Free Cat Calls by Cynthia Leitich Smith

“Hey, Tiff, how ’bout a man in your future?” Aiden calls from the nearest concession stand as he pours butter-flavored oil into the popcorn popper.
    The scent of rotating sausages and heating cheese makes my stomach rumble, but I yawn and hurry on my catty-corner path across the main drag toward my grandmother’s tent. What with working nights, I can’t seem to get enough sleep anymore. I spent this afternoon on the living lot crashed on a hammock in the sunshine.
    The carnival scene is only vaguely freakish. Sure, talk has it that the carousel is haunted and my grandma really has the sight and the owner is some kind of shape-shifter, but that’s just talk. And our roustabouts are on the tough side, but you could say the same for the losers back at my high school in Detroit. Other than one bit-off ear and one small-time drug bust, nothing remotely interesting has happened all summer.
    Right now, we’re set up on the outskirts of Nowhere, Oklahoma. It’s July, just past sundown, and the front gates open in fifteen minutes. It’s also ungodly hot, dry from the drought, and pink clay dust is blowing everywhere.
    As I saunter on, exaggerated kissing sounds trail me from the ex-con taking position at the Ferris wheel. A low whistle emerges from his brother-in-law, who’s touching up the red paint on the barred wagon labeled MAN-EATING SNAKE.
    Alongside a tin-can-alley game, I glimpse white teeth, the shadowy profile of a lean cowboy. A stranger. As I pause for a better look, he’s gone.
    Still, I stretch my arms over my head and arch my back, just to give the rest of the boys something to look at, showing off how my orange baby-doll T and denim cutoffs accent my curves. I’m a flirt, I admit it. I love the attention, especially ’cause it’s so new.
    I’m what people call “a late bloomer.” This May, not long after my sixteenth birthday, I finally started my period for the first time and shifted from blah to bombshell overnight.
    For me, it was a relief. My mom, on the other hand, had a full-scale panic attack. Before you could say “Xanax,” she packed me up and shipped me off to my grandmother, who at the time was predicting the future in Missouri off I-35.
    I tilt my head at one last whistle as I enter Granny Z.’s tent.
    “Cat calls,” she mutters, glancing up from the table where she’s filing her long nails. “You’re late.”
    I find Granny fascinating. She’s a tightly built woman, with golden-brown hair like mine, turned rusty from the dust. She goes by “Madame Zelda,” pretends like she can read my mind, and looks anywhere from age seventy to a hundred and ten.
    As I wiggle out of the T and shorts, Granny strolls over to hand me a loose-fitting, gauzy dress. It’s black and lavender with sheer, draping sleeves, silver sequins, and long fringe. Matching funky scarves drape from a beat-up freestanding coat hanger in the corner. The rest of the tent is the fortune-teller’s stage.
    My grandmother honestly believes in crystallomancy and claims “psychic ability is common among the women of our line.” It’s no big deal. She’s a little nutty, but who isn’t? I’ve been amazed by how many people believe in this crap.
    Tonight will be my first behind the ball. It was Granny Z.’s idea, apparently inspired by the one time back in June when she tried to read my future in the crystal. Granny claimed I’d someday join in the family tradition, and said she’d let me know when the time was right.
    At first, it sounded kind of fun, playing the fortuneteller, like dressing up on Halloween. So far as I can tell, it’s mostly a matter of watching your marks for clues and telling them what they want to hear.
    That sounds easy enough in theory. But here, tonight, moments away from facing real live people, the whole thing suddenly feels a lot more complicated. What if I totally blank? Or the marks get pissed at me for being such a lame and obvious faker?
    “I’m not sure I can do this,” I