One Less Problem Without You Page 7

  “Is this one of Alex’s ideas?”

  Prinny was embarrassed to admit that, yes, it was. It was a way to validate the business aspect of the store and ward off the never-ending threats of her stepbrother, Leif, who wanted to take control of every asset their father had left them.

  But Prinny was hard-pressed to admit all of that. So instead she simply said, “It’s one of those dotted-i, crossed-t things, yes.”

  Chelsea cast a suddenly compassionate look at her, then started the recording. “Press one,” she said, in a perfect neutral female accent, “to fall out of love.” She looked to Prinny with an eyebrow raised.

  Prinny nodded. “I think that’s good.”

  Chelsea sighed. “I know what he wants. I don’t think it’s going to do much to bring in business, but I get what you’re saying. All right. So is there anything else?”

  “I think you need to say the option first. To give them an idea of what they’re here for. You know?”

  “No.”

  “To fall out of love, press one.”

  “What difference could that possibly make?”

  A normal employee would never be this difficult. An actress? Virtually every interaction went like this. But the store needed her there to play the role of a safe, reliable psychic: one that would read the cards accurately—as Prinny had taught her—then let the clients come up with their own answers and never advise anything objectionable.

  One didn’t need to be psychic, per se, to read cards. The cards told the story whether the person could intuit anything further or not. So the reason she’d hired Chelsea was to read well and deliver advice convincingly and in a comforting manner. With fate being as flexible as it was, it was important to let people make their choices clearly.

  Chelsea kept her eyes on Prinny, waiting for an answer.

  “A lot of people would just hang up after hearing ‘press one’ because every day we get that with our banks or our utility companies or whatever other drudgery we have to deal with, you know? So ‘press one’ sounds like you’re being rerouted, whereas starting with ‘to fall out of love’ immediately grabs the attention of both people who want to fall out of love and people who want other such options.” Honestly, she couldn’t even believe she had to say this kind of thing with a straight face, but she did. This was her work, and this was an employee she was in charge of, doing a job she had created, so there was no out.

  “Got it.” Chelsea gave a nod. “But I still think you need a more exotic accent.”

  Prinny felt her shoulders sink. “No.”

  Chelsea reached up and twirled a finger in her blond, beach-waved hair. “But people are calling for fortune-telling, gypsies, magic. They want something romantic! I use an accent just about every time I do a reading, and they love it.”

  “You do?” Readings were private. Fake as Prinny knew them to be, the party line was to give good, sound advice that anyone on any daytime talk show would give. Chelsea had been hired as the store gypsy because she could give those supposed readings with a straight face, but Prinny had had no idea she was trying out a variety of accents on clients. “What happens if people Yelp that they liked or hated the Irish psychic and someone else says the psychic is French? Or Spanish? Or Polish? Or whatever else you decide to be that day?” Lost revenues circling the drain whirled in her mind.

  “I keep track,” Chelsea said, waving the nothing away. “What, you don’t think I have notes on everyone who comes to see me? Once I establish their issue—love, money, health, or family—all I have to do is nudge them and they spill it all and I record it and write down all the names and situations to reference when they come back.” She gave a purposeful dramatic pause. “And they always come back. Always. So I guess I don’t suck too bad at this.”

  Prinny pinched the bridge of her nose to try to stave off what she had come to think of as the Chelsea Headache at times like this. “Fine. Fine.” Chelsea wanted to use her acting chops, so fine. “But how about something just vaguely exotic. Not wholly foreign, not something that people with hearing problems might have trouble understanding, for example, but just the vaguest…” She searched for something Chelsea could hook on to. “Gabor sort of accent?”

  Chelsea frowned for a moment, then looked up to the left, then to the right—all of which was clearly unstaged, which made it that much creepier—then said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “You do.”

  “I do.”

  “Can I hear it?”

  “Let’s just go.”

  Prinny shrugged and nodded.

  Chelsea closed her eyes, took a long breath in through her nose—as if she were about to belt out an aria at the Met—and said, “To fall out of love, press one.” Her eyes remained closed for a moment, and she touched her thumbs and index fingers together as if she were meditating, then opened her eyes and looked at Prinny. “Okay?”

  The truth was, it was pretty good. A vague, unidentifiable accent, exotic enough to be intriguing, but not so much that it was confusing. Maybe Chelsea had been right; maybe what they needed was some gypsy in the phone messages, even though all of Prinny’s business education had supported the idea that neutral was best.

  This was no ordinary business.

  “Okay, go on.” Prinny gave a cautious nod.

  “For financial abundance and prosperity, press two,” Chelsea said, and did not look to Prinny for an opinion.

  Prinny did not object.

  “If you have family difficulties, press three.”

  At this point, it was not the accent but the content that was driving Prinny crazy. It was wrong to let people think they could just call up and get solutions to all their complicated life problems. Even a real psychic could only clarify: show them where they’d been, where they were now, and—sometimes— where they were headed if they didn’t change course. But the thing was, most people knew where they’d been and, even if they didn’t admit it, knew where they were now. And the future was liquid; it could always change. Predicting it with certainty was like jumping into someone’s car on the highway and deciding which exit they would take. If you didn’t influence them, they would take the exit they’d been heading for the whole time, and there was no way that even the best psychic in the world could predict that. Anyone was capable of swerving off course at any moment.

  That was one of the good things about life.

  Most people didn’t see it that way, though.

  So Prinny had to support the business and what they were presenting and people were receiving. And that was prognostication in all forms: purchasing tarot cards and oracle cards, buying books on witchcraft with which to force their future intentions, and, most of all, coming in for a reading with Chelsea—Miss Ada, to the masses (so she could be replaced, if necessary), unless she’d been giving other names in other accents—in order to find out that their dreams would come true.

  No one ever wanted to know that their lifeline was short, or that they should up the life insurance on their husband, or that the niggling little suspicion in their belly now and then was legit, or that, yeah, their kid was experimenting with pot and dunking the Amazon-purchased drug test into the toilet water to dissolve the results.

  No one wanted to know that stuff.

  So Prinny stood back and let Chelsea do her thing.

  “For revenge, press four,” Chelsea said, with a slight but unmistakable edge to her voice.

  She looked to Prinny with a question in her eyes.

  Prinny gave her thumbs-up.

  Good.

  Chelsea continued. “For intense stress relief and/or weight loss, press five.”

  Prinny shrugged inwardly. That might be the best bet for the power of suggestion they could provide. Believe you have willpower and are not craving junk food, and so it shall be.

  Hopefully.

  “To get a promotion or otherwise improve your professional life, including getting rid of a bad boss, press six.”

  Okay, yes, that was wordy, but it
covered a lot of ground that wasn’t interesting enough to stand on its own in three parts. Prinny herself had consolidated that collection, because the romantically forlorn did not want to listen to a long laundry list of boring business problems; they would hang up long before the last digit was proposed. So this worked, awkward as it was. It would speak to the people who were calling with job problems.

  “For love spells, press seven.”

  That was it. That was bank right there. And they had to leave it at seven because so many people who were calling wanted someone to fall in love with them, and they’d waded through all the other options to get there. And anyone who was already into the hoodoo of calling for help like that would be totally sensitive to which number they had to press to achieve it.

  Prinny held up her hand. “Chelsea, can we somehow hit harder on that one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Elaborate on it.” Then, seeing Chelsea’s slightly confused expression, she said, “Make it more clear. More … sexy.” She knew that would ignite Chelsea’s imagination.

  And it did. Her eyes grew bright. “You mean, like, ‘For love spells to enchant and win that person you have been loving from afar, press seven…” She raised an eyebrow.

  Prinny thought about it. It was basically everything she’d been thinking they should say. Except … “And to live happily ever after.”

  Prinny didn’t believe in that. Seriously, how many people end up with that?

  Chelsea squealed and laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh my God, Prinny Tiesman, you are brilliant—to live happily ever after, that is exactly what everyone who calls for a love spell wants. Believe me. I’ve talked to hundreds. Maybe thousands. They want dramatic results.”

  Yes. Of course. Love was the most compelling thing of all. That was one reason they were waiting for those callers to wait until seven. They’d be back; to fall out of love, to get revenge, for whatever they remembered from the earlier part of the menu that they might need or want later.

  So far, so good.

  “Go on,” Prinny said.

  Chelsea shot her a look, then cleared her throat and moved into the microphone. “For good luck in all areas, press lucky number eight.” She looked at Prinny. “Isn’t seven supposed to be lucky?”

  “Everyone has a different lucky number.”

  “You sure?”

  Prinny nodded, and so Chelsea fanned herself with her hands, then raised her chin and went on.

  “For protection and hex reversal, press nine.”

  Prinny cringed at that one because it was such a damaging lie. Plenty of people used it, of course; they acted all tough on the outside, then revealed that they thought they were cursed, their crops were dying, their wives were straying, their codpieces weren’t operating according to the original manual.

  Each of these cases needed to be treated individually. Very individually. Anyone who thought they were cursed tended to be at least somewhat open to the reversal. All that was required was their belief that the hex was gone and—poof!—the hex was gone.

  So Cosmos was off to a damn good start in determining where their biggest customer market was. That was Prinny’s idea behind the specific radio differentiation; she knew that much could be snuck in and out, yet not all the sneaking would be tolerated.

  Finally Chelsea—who was gathering her things to leave, even as she spoke into the microphone—said, “If you need further help, please press zero. If anyone is here to assist you, they will pick up. Otherwise, please leave your name, problem, and the number of livestock your family possesses at this time.”

  “Very funny,” Prinny said. “Just leave it at press zero, okay?”

  She nodded.

  Chelsea started replaying the recordings, doctoring the levels, and loading them onto the voice mail system.

  “That was good,” Prinny said to her.

  “Good of ye to say so,” she said, tipping an imaginary hat to her. And Prinny just knew it was a green top hat. Probably with a sarcastic shamrock poking out of it.

  “Don’t bring the Irish back here.”

  “How about the blonde from India?” It had to be said, her accent was pretty spot-on. Simpsons worthy.

  Chelsea did this all the time. Tried her accents out, too often with actual customers at the cash register, to see if she could fool them into thinking they were authentic. But when she tried the Indian accent on an actual Indian customer, or the Mandarin Chinese accent (she was very specific) on an Asian customer, it grew very awkward.

  To Prinny’s eternal frustration, all the actual workings of this already-insane metaphysical shop were her responsibility.

  She needed to consult with Alex.

  Not that he had to give her permission for anything she wanted to do. They both knew that. It was just a game they played, where she’d present some harebrained idea and he’d question her on it, which was lucky because he’d stopped her from wasting a lot of money on more than one occasion. She needed to be able to retire someday; she needed to not lose her nest egg on an idea that seemed great in one mood but was actually nuts to the rational public.

  Alex saved her from those decisions.

  Alex was a perfect man with a perfect job and a perfect family, in what was undoubtedly a perfect Northern Virginia house. He was married to a perfectly coiffed blond socialite named Britni Spencer-McConnell.

  Isn’t that cute? Alex and Britni.

  It would be just great if Prinny wasn’t in love with Alex.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chelsea

  It felt like the moment Chelsea’s eyes drifted shut, her alarm blasted like Reveille. It was actually “Chop Suey!” by System of a Down.

  She shot up out of bed like a cartoon character in an ejector seat, then shut off the alarm and lay in bed for a few moments, doing breathing exercises to calm her pounding heart. Next, she refreshed her browser on the casting Web site she used, as had become her routine before bedtime, in the morning, and at other random points throughout the day.

  “Audition Results to Come…,” it still said. No matter how many times she refreshed the page, the results were still to come.

  Letting out an audible groan, she threw the blanket and sheet off and made her Walking Dead way to the bathroom, putting on her morning playlist. She connected her phone to Bluetooth, so that she had no choice but to be immersed in loud, rousing sound. “Off to the Races” by Lana Del Rey blasted through the room.

  Hair up.

  Wash face.

  Brush teeth.

  She decided to leave her hair up in a top bun because she just didn’t have a shower in her. One look at the tub and she couldn’t think of anything she wanted less than to be soaking wet, especially with water that might or might not get cold today. Even if it would wake her up more, it just didn’t feel like it was worth the gamble.

  So she set about her makeup routine and hoped for the best.

  Make Up for Ever foundation, Too Faced Better Than Sex mascara, perfect MAC liner cat eye, and Lime Crime’s Red Velvet lipstick. That was her standard look. It wasn’t a cheap drugstore routine, but it was simple and so, in its way, economical.

  She didn’t do the clown contouring that had been so popular a couple of years ago. Well, no one called it clown contouring, but that’s how just about everyone who tried it looked. Including Chelsea herself; as much stage makeup as she’d done in her life, she found subtle but distinct makeup much more effective.

  It was the same with brows; people didn’t seem to be able to do their brows without ending up looking overdone. (Or if they did, they did it so well that she didn’t notice.) Thankfully, Chelsea didn’t have that worry, as she was blessed with good brows. Well, blessed might be an exaggeration—more like she had a mother who didn’t inform her that she needed to pluck them when she was young. The downside of that was that she spent a good portion of high school looking about half an inch shy of Frida Kahlo. The upside was that now, she was in a much better position than a
lot of girls to rock the Cara Delevingne look.

  Next, she had to get the clothes right. She had a standard audition outfit. One that she always felt good in. Stretchy scarlet tank that was tight enough to show off her body—Look how easily you could dress me, I’m practically a paper doll! and also I have just enough breast to push up, and just enough to strap down!

  Tight, deeply dyed jeans—Look, I have a thigh gap and trendy high-waisted pants, plus I can successfully pull them off!

  A black blazer, sleeves rolled halfway up the forearm.

  It was just enough ballerina, just enough business, and just enough every-girl to have as a standby. You never wanted to go in looking like a character, even if you thought you had a pretty good idea about the one you were auditioning for. You could be spot-on and get the role, or you could be way off and have made a bad move.

  Then she began her healthy breakfast routine. The one that was a huge pain but, she told herself, would be worth it when she got discovered (or found someone to discover her) and had healthy, glowing skin, shining hair, and the svelte body that was soooo important for acting.

  One Ziploc of preselected, precut veggies into the juicer. Beets, carrots, apple, broccoli, cauliflower, ginger, and celery. Pound the glass like a pledge at a frat party chugging Natty Lite. Recover while scrubbing each of the five pieces of the juicer. She had it down to a five-minute science.

  Then a Cali Shot, a shot of apple cider vinegar mixed into eight ounces of water with the juice of half a lemon. That and a protein powder + appetite curber + maca powder + chai tea + vanilla almond milk to take along in a blender bottle and she’d be set until lunch … which she packed herself so as to avoid the temptation of Chipotle when she was starving in a couple of hours. Because this breakfast was healthy but it wasn’t quite as filling as the carb-heavy brunch of pancakes, eggs Benedict, omelet, and strawberries and cream she would always, always prefer.

  Everything else she needed was by the door. She slid into her boots—and started her commute.

  Every time she sat on the Metro she felt like she might just be the person happiest to be there. Her routine was so jam-packed, and her schedule, too, that she was simply happy not to have to drive. She got to lean back and be carried to work through a dark network of tunnels under D.C. That was a relief.