At the next table, a boy and a girl -- or a man and a woman, they are perhaps 18 or 20 -- are reading the Tree of Life oracle. The box it came in is still on the table by their hot chocolates.
The girl places cards onto the marked squares on a cloth, its folds still sharp as pleats. Dyed red hair pokes out from under her stocking cap. She wears a necklace of coin-sized wooden beads. Everything seems too heavy and too chemical for her, her fragile skin, her blush pink and blotchy as if she's cold.
The boy reads: "power and conquest; you will overcome difficulties." He has shaggy hair and a hooded sweatshirt.
The girl flips a card. Her fingernails are painted peach and bitten to the quick. The boy struggles with "usurped." They are so delicate, he in his fatigues and heavy glasses, she in her combat boots and knitted skirt. They are just old enough to go to war.
She bends close to the table to copy something into a ratty spiral-bound notebook. Over the oracle book, he hunches forward as if to smell her hair.
