Sign Withheld

In college there was this girl in our crowd, a retro hippie, the type who looked into your eyes and claimed to see your soul. She answered to a one-word name of her own invention. She usually spoke in non-sequiturs. She was new age before there was a New Age.

Our crowd was populated mostly by pre-professionals, grimly focused on reaching the next rung on the ladder. She refused to acknowledge the ladder's existence, and enjoyed needling those who measured their lives by their progress up the ladder.

She was a skeptic when it came to our beliefs, but she was gullible when it came to hers.

For instance, she fancied herself a psychic, claiming to have inherited the second sight from her grandmother. She'd foretell futures from palms, tarot cards and astrological signs.

Not believing any of this twaddle, I refused to tell her my sign. "If astrology works," I told her, "you should be able to deduce my sign from my behavior. What's my sign?"

We'd go back and forth on this: she was determined to get my sign out of me, I was determined not to give it. Sometimes she'd slyly suggest that I had characteristics of a certain sign, hoping I'd confirm her guess while she retained the ability to deny that she'd guessed at all. I refused to take her bait.

This went on for a few months until she overheard someone mention my birth date. "Of course," she cried, "I always knew you were a [SIGN WITHHELD]." From then on, whenever I did or said anything in her presence, she'd say something like "what else would you expect from a [SIGN WITHHELD]" or "so typical of a [SIGN WITHHELD]." Eventually we drifted apart, something I'm sure she expected to happen all along, given that I was a [SIGN WITHHELD].

[This post was inspired by Stephen Baldwin's "A Typical Woman's Revenge."]

Comments

[Monjo]

I always thought you were a Scorpio.

[Waterfall]

Capricorn, right? :-)