“It was Seth’s idea,” Michael blurted out.

  “Yeah, but Michael bought the gag fortune cookies,” shot back Seth.

  “And anyway,” said Michael, “it was supposed to be funny, not sick, y’know—they were supposed to say things like, ‘Help, I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory,’ or something.” They started elbowing and pushing each other. It was Aunt Sonia who saved the day. She began to laugh—and not just any laugh, but an Aunt Sonia laugh. Her laughter was always long and loud and contagious. In a few moments the whole family was laughing, and soon even the table next to them was in stitches as well, without even knowing why they were laughing.

  Pretty soon they all forgot about the bad fortune. Then, the following Wednesday, they all said their goodbyes as Aunt Sonia boarded her bus back to Buffalo…

  … and somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, the bus plunged off the road, down into the freezing cold of Kiamesha Lake. Everyone survived. Except for Aunt Sonia.

  It was then that Robin stopped reading her fortunes.

  It was a secret she kept for years. After every meal at Richard Yee’s, Robin held the offensive little pastry in her hand, while the others read their little phrases of wisdom and fate. Finally it would be Robin’s turn. She would hold that cookie in her lap, where no one could see, hating the awful cookie with every ounce of her being.

  “Go on, Robin,” her father would prompt. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  No, she wanted to say. I refuse to read it! For deep in her heart, she felt certain that no one should know the future, no one should try to guess, and no one should serve up tiny shreds of destiny and pretend it was just in fun. There was nothing fun about it. Robin had already seen the results of a bad fortune.

  She couldn’t tell her parents; they wouldn’t understand. So, week after week, she would take the little cookie, keep it hidden in her lap, unbroken, and, like a magician, she would pull out a blank strip of paper that she had cut from a notebook. Then she would hold up that blank paper and pretend to read, saying something like, “Love will rain on you like stars rain from the heavens,” or, “For every smile you give, it will be returned one hundredfold,” or something else that sounded both wise and vacant at the same time. Having heard the fortunes of her family a thousand times over, she knew how to fake it, and no one ever suspected that her fortune cookies went unopened. She would slip the unbroken cookies into her pocket, dispose of them in her own special way when no one was looking, and they would never be seen again.

  Or so she thought.

  It was the first day of the Year of the Dragon, Lunar New Year, when Robin’s little cookie world began to unravel.

  The Greenblatts were eating at Richard Yee’s on that particular night, and the restaurant was packed and festooned with decorations for the Lunar New Year. At the end of the meal, it was business as usual for Robin: she pretended to crack her cookie beneath the table, then picked up a blank scrap of paper she had brought from home and pretended to read her fortune. All went according to plan. Then, just before she left, she went to the restroom, got rid of the cookie, and rejoined her family.

  At home that night, however, she was disturbed to find something strange and mushy in the medicine chest, right beside the dental floss.

  “Gross!” She flicked it out, and it landed on the bathroom counter, inert and lifeless. It was a wet fortune cookie. This was strange, because no one brought home unopened fortune cookies in their house—it was almost a sacrilegious thing to do. She was certain that she had flushed hers at Richard Yee’s. But then where had this one come from?

  “Michael! Seth!” she called, but there was no answer. She scraped up the soggy cookie and stormed downstairs to where her brothers were sitting in front of the TV.

  The twins, now seventeen, never pulled tricks on Robin anymore, unless they were really good tricks—the kind she’d be mad about, but deep down appreciate on a conceptual level. This was not that.

  “Who put this in the medicine cabinet?” she said, trying to sound as unbothered by it as possible.

  They looked at the waterlogged pastry. Michael shrugged, and Seth said, “Not me.”

  “Well, someone had to put it there.”

  “Maybe we have mice,” suggested Michael.

  “Or squirrels,” offered Seth. “They hoard nuts. Maybe they could go for fortune cookies too.”

  Robin decided not to press the issue. She took the cookie out to the back porch and smashed the thing beneath her heel. It made a sickening, squishy sound, like a snail crunched on pavement.

  There, thought Robin. That’s the end of it. She went to bed and slept soundly, putting thoughts of the rogue cookie out of her mind.

  And in the morning she awoke to find another one on her pillow.

  “Mom!”

  Her mother came running. “Robin, honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She was about to tell her mother about the mysterious reappearance of the cookie, but thought better of it. Instead she held the cookie behind her back and tried to make something up, but her mind drew a blank.

  “Um… ummm.”

  Then her attention was drawn to something skittering across the carpet. She gasped. “A mouse!”

  Her mother jumped. “Where?”

  Robin pointed, but her mom turned too late, just missing the small blur that ducked under Robin’s bureau.

  “Uh… that’s why I called you in,” said Robin. “There’s a mouse in my room.” Once more she saw the light-colored blur dart off beneath her bed.

  “Did you hear that?” Robin looked up.

  Her mother looked up too, as if she could see through the ceiling. “I don’t hear anything.”

  It sounded like a rodent crawling around in the attic. Then Robin heard skittering inside the wall. “There—do you hear it this time?”

  Mrs. Greenblatt listened, then shook her head, but took her daughter’s word for it and sighed. “Mice—just what we need.”

  But while Mrs. Greenblatt was disgusted, Robin left for school feeling oddly relieved. Mice must have been dragging all sorts of munchies around the house. The mystery was solved. The universe was back in order. Although there was one question she kept in the back of her mind all day. Where did the mice find fortune cookies?

  * * *

  A cloud of dust billowed downward as the exterminator climbed down his ladder from the attic. Mom and Dad waited in the hallway. Mom nervously scratched the dry skin of her elbows, and Dad looked gloomy, probably wondering what all this was going to cost. Robin sat in her room doing homework, but kept glancing at them through the open door of her room.

  “Well,” began the exterminator, “the good news is I can’t find signs of any rodents anywhere in your house. But honestly, you should have mice, with all these things lying around.”

  Robin bolted upright in her chair. What was he talking about? She leaned back until she could see him through the open door. He was holding a handful of jagged little pastries in his hand. Fortune cookies.

  “That’s strange,” said Mr. Greenblatt, examining the dusty relics the exterminator had given him.

  The man shrugged, and wrote out a bill that made Dad grimace.

  * * *

  The family spent the following Saturday cleaning up the attic, where they were amazed to find dozens of fortune cookies scattered about the floorboards.

  “Weird,” Seth said. “Must be from the previous owners.”

  And since no one in the family had ever been up in the attic, no one contested the theory.

  “Total slobs,” Michael said, then made a move to crack open one of the stale cookies, but Robin slapped it out of his hand before he could.

  “Hey, what was that for?”

  “We just got this place cleaned up,” Robin replied. “Do you want to get crumbs everywhere?” Maybe the others didn’t know, but Robin had been in the attic before, and she knew the cookies hadn’t been there when they moved in.

  * * *

  That night, at their weekly foray to Richard Yee’s, Robin poked at her rice and toyed with her Mongolian beef, with absolutely no appetite, wishing she could be anywhere else in the world. The rest of the family shoveled down the food without speaking, and when the meal was over, the waiter approached with a plate of fortune cookies.

  The Greenblatts looked at one another, and everyone but Robin burst out laughing. After the day’s ordeal, the last thing anyone wanted was a fortune cookie. For a moment Robin felt relief wash over her, figuring that, for once, the ritual reading would be canceled tonight—and maybe every night thereafter. But her parents were creatures of habit, and couldn’t let it go.

  “Aw, what the heck,” Dad said. “Let’s see what they say.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Michael. He snapped the cookie open and pulled the paper out, studying it with a furrowed brow before reading it aloud. “Here’s a weird one,” he said. “ ‘Take care, for the fortune you shun today may consume you tomorrow.’ ”

  Dad went next. “Ooh,” he said. “ ‘Someone you love is about to leave you.’ ”

  Mom chuckled. “Probably me,” she said, then cracked her own cookie and peeled out the fortune. To Robin the paper seemed to squirm in her mother’s hand like a tiny tapeworm. She couldn’t stop staring at it as her mother read: “ ‘Set your dinner table for four. Begin tomorrow.’ ”

  Robin could feel the panic silently well up inside her. Didn’t her family know? Couldn’t they see what was happening? It was those vile cookies. They were plotting against her!

  Crack! Seth ripped his cookie open and drew out the slithering piece of paper. “ ‘The Sister of False Fortune receives judgment at dawn.’ ” Seth flipped the paper over to see if there was more. “What does that mean?”

  Blank stares from Mom and Dad, a shrug from Michael, and nothing from Robin, who couldn’t even look up from the table.

  “Your turn, Robin,” prompted Dad. Robin had to fight to keep herself from hyperventilating.

  “C’mon, Robin,” Seth said impatiently, “we don’t have all night.”

  She had her slip of blank paper in her pocket, but her fingers trembled so much that she couldn’t get it—and even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to think of any false fortune to say. Still, they all stared at her, waiting for her to tell them what the Fates said.

  “Robin?” Mom asked.

  “Excuse me.” Robin stood up, and her chair scraped itself back on the floor, a loud, jarring noise. In a moment she found herself in the bathroom, staring at her own wild eyes in the mirror.

  Stop it, Robin, she told herself. This is crazy—they’re only cookies.

  But they were more than mere cookies—Robin had always suspected that. She thought back to poor Aunt Sonia—how she had laughed away her own bad fortune, only to be killed by it. Deep down Robin had always felt that the cookie hadn’t merely predicted Aunt Sonia’s fate. Somehow it had caused it!

  Frantically, Robin reached into her purse, finding a felt-tipped pen. In the other hand she still held the offensive cookie, its secret message still trapped in the dark crevices of its twisted folds. If these hideous little pastries were the makers of fate, she would defy them to the end. With the pen she wrote on the surface of the cookie NO FATE! like a bright red tattoo, and she hurled the cookie into the toilet. She watched as the swirling waters spun it around and around the bowl, fighting to take it down into eternal sewer darkness.

  When she finally stepped from the bathroom, hands cold and wet, her dad was signing the check, and her family was preparing to go. It was as if nothing had happened. But how could they not know? Didn’t they understand what those fortunes had said? How could they not have seen the look on her face as she raced off into the bathroom?

  Or maybe they did see, thought Robin, and they’re a part of it….

  As soon as the thought dawned on her, it mushroomed and multiplied until it filled every corner of her mind. If this was a conspiracy, how deep did it go? Was it her brothers? Her parents, too? The exterminator—was he involved? How about the waiter, who so innocently handed out those malevolent cookies tonight? Suddenly something in Robin snapped like the crust of a fortune cookie, and she felt herself slip out of the arms of those she loved, and into a place where everyone was suspect.

  “Get your coat on, Robin. It’s cold tonight,” said Mom.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Robin, suddenly realizing that there might be hidden messages in everything the people around her said. Was it a warning that her life would be cold and empty? Did it mean her parents had decided to start giving her the cold shoulder? Then Mom threw Dad a glance. What did that glance mean? What were they planning to torment Robin with now?

  “Robin,” asked her father, “what’s gotten into you?”

  “As if you didn’t know,” was all she said.

  She held her silence on the way home, and through the evening. While the others settled in for an evening of TV bingeing, Robin locked herself in her room, sitting knees to chest in the corner of her bed. When sleep came, it was cold and fraught with disjointed nightmares.

  It was near dawn when the strange sound dragged her up from the depths of her troubled sleep.

  Boink-boink-gurgle-boink.

  It was a familiar enough night sound. Just like the creaking of their settling house, or the skittering of leaves across the roof, it was a sound she had grown used to, or at least learned to tolerate.

  Blurble-boink-glubb-glubb.

  It was, of course, the toilet—its porcelain intestines echoing a complaint as water slipped through an imperfect seal. Fixing the noise was simple—just a matter of jiggling the handle. But no one was getting up to do it. No one but Robin. Slowly she opened her door.

  Gurgle-hiss-glubb-glubb.

  It was louder than usual tonight. She turned on the bathroom light to see the clean waters of the bowl shimmering silently. Mom was insistent about clean bathrooms, and so the bowl was immaculate, full of Caribbean-blue water.

  But tonight, something was causing a little tempest in that particular teapot. Robin narrowed her eyes as she noticed something in the very bottom of the bowl. It seemed to be moving, crawling its way up the drain. She slammed down the handle, but the water did not flush. Instead the water swirled and slowly began to rise, brimming, and delivering the crawling little mass to the surface; soggy and beige. She didn’t need a closer inspection to know what it was, because on its waterlogged surface the words NO FATE were scrawled in her own handwriting, the deep red letters bleeding into one another.

  Robin had to bite her lip to keep herself from screaming. With the water flooding the floor, she slammed the door and hurried back toward her room… but something stopped her. Another sound. This one outside.

  She went to the hallway window, which was open just a crack, and looked out across the lawn.

  Crunch-crunch, skitch-skitch. Something was moving beneath the piles of dead winter leaves. Something was burrowing beneath the ground. Many things. She could see the crisscrossing, slithering patterns they made in the ground, like a thousand moles burrowing closer and closer to—

  She slammed the window to lock out the noise, but that wasn’t enough. She had to seal them out any way she could. Tearing through the house as fast as her ice-cold feet could carry her, Robin went to every window and every door, bolting them and double-bolting them. She stuffed a pillow in the doggie door, she plugged up the garbage disposal, she closed the air-conditioning vents.

  Her parents and brothers still hadn’t woken up—and she wouldn’t wake them either, for fear that somehow, in some way, they were allies of those evil little fortunes. Finally when she was certain the house was secure, she took a moment to sit down on the couch and catch her breath.

  They would not catch her tonight. And tomorrow she would run. She would go far away where fortunes were not yet written. Surely there had to be a place like that—she just had to find it.

  At first, the skittering she heard didn’t register in her mind. It was just another one of those night noises she had grown accustomed to: ashes slipping down the chimney.

  The chimney?

  Instantly, Robin realized her fatal mistake. The flue was wide open, and she dared not go near it now, for they were already tumbling down.

  She broke for her bedroom, letting lose a scream that might have woken the dead, and most certainly woke up everyone living in the house. Her parents and brothers came barreling out of their rooms as Robin crashed past, her arms flailing madly. She ducked into her room, slammed the door, locked it, put a chair in front of it, and sat down, her head in her hands, sobbing.

  “Robin, what’s wrong?” wailed her parents, pounding on the door. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  She wouldn’t answer them. How did she know she could trust them? What if, when she opened the door, they weren’t really her parents at all, but were beige shells of flesh, hollow except for a single message scrawled on a squirming white sheet? She couldn’t open the door now. She didn’t dare.

  “Robin, please…”

  She opened her eyes for an instant… and in that instant, she saw it. There, alone on the little round rug in front of her closet, right in the center of the rug’s concentric rings… a single fortune cookie.

  It didn’t move. It didn’t squirm. It merely waited. For her. As it had waited for her since that first day at Richard Yee’s after Aunt Sonia’s bus plunge.

  As she stared at it, the truth came to her in bright clarity. A truth she had been hiding from everyone… including herself.

  “What have I done?” She whispered.

  She had never thrown all those fortunes away, had she? All these years, she had told herself that she had flushed them, or crumbled them, or shoved them into the trash. She had made herself believe her own lies. But the truth was, she had kept them—because as much as she despised them, deep down she was far too superstitious to throw away an unread fortune. Now a corner of her mind that she had always kept locked sprang open, and the truth spilled out. She was the one who had hurled the cookies into the attic. She was the one who had slipped a cookie into the medicine chest the other night. She was the one who had buried them in the yard the way a dog buries bones, knowing they were always there, waiting. And she was the one who had plunged her hand into the grungy toilet at Richard Yee’s, desperate to get back her NO FATE fortune before it could be irretrievably lost in the sewers of Brooklyn.