The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder Page A

stopped.
    She could already tell that her card was different than Perry’s. There was no pretty red border around it, and when she tried to pull it out, it was as if the swami were pulling it back. He wouldn’t let go of it. Cam tugged harder, using two hands, but it wouldn’t budge. She put one foot up onto the machine and yanked one last time. When the card finally unstuck, she fell backward. She looked down. In her hands was a blank piece of paper.
    She turned it over to see if something was printed on the other side. She looked back into the slot, but there was no other ticket. The swami’s wax face seemed to smirk at her.
    â€œIt’s blank,” Cam said, disappointed in spite of herself.
    â€œSee,” said Perry. “You have to believe in it, or it won’t know you exist.”
    Cam crumpled the card in her palm. Maybe her oxygen levels were just really low. She’d been feeling weak since Atlanta, and she should probably go to the hospital. But she knew if she could get a good night’s sleep, she’d be fine in the morning.
    Or maybe not. Maybe her future was blank, after all.

SEVEN
    LILY’S DRIVEWAY, LITTERED WITH PINE NEEDLES, WOUND INTO THE tall, piney woods and opened up on to a newfangled log cabin–style home. The way Log Cabin syrup is “maple-style,” it was an enormous, diluted, imitation of the real thing. The severe horizontal lines of the architecture were broken up by beautiful arched windows and softened by a completely chaotic English-style garden growing out of control in the front yard. The wet grass of the backyard sloped down to the lake.
    It was only eight o’clock, but Cam was tired. It had taken them less than an hour to get to Lily’s from South of the Border, and during the ride, Cam hadn’t been sure she would make it. Her head throbbed and everything ached. She almost had to resort to the little dropper of morphine she kept in the secret knee-pocket of her cargo pants for emergencies, but she didn’t want to be crabby and irritated when she saw Lily, so she drank a ton of water instead and took some of her stolen calendula root from Whole Foods. But the sight of Lily’s house eased some of Cam’s pain. She’d only been there once before, but the house felt instantly familiar and comforting. People here knew what it was like.
    Cam stepped out of the car and stretched her arms in the air. Before she could even put her shoes on, Lily bolted out the front door, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her down the hill toward the water.
    â€œOuch, ouch, ouch,” Cam chanted as she tried unsuccessfully to dodge the pine cones that kept ending up under her feet.
    â€œWatch out for those,” said Lily, who whisked ethereally around them in a white, flowing dress like a tiny wood fairy.
    They tiptoed out to the end of the dock, where Lily had set up two Cokes, a box of cigarettes, and a big abalone shell she was using as an ashtray. The fiberglass of the motorboat squeaked as it occasionally rubbed up against the tires nailed to the side of the dock. The only other sounds were the chorus of the crickets and the lip-smacking noise of the water as it lapped up against the boat. The moon cast a glimmering yellow path on the water, as if inviting you to walk on it.
    â€œSo, I did it,” said Lily as she lit a bottle rocket and sent it screaming off the dock. It exploded with a pop that echoed over the lake. Turned out Lily was quite the pyrotechnics expert—or pyromaniac, Cam wasn’t sure. “What else did you bring me?” she asked, hungrily digging through Cam’s bag for another explosive.
    â€œWait! Back up. You did what?” asked Cam. From the looks of it, Lily had done a lot of things differently since she and Cam had bunked together at their last clinical trial in Memphis. Her hair, normally spiked in a punk pixie and highlighted with green, was back to its natural dirty blonde. It was