Kendall's POV
It all started to get weird when our producer Gustavo took me, my band mates, my mom, my sister and his assistant Kelly out to dinner at the Glory Panda Super Buffet. We had just finished recording the last song for our first album which was coming out in a couple of months, and the spirits were high. Everyone ate way too much and you know it's a lot easier to laugh out loud when you're full so we were getting pretty obnoxious. I remember when Carlos was just coming back with his fourth plate from the buffet.
"Oh my God, Carlos! What is that?" Logan exclaimed, still laughing from something Kelly just said.
"What is what? It's chicken, jewfish!"
"Carlos I have no idea what that is but I am 100% sure that it's nooot chicken!" he maintained, cracking up and barely getting the last word out.
Carlos took a bite and shrugged. "Whatever. It's good."
"Looks like blackened rat with bubonic oyster sauce." Katie said, leaning over the table to see. This got my whole body seizing with laughter to the point where I just stared at the ceiling and clucked breathlessly every few seconds. It always turned out that we were cruelly ridiculing the food whenever the waitress came to our table, but her expression was as difficult to read as ever. I told myself that she didn't speak English, and even if she did she was likely fully aware of the squalor of their selection. She set down our check on a plastic tray along with eight unbroken, perfectly lined up fortune cookies. They never looked like that. Usually they were a complete afterthought on everyone's part but tonight they looked so very deliberate and inviting. The waitress bowed and left us.
"Hey! Fortune cookies time everybody!" Katie shouted, grabbed hers and started the tray being passed around the table.
"Oh dude I love those things! Give me it!" Carlos aggressed, taking the tray from Logan and tearing the plastic wrapper off of his spastically, breaking his cookie in the process. Logan rolled his eyes and took a cookie before giving the tray to me. I took one and handed it to James, who stared at the tray for a second. It's because of him that I remember how the cookies were situated just then:
There were two pairs missing, the furthest left pair and the middle-right pair. One of the cookies from the furthest right pair was still there. James took one of the cookies from the middle-left pair and there were two left.
"Hey, who didn't take one?" James asked whiningly as if it were against the rules of gorging oneself at Chinese buffets to not top it off with a contorted swatch of vanilla cardboard. Logan was across the table from James, seated next to my mom. She looked up from digging in her purse for her credit card and, upon seeing James looking at her, asked him to repeat himself.
"Did you take a fortune cookie, Mama K?"
"Oh, no I guess I didn't." she reached over and took the mate to the one James had just taken.
"Gustavo?" James said, implying the same question. Without looking up from his Blackberry, Gustavo waved his hand in James' general direction.
"I hate fortune cookies. There's always some grammar or syntax error and they don't make any sense. There are too many lucky numbers and to top it all off, they taste TERRIBLE!" he shouted grumpily. We all chuckled and shook our heads at Gustavo's overzealous denunciation. All except Kelly. She suddenly seemed worried and fearful. I was about to say something to her when Carlos began to recite his fortune for all to hear.
"It is time for your feelings towards old acquaintances to be reevaluated. Huh? Dude, what does that even mean?"
"That's the way they always are, Carlos. A 'fortune' is just a cryptic and vague suggestion that can apply to an almost infinite number of events and situations. They always seem to come true in an eerie way, but only because of your own paranoia and interpretation." Logan condescended.
"Whatever dude, I still believe in them! Read us yours and you'll see how true they are!"
Logan, eager to advance his argument with an idiot, opened his wrapper and cracked his cookie, careful to make only two pieces and to slide the slip of paper out of the middle in his own OCD way. As soon as he looked at it, his eyes widened and his mouth parted in stupefaction.
"What is it?" Carlos snatched it from his best friend impatiently and regarded the fortune. "Dude… this is so jank! We got the same one! How lame is this place?"
Logan took both of the fortunes from Carlos and started perusing them. I noticed James looking over my shoulder. I had eaten my cookie and was holding the fortune in my hands. James read mine for me.
"Seek opportunity in the most unlikely of places. Only then will your circumstances change." Kelly peered at me across Katie and James' chests suspiciously.
"That's what mine says too, Kendall." I was now keenly interested in what was going through Kelly's mind. After holding her gaze for a minute but saying nothing, we both turned to look at my mom as she read her fortune.
"Don't let preconceptions from the past hinder the future. Take the present as it is and seize the day." My mom looked up at James, knowing he was already staring at her. Sitting next to him, I couldn't really tell what their look meant. "Yours is the same, isn't it?"
"Yes." James admitted.
"But they aren't exactly the same." Logan suddenly said to James.
"What? Yes they are. Mine says 'Don't let preconceptions—'"
"I know. But look at the other side. What does it say?"
James flipped his fortune over. "Lucky numbers: 13, 18, 19, 11, 14, 9, 7, 8, 20."
"Hey, that is different." My mom butted in. "Mine are 10, 1, 13, 5, 1, 9, 4, 9, 1, 13, 15, 14, and 4."
"They really must be random, considering numbers are repeated in yours. There isn't even the same number of numbers as anyone else's." Logan concluded.
"Logan, don't you think you're obsessing over this a little too much? They obviously just put different numbers on the same fortunes to make them seem different when they can't come up with new ones. Plus this batch wasn't shuffled well enough." I said, attempting to pacify Logan who seemed unnecessarily shaken when he had been so jolly a few minutes earlier.
"Nope. Uh-uh. It means something." Carlos said with surety. "These things are the real deal! That old Chinese voodoo magic is nothing to shake a book at, my friends!" although we were all somewhat intrigued, we weren't to the point of listening to Carlos. I've never been that confused.
"Well mine isn't like any of yours." Katie spoke up.
"Really?" my mom questioned. "What does it say?"
"Don't doubt yourself. No one is too weak to save another, too young to know what's right or too small to be loved." Even Gustavo paid attention to that one. James said what we were all thinking.
"Wow. How freakin' weird is it that Katie got that one? It almost seems… personal."
Gustavo snorted. "Yeah right! I bet if I picked up that last one it would say the same thing." At that, we all stared down at the last uneaten fortune cookie. Actually, it wasn't the last; Logan was nibbling on a piece of his nervously and Kelly had left hers thoughtlessly on the table. Having been unsuccessful in finding her card, my mom put some cash on the table.
"Let's go." She said, standing up. Gustavo looked up at her incredulously.
"What, are you freaked out Mrs. Knight? By some uncanny fortune cookies? May I remind you that you are a GROWN WOMAN?" Mrs. Knight scoffed and gave Gustavo no answer, quickly leaving the private dining room that we had rented. To my surprise and bemusement, James got up just as quickly and followed her out. I got up and went towards the exit passage a few seconds later.
"C'mon Katie, mom's your ride home." Katie got up and stood beside me.
"Kendall," Gustavo barked, "give this money back to your mother. I said I would buy everyone dinner and I am keeping that promise." I took the money from him and he was redeemed in my mind. My mom was acting pretty weird when she left. Little did I know as we left the restaurant that that odyssey of a Friday night had barely begun, and that nothing less than destiny awaited us all outside the walls of the Glory Panda…