The cards spun, danced and flickered through the air as Madam Columbina shuffled them from hand to hand. They arced elegantly as she sprayed them from her right hand to her left, then fanned out as she once again flicked them back from her left hand to her right, but Jo just watched it all without paying much attention. She was thinking more about what Chantal had meant when she'd said, "Anything."
Madam Columbina set the deck down on the shoulder of her artfully tattered jester's costume, and let the cards slide down her arm into her hand. She cut the deck, and it took Jo a moment to remember that she was supposed to be calling out the card she saw to the audience. "Three of clubs," she said hesitantly.
Madam Columbina smiled, her teeth a perfect white beneath a slash of ruby-red lipstick. "I guess my partner hasn't shown up yet, then," she said. "You'll have to forgive Harlequin, folks, he's a bit unreliable." She returned to her display of shuffling.
Jo didn't know what the whole thing was supposed to prove. She'd examined the whole deck when she'd first stepped up on stage, and the joker wasn't in it. Which was obviously the point; Madam Columbina was no doubt going to slip the card back in during the whole elaborate display of whirling, dancing cards, and everyone would ooh and ahh. Nice trick, everybody claps.
Except that they'd also be expecting Jo to...to slump down on her stool and start clucking like a chicken or something, and that just wasn't happening. Everybody knew that all these stage shows just used plants in the audience, with maybe a gullible idiot or two mixed in for flavor. The fact that she had managed to trick Madam Columbina into thinking she was a gullible idiot was about to get her a cool thousand bucks, but it wasn't going to leave her hypnotized, and it wasn't about to leave her doing...Jo remembered that wild, fearless light in Chantal's eyes. "Anything?" "Anything."
With a sudden flourish, Madam Columbina cut the deck again, but this time Jo was prepared. She called out, "Seven of hearts."
Madam Columbina nodded. "And before that was...?"
"Um..." Jo felt a little defensive; she didn't know there was going to be a test. "Two...no, three of clubs."
Madam Columbina nodded solemnly. "Three of clubs, seven of hearts, and we're looking for the joker. Could you keep track for me as they come? I'd take notes, but..." She sprayed the cards in a rainbow arc from one hand to the other. "It's a little hard to hold a pencil while you're doing this."
Jo smiled thinly. She just wished Madam Columbina would show her the joker and get this over with. Then Jo could stick out her tongue at her, walk off stage, and go collect Chantal's money. Maybe she should feel a little guilty, scooping up a thousand dollars for about fifteen minutes of sitting here and doing nothing, but Chantal wouldn't even miss it. A thousand bucks to a trust-fund baby like her just meant deciding between pairs of shoes this week instead of buying all three. (Thankfully, Chantal was willing to pay the extra rent to get them an apartment with plenty of closet space. Having a rich friend was cool sometimes, even if it got on your nerves sometimes too.)
Besides, Chantal started it all. The last two straight weeks, she'd been talking about nothing but how awesome it was that Madam Columbina was doing a show in town, and how cool her act was, and how she was the best stage hypnotist in the business, and how great it had been last time Chantal had seen her, and how they had to go, and how she'd pay for Jo's ticket, and just generally drooling over the woman like Chantal had a total girl-crush on her. ("Anything?" "Anything.")
It just got on Jo's nerves, that was all. That was the only reason she'd said, "I bet she does it with plants," as they were walking into the nightclub, just to deflate Chantal's hero-worship a little. She hadn't meant to start a whole big thing. Which she technically didn't, because it was Chantal who started it with her endless praise anyway.
But Chantal wouldn't let it go. Well, not after making a joke about cucumbers, and saying that she didn't think that was what the poster meant by 'Adult Hypnosis Show'. Which, okay, actually pretty funny. But she didn't leave it at that, and that meant Jo couldn't either. By the time they'd found a table, they were well into an argument about whether stage hypnosis was really real. "All I'm saying," Jo had said, "is that I kind of doubt that it's real hypnosis, the kind that they use in therapy and stuff. I'm betting that she's probably got at least one or two stooges in the audience, and maybe a couple of gullible types, and she's going to milk that for all it's worth."
And that was when Chantal had replied with, "How much?"
At first, Jo hadn't understood. She'd just shrugged and said, "I dunno, maybe a couple of hours...depends on how good her magic tricks are, really."
But Chantal had kept at her, saying, "Come on, Pussycat, put your money where your mouth is." Even though she knew Jo hated it when Chantal called her 'Pussycat', because she'd always hated that stupid cartoon--
Madam Columbina slapped the cards together and cut the deck so fast it almost startled Jo. "Um, three of clubs, seven of hearts, ace of spades."
"And...?" Madam Columbina said, winking at the audience.
Jo sighed. "And we're looking for the joker."
"That's my partner," Madam Columbina said. "He loves to make an entrance. Or is that an...entrance?" She stressed the second syllable that time, sending a ripple of chuckles through the audience.
Jo grinned too as Madam Columbina went back to shuffling the cards in dizzying arcs, but for different reasons. Jo knew she couldn't be hypnotized--well, actually she didn't know whether she could be hypnotized or not. Probably if she went to a hypnotherapist, and he swung a watch back and forth in front of her eyes or showed her a spiral or something, she could do it. But she knew she couldn't be hypnotized if she didn't want to be, and she couldn't be hypnotized just by seeing a card.
Probably the whole card thing was just a desperation tactic. Jo had let slip that she had money riding on not being hypnotized (not that she was going to be paying money if she lost...she didn't have a thousand dollars to spare right now) and Madam Columbina probably realized that it was pointless to pull out the swinging watch or the spinning spiral. Her whole patter about "Maybe I can't hypnotize you, but my partner, Harlequin, is a much better hypnotist than me. You know, Harlequin, the jester, the clown...the joker?" and the way she'd pulled out the deck of cards and told Jo that seeing the joker would hypnotize her...all that was just her way of stalling, once Jo had come up there and Madam Columbina had seen that 'suggestibility tests' aside, she hadn't picked a sucker or a plant this time. Jo had raised her hand because she wanted to come up on stage for the bet, not because it was 'tied to a balloon' or anything.
You couldn't be hypnotized with a card or an imaginary balloon. You had to be...induced or something. Jo was a little fuzzy on the details, but she'd looked it up on Wikipedia. (And oh, didn't Chantal crow when Jo had said that was where she got her information from. Who knew that Little Miss C Average was an expert on stage hypnosis?) This whole card trick wasn't going to work.
Which meant that unfortunately, Chantal was going to be out of luck on their little bet. Out of luck, and out a thousand dollars. Which meant that Jo wasn't going to have to follow through on her end...which was good, right? Having to be Chantal's personal slave for a month was bound to suck. She'd probably make Jo do all the cleaning (except that Chantal sprung for a maid service...) Or she'd make Jo wash her clothes (except that Chantal had everything dry-cleaned, because she said you couldn't trust Dior to a washing machine...) Or she'd make Jo... ("Anything?" "Anything.")
It was the look in Chantal's eyes that kept haunting Jo, the one Chantal got when she said, "You have to agree to be my personal slave for a month, and do anything I say." That look said, "I'm trying so hard to make this sound like just another one of my smutty jokes, just good old boy-crazy, girl-crazy Chantal making another mock pass at her oldest friend, but I want so badly for you to lose so that I can make you strip naked and fuck me." That was what kept sticking in Jo's mind as she watched Madam Columbina go through her fifty-two card juggling routine. If she lost, which she wouldn't because she couldn't because it didn't work that way, Jo would have to do anything she asked. And when Jo had asked, "Anything?" and Chantal had repeated "Anything," they'd both known perfectly well what that meant.
That was what Jo couldn't stop thinking about. She was watching the cards flutter through the air, but she wasn't really seeing them. She was thinking about all those other times Chantal had made jokes about wanting to get into her panties, and wondering how many of those times that light had been there in Chantal's eyes and Jo had just missed it. She was wondering what she would have done if she'd noticed it before...and she was wondering what her own eyes had looked like to Chantal when she asked, "Anything?" Because suddenly, she wasn't sure.
"Still with us?" Madam Columbina asked. Jo suddenly noticed that she was holding the deck out for Jo to look at. "Or is that my partner in there after all?"
The audience laughed, but Jo was a little too surprised at how lost in thought she'd been to be upset. "Oh!" she said. "No, it's, um...three of clubs, seven of hearts, ace of spades, four of clubs, and we're looking for the joker."
"That's right--tell you what, Jo," Madam Columbina said, beginning to put the cards through their paces again, "next time why don't you do them last to first instead of first to last? Might be easier for you to remember."
