SPECTRAL.

† E L E V E N †

     I HAD BEEN SITTING AT MY DESK FOR NEARLY AN HOUR, the soft scratch of my pen across the page filling the small silence between McKayla's sighs. My headphones sat snugly over my ears, low music humming, something instrumental I often used to muffle the world so I could retreat into my own. But even with the volume turned up just enough to drown out most sounds, I could still hear her. That restless sigh. Again and again, punctuating the stillness of our room like a metronome ticking inside my skull.

     I ignored it at first. I told myself it was nothing, just McKayla being McKayla. But there comes a moment when the weight of someone else's boredom presses into your spine and makes you twitch. I pulled the headphones down around my neck, the quiet of the room collapsing in on me, and twisted in my chair.

     "What's wrong with you?" I asked, not unkindly but with the edge of someone who had already asked that question in her mind ten times before saying it aloud.

     McKayla was sprawled across her bed, knees bent, tarot cards flickering between her fingers like restless playing cards. She didn't look at me when she answered, just let the corner of a sigh leak into her words. "I'm bored. That's what's wrong."

     I smirked faintly, tapping the pen against my notebook. "Then get something—or someone—to entertain you."

     She tilted her head, eyes finally catching mine. "Like what? Or who? You're clearly too busy to keep me company."

     Her tone wasn't biting, but it wasn't soft either. She was right, though. I had been distant. My books were easier than people. Safer, too. I let my gaze linger on her for a moment before sighing myself. Maybe I owed her something. We had lived together for weeks, and yet I realized I barely knew her beyond the surface gloss—tarot reader, casual cynic, night owl. We used to talk more, back when school hadn't swallowed me whole. Somewhere along the way I had folded into myself, as I always did, and left her hovering at the edges.

     My eyes drifted back to my book. It wasn't even anything important, not coursework, not notes—just a philosophy text I had been rereading to quiet my mind. Nothing that couldn't wait. I closed it slowly, the sound of the cover shutting louder than I expected, and turned again toward her. The tarot cards gleamed faintly in her hands, their backs a deep navy blue with gilded edges catching the lamplight.

     I had wondered once how those cards worked, how she could look at symbols and pictures and pull meaning from them as if she were reading veins of the universe. I had wondered how she had come to hold such a strange skill at such a young age. The thought flickered again.

     "How did you even learn to read them?" I asked, nodding toward the deck.

     That question lit her up in a way boredom never could. Her lips curved into a grin as if she had been waiting for me to ask all along. "It runs in my family," she said, voice bright. "My grandma reads. My mom, too. Even my aunt. But me—" she tapped the cards against her palm— "I got it earlier than any of them did. It just… came to me when I was little."

     "Only from your mom's side?" I asked.

     She nodded, her grin widening. "Yeah. All women. Like it skips the men entirely. My dad couldn't even shuffle these without dropping half."

     I found myself nodding along, surprised at my own curiosity. "So, tell me… reading the future and reading tarot—it isn't the same thing, right?"

     She leaned forward on her elbows, her face animated now. "Exactly. People think they're the same, but they're not. Tarot doesn't tell you the exact future like some movie fortune teller. It shows patterns, energies, possibilities. It's about interpretation, about what's shaping you now and where it might lead. Reading the future—that's prophecy, and very few people actually claim that. Tarot is guidance. It's not set in stone."