me.

“Aw, man,” she whispered hoarsely. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

I reluctantly turned and scanned the source of her nausea. My gaze landed on a grisly scene. At the foot of the next tree, a cat—or whatever was left of one—had been brutally eviscerated. Its corpse lay in the center of a blood-soaked pentagram that had been dug into the dirt.

“Let’s bolt,” I choked out.

“And it was just totally and completely gross!” Jenny announced, concluding her description of our escapade. The three of us—me, Jenny and her roommate—were huddled in their small apartment at the kitchen table over a plate of brownies.

“You really predicted it, Tabitha?” Lara asked, eyes wide from behind thick black-rimmed glasses.

“No.” I sighed, because now I’d have to correct all of Jenny’s exaggerations. “To start with, my car was not carjacked, it merely died over on Baldwin Street. Jen and I were waiting for a bus when the purse snatcher grabbed my bag. He was at least fifty and most likely a druggy, not a green beret set on revenge.” I rolled my eyes at Jen, who was biting into her fourth brownie. “But, yes, there was a cat that was cut up and it was humongously gross. I only had a bad feeling about what was behind the tree, I didn’t drop into a trancelike state and predict the second coming.”

Jenny harrumphed. “Nothing wrong with adding a bit of color to a story.”

Why would you need to make a horrible event sound even worse?

“Did you call the cops?” Lara asked.

Jenny and I looked at each other then back at Lara and shrugged.

“You should call someone, shouldn’t you?” She pushed. “The ASPCA? The groundskeeper for the cemetery?”

We shook our heads.

“What for?” Jenny asked. “They never catch purse snatchers and the cat’s dead—nothing will change that.”

“And it’s not like the Seattle PD is going to launch a door-to-door search for either my forty dollars or for some sicko who likes to hurt animals,” I put in.

“Yeah, but the pentagram.” Lara shook her head slowly from side to side. “That says bad shit, like satanic stuff or something.”

“Actually I think pentagrams are usually linked more to Wicca and witches, right?” Jenny asked.

Both turned and stared expectantly at me.

“What?” I demanded. “I don’t follow that stuff anymore, you know that! Anyway, mutilated animals…” I shuddered. “That sounds satanic to me.”

“If it’s the devil, then we’ll say a prayer,” Jenny commented sarcastically. “That doesn’t mean we need to get in his face.”

There was a pause while we each considered our own thoughts on the matter.

“So, where’s your car?” Lara asked, brushing brownie crumbs from her sweater.

“We towed it to Doug’s garage,” I replied.

“Your cousin, Doug?” Lara asked Jenny. “The one with no neck?”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Jenny agreed.

Then, as if thinking of my 1995 Ford Escort summoned it to respond, my cell phone rang. It was the mechanic. The conversation was short and afterward I laid my head down on the table and moaned.

“Is she having another one of her visions?” Lara asked Jenny.

“Nah.” Jenny chewed another brownie. “Just an emotional meltdown.”

“My car,” I murmured against the cool pine table. “It’s going to cost almost eight hundred bucks to fix it.”

“Wow,” Jenny sympathized. “You could probably just buy another Escort for that price, right?”

I lifted my head to glare at her.

“Okay, maybe not one as nice as yours,” she conceded. “Guess you’ll be taking the bus for a while.”

“I hate the bus,” I whined. “Where am I going to get that kind of cash?”

Half an hour later we concluded that I could save up enough to pay for the repair if I gave up a few necessities like Starbucks, Vogue magazine and food for the next six months.