Oddballs by William Sleator Page B

painted wrinkles on my face with it, blackened my lips, and wore a black robe Nicole had found at a junk store. Just before my friends arrived, I put the dry ice in the pot, where it began to generate wafting clouds of vapor.
    I was waiting for my friends in the half-lit playhouse as they made their way down to the end of the dark backyard. The idea was that I was a medium, contacting an authority in the spirit world who knew what lay in store for each of my friends. They sat down at the creaking table and joined hands. Mist billowed around my dimly lit, lined, and demonic features. Various wavering hoots and moans floated up from under the table. I sighed and groaned awhile myself and then announced, “The contact is there, I can feel it coming, it’s taking over me, it’s …” My head lolled forward.
    I had seated my friends around the table in the same order as their futures were related on the tape. “And what lies in store for Matilda, Master?” I said dully, as though speaking in a trance. Tall, thin Matilda, with her unfashionably kinky red hair, who spent about 90 percent of her waking hours with a book and already knew more about literature than most of our teachers, was sitting just beside me.
    â€œFor Matilda … Ah, yes, fame and glamour lie in store for this fortunate creature,” intoned the tape. “She will marry an illiterate and gluttonous multimillionaire, and the two of them will spend the rest of their lives watching soap operas on TV and devouring candy. By the age of thirty, she will be as grotesquely obese as her husband.”
    â€œPerfect!” Matilda crowed, laughing just as hard as the others.
    â€œFor poor Dave, the future is not so bright,” predicted the voice. “His sheer lack of talent will make him a failure at all ‘serious’ musical pursuits. He will become a poorly paid salesman at a flea-bitten record store catering to the tastes of moronic adolescents. He will spend his days listening to the raucous blare of popular idols and at an early age will grow deafened by the sounds and end his life in poverty.”
    Dave wasn’t so thrilled by this—he and I were intensely competitive. He grunted and muttered, “Thanks a lot, Bill.” Everyone else was chuckling, though.
    Bart and Nicole—two of the most brilliant kids in the school—came last; their prediction created the most satisfying reaction of all. “Ah, for these two the future is so hideous that it pains even me to utter it,” droned the voice. “For them, only thankless, unceasing toil and drudgery lie in store. Due to their extreme mental incompetence, their career opportunities will be limited indeed. They will spend the rest of their lives cleaning the toilets at Westgate Junior High.…”
    By this point, not only Bart but almost all the others were happily hooting and guffawing. I glanced over at Nicole. Of course, she wasn’t insulted by her future, as Dave had been. No one could take this particular prediction seriously. But there was something about Nicole’s smile that indicated cleaning toilets was exactly the kind of thing she had known I would come up with for her all along.
    It would be cute if I could now surprise the reader by saying that these predictions unexpectedly came true. But of course, they were intended to be farcical and ironic, the most highly unlikely futures I could come up with for everyone. Naturally, Matilda became an erudite professor and an author, not an obese TV addict. Bart is a successful scientist, not a cleaner of toilets. And though Dave dropped in and out of college for awhile and had various jobs, he never worked in a record store and is now seriously studying musical composition.
    Nicole spent part of her high school senior year as a foreign exchange student in Italy. Previously an atheist, like many of my friends, in Italy she had a deep religious experience, a calling. She lost a