Page 2 of A Shared Mind

I shook the hands of the three guys with him, having no idea what their names were, nor did I care. I knew more people than I wanted to know. I didn’t need to know more.

“Happy birthday, Bookie.” Herbst stepped forward and picked me up, spinning me around, and dropping me, the big oaf. Thankfully, I caught myself before my ass hit the jagged concrete of the sidewalk.

Eve gave me an apologetic glance before she took Herbst’s hand. “We don’t want to be late, babe. Come on, Justin.”

Herbst opened the door and Eve pushed me inside, the rest of the crowd following like the lemmings I believed them to be.

“May I help you?” An attractive middle-aged white woman dressed in a Mrs. Roper-esque caftan with her strawberry-blonde dreadlocks piled high on her head and held in place by a colorful scarf greeted me.

I turned around and grabbed Eve’s arm. “You made the booking. You talk to the lady.”

She giggled, of course. “Hi. We have a seven o’clock appointment with Madame Stella. Murray, party of seven.”

Trepidation and embarrassment consumed me. Going to a voodoo priestess, or whatever she called herself, was such a bad idea. Like a marching band coming down Bourbon Street, my virginity was about to be trotted out for all my companions to witness.

Herbst was probably already aware of my virginal status but having Kirk Dunston know my truth would be an incredibly humiliating revelation, especially on my twenty-fourth birthday.

“Ah, yes. Y’all are here for the séance. Which one of ya is the birthday boy?” The woman looked at the other guys in our party before they parted like the Red Sea and there I was in the spotlight.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me.” Where had my professionalism gone?

“If y’all will follow me, I’ll take ya into the salon where Madame Stella communes with the spirit world.” The woman picked up an odd glass incense burner that had smoke coming out of it and led the way to a curtained-off section toward the back of the shop. There were all sorts of candles with religious pictures on the front. A whole display case had statues and various other scary symbols. Shelves were filled with different sizes and colors of drums, which I found very odd.

“What’s all this shit?” one of the three stooges behind me asked.

“Madame Stella is a practitioner of Santeria. Each color and object symbolizes...”

I tuned out the rest of it because that Sublime song popped into my head and the lyrics had me stifling a laugh as I turned to Eve, who wore a million-dollar smile. I rolled my eyes at everything in front of me.

It was all a bunch of crazy superstition. I wondered when Madame Stella was going to give us the speech: “For a hundred dollars more, I can contact [insert name of dead relative/friend/famous actor].”

We were taken through a brown door into a room with all sorts of colorful curtains on the walls draped with beads. There were some of those religious candles lit around the room and placed dangerously close to the curtains for my taste. In the center of the table was a lighted bowl where some sort of fog or smoke was rising from. Dry ice?

There were eight chairs around the table, one of which was occupied by a black woman who looked a lot like the white woman out front, down to the charms she had woven into her gray dreads. They were living up to the stereotype firmly fixed in my brain of anyone who read tarot cards, claimed to be a psychic, or had any mystical powers of any sort.

It was early September in the south, so of course, the room felt as hot as the devil’s taint. I glanced around to see no fans or windows of any kind. God, with so many of us in the room, were we going to suck up all the oxygen and die? Happy birthday to me!

The canned lights dimmed overhead, and a dramatic spotlight shined up from the floor, putting Madame Stella’s face in shadow. “I am Madame Stella. Why have you sought my services today?”

All eyes turned to me. I crossed my arms and gave Eve a rude stare. “Nuh-uh. You booked it.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “It’s Justin’s birthday, and the best birthday present I could give him is a discussion with the world’s greatest lover, Ramon Blanco. Unfortunately, Ramon died—”

“There is no such thing as death. The spirit inside us leaves this plane and moves on.” Madame Stella’s voice was eerily deep all of a sudden.

“Okay, uh, Ramon’s spirit departed in 1996, but we’d like you to summon him so he can give my friend some tips to...”

Wait for it.

“Lose his virginity.”

Again, all eyes on me.

“Dude! You’ve never popped your cherry? Are you religious or something?” one of the stooges asked.

“Hell, why are we sitting here? Let’s find a bar and a backroom. We can get this done right now. A birthday pop!” another added.

Herbst smirked and shifted his gaze to me. “Is it true?”