Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Author:Nadia Bolz-Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

I had worked at the psychic call center for only two weeks when I realized that my period was late. I possessed no qualifications for the job—no special ability to see the future, no clairvoyance or second sight. What I did have one windy afternoon, when I bumped into an old friend on the street, was an empty bank account and an impatient landlord.

“Morgan!” I cheered, and hugged my former roommate and coworker. “It’s been forever. Still waiting tables at the Pegasus?”

“Nope.” She brushed her brown curls out of her face. “I’m working at a psychic phone line now.”

“Shut up, Ms. Cleo,” I said, assuming she was joking.

“No, for real,” she said. “It’s so easy. Hey, you could totally do it.” Funny, I’d been told the same thing one week earlier by another friend who was stripping at PT’s Topless.

Morgan cupped her hand around a Marlboro Light and lit it expertly, despite the wind.

We shared the cigarette and watched pedestrians jaywalk across Thirteenth Street as she told me about her job.

“They’re basically always hiring, and the interview is just doing a ‘reading’ for the manager,” Morgan said. “I can tell you exactly what to say. She had a terrible divorce two years ago and she keeps dating jerks, so just talk about that and she’ll love you. Throw in something about archery and she’ll hire you on the spot. She’s obsessed with it.” Morgan took the half-smoked cigarette back from me. “That’s the job, when it comes down to it. Figuring out what people want to hear.”

After a week of trying to learn tarot cards, I decided it was either that or stripping, and stripping called for tanning, shaving, and dieting. Both jobs required insight into desire, but I could read tarot cards in my pajamas, so the choice seemed obvious. I called Morgan’s boss and set up a time for my test reading.

Nothing about the downtown Denver high-rise signaled that a psychic call center took up the ninth floor. No neon crystal ball, no “Call 1–800…” sign. Even as you walked off the elevator and into the cubicle farm, the only hint of the supernatural was one heavily decorated workspace. Stacy, a woman my age who had been assigned to show me around, motioned toward the four-by-four cube that looked like the Grateful Dead had set up a booth at a Renaissance fair.

“That’s Monique’s cube,” Stacy said. “She’s been here forever, really believes in her ‘powers,’ and makes the company a lot of money. Anyway, you’ll be assigned an empty desk and a phone each day when you start your shift.”

But it turned out that I was no Monique. I didn’t believe in my powers, and I’d overestimated my ability to stomach manipulating people for money. I assumed it would be the same as pretending to like guests I waited on at a restaurant, but smiling at a four-top of middle-aged women who had ordered just water and soup was one thing, and keeping a

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