The Nose Ring in Ballroom B

The Holiday Inn had the kind of lobby lighting that made every life choice look administrative.

By the time she found Ballroom B, she was already embarrassed by how much she cared. She had told herself, while driving there in the dark, that this was anthropological. Funny, even. A psychics’ fair in a hotel off the interstate, tucked between a sports bar and a medical aesthetics conference, was the sort of thing a person could attend ironically. A person could wander through, smell some patchouli, privately judge the font choices, and leave with a twenty-dollar crystal and a story.

Instead, she had changed outfits twice.

The little brass frame outside the ballroom read:
PSYCHIC WELLNESS FAIR
BALLROOM B

Below that, on a second printed insert:
AURA PHOTOGRAPHY
MEDIUMSHIP
ANGEL NUMBERS
INTUITIVE JEWELRY

The hallway was so beige it felt doctrinal. Inside, the conference-room carpet swirled with wine-colored patterns clearly designed to hide despair, red wine, and possibly blood, though not in a way that inspired confidence. The air smelled like weak coffee sprayed over with lavender. Folding tables in polyester cloths ringed the room. Little bowls of tumbled stones sat beside stale mini muffins under plastic domes. Women in soft cardigans moved from booth to booth buying destiny in twenty-minute increments.

She paused just inside the door, clutching her phone and pretending to check a text she did not have.

A woman at the registration table looked up from a cash box and smiled with seminar-level warmth. “Welcome, love. First time?”
She hated being immediately identifiable as first-time material.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only because you still have your car keys in your hand.”

The woman slid a raffle ticket toward her, along with a printed schedule listing time slots for tarot, mediumship, aura photography, and something called career channeling, which sounded less psychic than HR with crystals.

As she reached for the paper, she noticed a blonde woman crouched near the wall behind the registration table, untangling a nest of black extension cords with brisk, almost irritated precision.
Dirty Blundstones.
Frayed hem.
She worked like someone correcting a small but offensive moral failure.
No one introduced her.
No one looked surprised she was there.

The blonde glanced up once, took in her, the schedule in her hand, the expression she was trying not to have.

“You can’t run six power strips into one grief outlet,” she said, mostly to the cords.
Then she went back to work.

She chose tarot first because it felt the least embarrassing.

Mediumship implied a level of desperation she was not ready to perform before seven o’clock. Aura photography seemed worse somehow, too close to proof, and she did not want to leave with a glossy image of her own emotional poor judgment in jewel tones. Tarot, at least, had some literary dignity left. Paper, symbols, old-world theater. If she was going to humiliate herself in a Holiday Inn ballroom, she preferred a deck.

The reader’s table was draped in indigo polyester with a battery candle, a bowl of rose quartz, and a laminated Venmo sign that said ENERGY EXCHANGE WELCOME in looping script. The woman behind the cards wore three silver rings on each hand and smiled like someone about to tell a child there were no monsters under the bed while standing ankle-deep in teeth.

“What would you like clarity on?” she asked.

She looked at the spread of cards fanned neatly between them and briefly considered lying.
Career. Travel. General direction.
Something adult and bloodless.
Instead she heard herself say, “A person.”

The reader nodded with such practiced softness it almost qualified as violence.
“Of course.”

The cards came down one by one. Cups. Swords. A woman suspended upside down in decorative suffering.

The reader touched each card lightly with one polished nail and spoke in a low, fragrant voice.
“There’s unfinished energy here,” she said.
“A strong cord. A lot left unsaid.”
She stared at the cards as if one of them might suddenly break formation and tell the truth in plain English.
“She still thinks about you,” the reader added.
“But I’m seeing pause. Not ending. Just pause.”

Pause. A beautiful word for rot.
She nodded like this was helpful.
Maybe it was.
Maybe she had not driven to a psychic fair in a highway hotel because she was seeking rigor.

When the reading ended, the woman pressed a small card into her hand with her Instagram handle and a note about full moon specials.

Outside the tarot nook, the ballroom felt hotter. The aura photography printer radiated plasticky heat from across the room. A woman in a cream cardigan was buying incense from a vendor who also offered QR code readings through Venmo. Near the angel number booth, the blonde from registration was replacing dead tea lights from her coat pocket one by one, as calmly as if she were restocking printer paper.

Her gold nose ring flashed when she looked up.
“That woman tell you you had unfinished energy?” she asked.

She stopped.
“…Yes.”

The blonde struck a match on the bottom of the angel number booth’s candle plate, relit a tea light, and slid it back into place.
“Most people do,” she said.
“That’s not rare enough to charge for.”

At the end of the hallway, a dog’s nails clicked once against tile like a judge clearing her throat.

She drifted toward the angel number booth because there was nowhere else to put her face. The booth occupied the far corner of Ballroom B beside a collapsible divider and a potted plant that looked rented. A vinyl banner listed repeating numbers and their meanings in mauve script that managed to make revelation look like a bridal shower game.

111 - alignment
222 - trust
333 - creativity
444 - protection

Below it, tea lights flickered in little glass cups around a taller devotional candle printed with a gold-winged angel whose expression suggested she had seen worse venues. Several women stood nearby holding tote bags and listening to a silver-haired reader explain that 555 meant change was coming, which struck her as the sort of prophecy one could safely issue to anything still technically alive.

She pretended to examine a bowl of tumbled amethyst while reading the same line about 222 three times.

From the edge of the booth, the blonde stepped into view with the calm, unsponsored energy of someone who had never once confused ambiance with truth. No nose ring this time. Just dirty Blundstones, frayed hem, pale hair falling forward as she leaned over the table and checked the candle flame with a look of brief professional interest.

Then, without any visible hesitation, she took a cigarette from behind her ear, bent, and lit it from the angel-number candle.
The move was so efficient it took a second to register as blasphemy.
She straightened, drew in once, and let two neat smoke rings drift upward through the mauve numerology sign.

One of the women at the booth gave a tiny offended cough. The silver-haired reader either did not notice or had chosen a level of spiritual nonintervention.

She stared.
The blonde glanced over. “What?”
“Can you do that?”

She looked at the cigarette, then at the candle, then back at her.
“They put open flame next to laminated numerology. I’m not the weak link here.”
The first smoke ring thinned into nothing against the ballroom lights.
A laugh nearly escaped her before she could stop it. “I don’t think that’s how sacred objects work.”
“Nothing in this room is sacred,” the blonde said. “Some of it is expensive.”

She shifted the devotional candle two inches to the left, straightened the sign for 444, and, in the same motion, plucked a dead tea light from its glass cup and replaced it with a fresh one from her coat pocket. Her coat pocket, apparently, contained an emergency supply of minor revelations. The silver-haired reader was now telling a woman in a green cardigan that 777 meant she was on the right path.

The blonde exhaled a final thread of smoke and watched it curl.
“People love a number,” she said. “Takes the pressure off having to notice patterns with their actual life.”
Something in that landed harder than it should have.

Before she could answer, the blonde reached past the angel sign, adjusted a crooked bowl of rose quartz, and wandered off toward the hallway as if lighting cigarettes from devotional candles was simply one of several small tasks required to keep the evening moving.

Her second reading was at a table called RELATIONSHIP CLARITY, which was either honest advertising or an act of war. She had tried to walk past it twice. The sign sat in a little brass holder between a bowl of polished rose quartz hearts and a battery-operated lantern trying its best to imply destiny. The woman behind the table wore a mauve wrap dress and had the composed, hydrated face of someone who had monetized other people’s indecision for years.

“Just twenty minutes,” she said, as if that were medically reassuring.
She sat.

The tablecloth was blush polyester. There was a framed print of two swans making a shape that looked less like love than a tax problem. A laminated price list offered soulmate insight, cord-cutting consultation, twin flame confirmation, and post-separation energetic mapping, which sounded less like intuition than a boutique disaster menu.

“What brings you here?” the woman asked.
She looked at the rose quartz hearts, all of them unnaturally smooth.

“There’s someone I can’t…” She stopped. “I can’t seem to be done with her.”
The woman nodded slowly, with the grave satisfaction of someone watching a slot machine begin to align.
“Give me first name only.”
She gave it.

The woman closed her eyes. Her rings clicked softly against each other as she pressed two fingers to her temple. Around them, Ballroom B hummed with folding chairs, low voices, and the faint plasticky heat of the aura photography printer. Someone laughed too loudly near the incense table. Weak coffee and lavender floated at war in the air.

“I’m feeling a very strong pull,” the woman said at last. “This person still carries your energy.”
A beautiful sentence.
Completely useless.
“There’s unfinished communication. A pause, not a severing. I keep seeing a door that isn’t fully shut.”

There it was again.
Not ending.
Pause.
As if the whole room had agreed on a grammar for elegant suffering.
She let the words settle where they wanted to settle, which was unfortunately somewhere hopeful.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” she asked, and hated herself a little for how quickly it left her mouth.
The woman tilted her head, performing caution.
“I think the connection remains active. But I’m also hearing divine timing. You can’t force what’s in pause.”
Of course not.
You could only finance it.

When the reading ended, she stood too quickly and nearly knocked her chair into the neighboring table, where a woman was paying forty dollars to hear about retrograde interference in her dating life.

Near the back of the ballroom, the blonde was sorting crystals into separate glass bowls with weird, almost insulting precision, as if each stone had personally failed her by ending up in the wrong category.

She stopped there before she could decide not to.
The blonde didn’t look up.
“Let me guess. She said there was still a connection.”
She said nothing.
That was apparently answer enough.
The blonde lifted one polished stone from a bowl of amethyst and dropped it into another with a dry little click.
“They always do.”

“What if there is?”
Now she looked up.
“Sure,” she said. “There’s a connection between a stove and a hand. Doesn’t mean you keep touching it.”

Then she went back to sorting crystals, leaving her with the unpleasant sensation of having just paid good money to be outperformed by a woman organizing rocks.

She left Ballroom B under the pretense of needing air, though the hotel hallway offered nothing that deserved the name.

Outside the conference room, the beige deepened into something almost theological. The walls were blank except for a framed print of boats in fog and one of those little brass room signs pointing toward ICE - EXIT - FITNESS CENTER as if all forms of deliverance were equally available. The carpet ended at the elevator bank and gave way to tile, which made every sound feel more official.

That was where she found the dog.

A small pit bull sat squarely in the middle of the hallway as if presiding over an appeal. Blue-gray, velvet-looking, compact in a way that made her seem less pet than ordinance. Her leash lay loose against the floor. Her ears tipped forward. Her expression was not friendly, exactly, but deeply literate.

She stopped walking.

The dog looked at her, then at the ballroom doors, then back at her with the exhausted patience of a magistrate reviewing a motion that should never have been filed.

At the far end of the hall, the blonde emerged from around the corner carrying a cardboard tray with three bottled waters, two tea lights, and a packet of printer paper tucked under one arm. The gold nose ring was back. It flashed when she turned her head, small and bright and briefly wrong, like an edit in the scene that hadn’t existed five minutes ago.

“You can pet her,” she said. “She’s judgmental, not hostile.”

She crouched because the alternative was standing there looking accused. Up close, the dog really did look like velvet. Dense, silvery-blue, with wide dark eyes that suggested both mercy and procedure. When she offered a hand, the dog sniffed once, sat down harder, and looked away.

The blonde came closer.
“She doesn’t like evasive language,” she said.
“That’s a human issue you’ve assigned to a dog.”
“No,” the blonde said. “That’s a dog issue humans keep demonstrating.”

The dog’s tags clinked softly as she shifted.
Mercy, the tag said.
Of course.

“Mercy,” she read aloud.
“Mm.”
“That’s a lot of name for a tiny animal.”
“She handles it.”

The blonde set the tray down on a side table beneath another hotel print, this one featuring pears in a bowl with the emotional range of church upholstery. Up close, the nose ring made her look less mystical than specific. More like someone who knew exactly where the extra batteries were kept in every building she entered.

“Does she come to all the readings?” she asked.
“She likes hallways,” the blonde said. “More honest traffic.”
Mercy leaned lightly against her shin, which felt less like affection than a ruling.
“She already knows why I’m here, doesn’t she.”
The blonde clipped the leash back on.
“She knows when someone’s trying to turn yearning into a belief system.”

Then, as if she had only commented on the weather, she picked up the bottled waters and the tea lights and started back toward Ballroom B, Mercy’s nails ticking sharply over the tile beside her.

By the time she went back into Ballroom B, the room felt warmer and less convincing. Someone had opened the partition between the psychic fair and a smaller overflow space, which meant the sound was now spreading wrong. Laughter from the incense table kept surfacing in the middle of the tarot readings. The aura photography printer gave off its little pulse of plasticky heat. A woman in a mauve cardigan was buying a bracelet said to support throat truth. Near the registration table, a stack of paper coffee cups had tipped sideways in slow collapse.

The blonde was fixing the collapse.

Not dramatically. Just pressing the cups back into a stable tower with the kind of practical irritation usually reserved for drawers that refused to close. She had a folded sheet of printer labels tucked into one coat pocket and a black Sharpie in the other. No one had asked her to do this. No one, as far as she could tell, had ever asked her to do anything here. Still, she moved through the room like a person correcting the visible failures of a system she did not respect.

She stopped near the table without meaning to.

The blonde glanced up once. “You came back.”
“I never left.”
“Physically, no.”
That landed with enough force to make her look away.

On the table beside the coffee cups sat a bowl of polished stones, one of which had somehow ended up among a stack of raffle tickets and a half-unwrapped cough drop. The blonde picked it up, dropped it back into the bowl, and straightened the raffle tickets into a cleaner pile.

“She said it wasn’t over,” she said, before she could decide to preserve her dignity.
The blonde uncapped the Sharpie with her teeth, wrote AURA PICK-UP on a blank tent card, and set it upright.
“Sure,” she said. “That’s excellent business.”
“She didn’t seem like she was lying.”
“I’m sure she wasn’t.” The blonde recapped the Sharpie and slid it back into her pocket. “People can be sincere and still useless. Happens constantly.”

A woman in a soft blue sweater approached the table, frowned at the tipped cups, then seemed to realize the problem had already been solved and drifted off again without speaking.

“She said the connection was active,” she said.
The blonde looked at her then, properly, with that flat bright attention that always felt a little like being inventoried.
“You keep treating feeling affected like evidence,” she said. “It isn’t.”
She did not answer.

The blonde reached past her for the cough drop wrapper, folded it into a smaller square, and tucked it under an empty saucer as if even the trash needed firmer boundaries.
“Some people leave a mark,” she added. “That’s not the same as being called back.”

Behind them, someone at the mediumship table gasped softly in the tone of a woman being handed her own birthday in a lower voice.

She stared at the bowl of polished stones.
“Then why does it still feel like something?”
The blonde shrugged.
“Because your nervous system has poor taste.”
For one terrible second, she nearly laughed.

The blonde lifted the stack of cups, tapped them once against the table to settle them into place, and looked past her toward the ballroom doors.
“You don’t need a stranger in a polyester ballroom to notarize your denial,” she said.
Then she picked up the coffee cups and walked them to the beverage station, leaving her with the humiliating sense that the most useful reading of the night had been delivered beside a collapsing column of decaf lids.

She still booked the aura photo. At a certain point, humiliation became an investment strategy.

The aura photography station had been set up in the smaller adjoining room behind a folding screen printed with moons in various phases. A printer sat on one end of the table beside a ring light and a plastic tray of order forms. The air back there was hotter, full of machine warmth and the sweet chemical smell of overheated laminate. A woman with silver eyelids and a headset microphone waved her into a chair with the brisk cheer of someone running both a spiritual service and a school picture day.

“Relax your shoulders,” she said. “Auras love honesty.”
She almost laughed at that.
The woman adjusted the ring light, then fussed with the camera while explaining that the image would capture her energetic field as it currently existed, which was a threatening sentence to say to a person already making bad choices in a Holiday Inn.
“Are you looking for general insight,” the woman asked, “or something relational?”
She stared at the fake moon screen.
“Relational.”
“Beautiful.”
No, it wasn’t.

The camera flashed once. Then again. The woman clicked through the images with grave concentration while the little printer began its soft mechanical whine. Around them, the sounds of Ballroom B bled through the partition wrong. Folding chairs. A burst of laughter. Someone explaining Mercury with too much confidence. The printer spat out a glossy sheet in bands of color that gradually resolved into her own face looking tense and faintly hunted beneath a cloud of violet, blue, and a streak of yellow near one shoulder.

The woman picked it up carefully, as if handling medical results.
“You’re deeply intuitive,” she said. “Very sensitive. Very connected. There’s love here, but also interruption. I see unfinished heart energy and a bond that hasn’t fully released.”
Of course there was.
She stared at the printout. It looked like a school portrait taken inside a migraine.
“I don’t feel closure,” the woman continued. “This person is still in your field.”
Every woman in this ballroom, she thought, was a different font for you can keep suffering if you’d like.

“Do you think that means something’s supposed to happen?” she asked.
The woman smiled with compassionate vagueness.
“I think some connections remain active beyond physical timing.”
Which meant absolutely anything a desperate person wanted it to mean.

When she stepped back into the main ballroom, aura photo in hand, the blonde was standing near the registration table taping down the corner of a curling sign with the focus of an emergency responder.

She looked at the glossy printout, then at her face.
“You paid to color-code it,” she said.
She looked down at the photo.
“It said there was unfinished heart energy.”
The blonde pressed the tape flat with her thumb.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s a very profitable genre.”

She pushed through the side exit with her aura photo still in hand, as if fresh air might improve the results.

It did not. The air outside the hotel smelled like damp mulch, cold pavement, and the faint industrial chill of the ice machine humming in its alcove by the vending area. A yellow wall sconce buzzed overhead with the weary determination of something that had outlived several management companies. Beyond the covered entry, the parking lot lay slick and black, collecting the neon-red reflection of the Holiday Inn sign in a series of shallow, ugly puddles.

The blonde was standing beside a square hotel planter full of decorative pebbles and one exhausted shrub.

No nose ring. Just pale hair, the frayed hem, dirty Blundstones, and a cigarette balanced between two fingers like an administrative note she planned to file later. She leaned one shoulder against the stucco wall, looking not relaxed exactly, but efficiently paused. Smoke drifted upward in a thin ribbon before she shaped it into one neat ring, then another, both floating briefly through the yellowed light like tiny failed halos.

She stopped under the overhang.
“Do you work every illegal corner of this event?” she asked.
The blonde glanced at the cigarette. “Only the load-bearing ones.”

The ice machine kicked on harder with a rude metallic shudder. Somewhere beyond the side lot, a truck changed gears on the highway. She looked down at the aura photo in her hand. Even in the bad light, it still looked ridiculous. Her own strained face floating in violet and blue like a woman being haunted by her printer settings.

The blonde followed her gaze.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re spiritually lavender now.”
She laughed despite herself, sharp and unwilling.
“Violet, apparently.”
“Congratulations.”

The blonde drew once more from the cigarette, then flicked ash neatly into the planter. Her expression didn’t change. She seemed to be watching the parking lot, the puddles, the glow of the sign, some other worse event happening just beneath the visible one.

“I don’t get why everyone keeps saying the same thing,” she said. “Unfinished. Active. Pause. Connection. It’s like they’re all using the same script.”
“They are.”
“Why?”
The blonde exhaled a final smoke ring and watched it unravel over the pebbles.
“Because ambiguity keeps the lights on.”

Then, with no ceremony at all, she bent and stubbed the cigarette out in the decorative planter beside the struggling shrub, grinding it once into the pebbles like she was correcting a typo in the landscaping. It was so specifically rude that she almost admired it.

“You always do that?” she asked.
The blonde straightened. “Only when people monetize uncertainty indoors.”
She dropped the dead cigarette into an empty mini muffin wrapper someone had abandoned on the ledge beside the ice machine, then looked at the aura photo again.

“You know that thing’s not going to say anything new if you keep holding it at different angles.”
And just like that, she pushed off the wall and went back inside, leaving her under the buzzing light with the puddles, the stupid photo, and the faint feeling that she had just witnessed the only honest ritual of the evening.

When she went back inside, the fair was beginning to sag. Not end, exactly. Just soften around the edges in the way bad events always did once everyone had spent the money they were willing to spend. A few booths had started packing smaller objects first. The incense vendor was wrapping glass bottles in tissue paper. Someone near the mediumship table was counting cash with tired fingers. One of the polyester tablecloths had slipped half off its corner and remained that way, too minor a failure to justify intervention.

Near the registration table, the blonde was gathering the last of the dead tea lights into a paper cup. The nose ring was back. It caught the ballroom light when she turned her head, small and gold and oddly precise, like a detail from a different version of the night bleeding through this one.

She stopped in front of the table before she could invent a less pathetic route. The blonde glanced up, took in the aura photo still in her hand, and said nothing. That was worse.

Around them, Ballroom B kept humming its tired little hum. Folding chairs nudged tile. Printer heat lingered. Weak coffee and lavender had settled into a truce. In the hallway beyond the open doors, Mercy’s nails clicked once, then stopped, as if court were now in session.

She looked down at the glossy photo, then set it face down on the table between them.
“Do you think she’ll come back?”
The words sounded smaller once they were out. Not mystical. Not tragic. Just embarrassingly direct, like asking a clerk whether something had been discontinued.

The blonde dropped the last tea light into the cup.
“No,” she said.
No cushioning.
No incense around it.
No divine timing.
Just a clean answer set on the table like a receipt.
She felt herself go still.

The blonde looked at the upside-down aura photo, then at her.
“If she wanted back in,” she said, “you wouldn’t need Ballroom B to prove it.”

Something in her chest gave way with such immediate violence it almost felt comic. Not because it was new. Because it wasn’t. Because the sentence entered a place already prepared for it. She stared at the tea lights in the paper cup. Their little metal bottoms flashed dully under the ballroom lights.

“What if it’s more complicated than that?”
The blonde shrugged.
“Everything is more complicated than that. That doesn’t make it different.”

A woman in a cream cardigan passed behind them carrying a bag of crystals and a folded brochure on spiritual detachment, which felt pointed in a way the universe had not earned.

She swallowed.
“I just keep feeling like…” She stopped, hating the shape of it. “Like maybe I’m supposed to wait.”

The blonde rested one hand on the table. Her expression didn’t soften. It didn’t need to.
“You can keep the person,” she said, “or you can keep the waiting. Most people can’t afford both.”
For a second, the whole room seemed to hold still around the sentence.

Then the blonde slid the paper cup of dead tea lights aside, straightened the edge of the registration sheet, and added, almost conversationally, “Some doors aren’t mysterious. They’re just closed.”

Mercy’s nails clicked again in the hallway.
That, somehow, was the end of the reading.
She left without booking anything else.
That, more than the readings, felt significant.

At the registration table, no one stopped her. The raffle bowl still sat beside the stale mini muffins. The curling sign the blonde had taped down earlier was already lifting at one corner again, as if correction in Ballroom B only held for so long. Someone near the incense booth laughed too hard at something that wasn’t funny. The aura printer gave off one last pulse of heat behind the partition, still manufacturing colored evidence for people not ready to call anything by its name.

She picked up the aura photo from where she had left it face down on the table. For a second she considered throwing it away right there. Sliding it into the trash beneath the registration desk between the empty water bottles and the paper coffee cups. But that felt too ceremonial, too much like making a point for an audience that did not exist. Instead she held it loosely at her side and pushed through the ballroom doors into the hallway.

The beige hit her again. The little brass signs. The hotel fog print. The doctrinal quiet.

Ahead of her, at the far end of the hall, the blonde was walking away with a half-collapsed cardboard box tucked against one hip. Tea lights, a roll of tape, bottled water, someone’s abandoned brochure on angelic alignment. The kind of leftovers every bad event produced once it admitted it was over. Mercy trotted beside her on the loose leash, nails ticking neatly across the tile.

Halfway to the corner, the blonde turned her head as if she had heard something. Or sensed it. Or simply kept better inventory than everyone else.

For one brief second, the ballroom light caught the side of her face. The gold nose ring flashed.
Then she and the dog turned the corner and were gone.

She stood there a moment longer with the aura photo in her hand, listening to the hallway settle around the absence they left behind. Somewhere behind her, Ballroom B continued its soft tacky hum of folding chairs, weak coffee, lavender spray, and women still buying destiny in twenty-minute increments.

Then she looked down at the glossy printout of her own violet suffering and slid it, without ceremony, into the brass-framed hotel flyer stand beside the ice machine, between a coupon for the sports bar and a laminated map of local attractions.
Not destroyed.
Not treasured.
Just filed.

Then she walked out under the buzzing yellow light and into the parking lot, carrying nothing but her keys.

dedication

For Boots Girl’s real-life counterpart, who side-eyed my tarot cards like she’s never once been to Los Angeles (statistically the 4th most psychic city in the US per capita, FYI) and has somehow made it this far in life without ever seeing a queer with a deck and a crystal. I try not to make her too literal in these stories, but that face practically wrote this one: my mind went wild with laughter imagining her coping with a psychic fair untangling extension cords, aggressively sorting crystals, and briskly marching a pit bull through the hallway in protest.