Ariana DuBois to Josh Wood, 3:07pm: See you 6pm outside Doherty Hall!
J to A, 3:07pm: It's a date! Should I be prepared? What do you like?
A to J, 3:15pm: I don't know. I'm just a girl, y'know? I guess I like solving mysteries? Like explaining magic tricks. It's always just physics and misdirection.
J to A 4:30pm: Hah! I prefer being lucky thankyouverymuch. Heyy buy me a lotto tickt will u? Ill pay yer back.
At 5:59pm I showed up outside Doherty Hall, with no Josh to be seen. My hands were freezing. College students walked by, in and out the door. After ten minutes I was thinking of going in the lobby to keep warm.
"Ariana?"
Josh had snuck up on me from behind. He turned out to be a freshman, shoulder length thin blond hair. Triangular face, pointy chin. Looked sort of like John Lennon but younger and skinnier and weaker and no glasses. "Dollar. You got that lotto ticket?"
"Ticket. So did you win, Josh?"
Josh scratched it off, frowned. "Not today. But it's fun, y'know? The hope, the suspense?"
"No," I said. Shook my head. "Playing a game with losing odds has never appealed to me."
"So," said Josh, staring, uncertain, then he snapped back. "Food?"
"Villa Pizza?"
"Well ... yes, I can do that. My treat. Since you humored me with the lotto ticket."
After pizza we were in the student commons area. Josh had somehow produced an electric guitar, unplugged, that he was riffing on quietly. I could hear it over the ambient noise of the commons, but just barely. Some of his riffs were interesting, even good. Some weren't.
"Buying a lottery ticket was remarkably hard," I admitted. "Even though I knew I wasn't doing it for myself. I mean, even being SEEN buying a lotto ticket!"
"I would have thought you'd have done it a lot," said Josh.
"No! Why?" I asked, as Josh concentrated on a tricky run. "Do that one again?" I asked. He did. "I liked the little bend you did into the third note the first time you did it."
"Well you like mysteries," said Josh. "Lotto is a pure test of luck. If you play it a hundred times you should get a particular range of results if it's just probability, right? If you believe there's no luck, you ought to have tested that there's no luck."
I laughed, a sharp bark followed by a giggling grin. "Oh that. Yes. I've done that. But in my basement, with darts, y'know. If you're going to do something pointless hundreds of times it's best not to have to pay for each time."
"And?" asked Josh.
"And what?"
"Did it come out in the expected range?"
"Yes. 60 out of 100 white."
"Were you aiming at white?"
"No, the bullseye."
"How many bullseyes?"
"None."
"Bad aim?"
"Bad aim. Actually I had to do 130 shots not 100 because 30 didn't hit the board at all."
"Shouldn't you have hit the bullseye just by chance?"
"It was a tiny bullseye. A thousand tries should have hit it a few times by chance, but a hundred, no."
"Did you try praying?"
"Ooh good one. I'll have to try that. Who should I pray to?"
"Well God of course."
"But which God?"
"God God. There's only one God."
"God of Moses? Of Jesus? Allah? Budda?" I smirked. "Maybe Zeus?"
"They're all the same," said Josh, "Just God. And remember not to pray out loud, so only God hears you not the Devil."
I laughed again. Eyebrows raised. "What really?"
"You should come to bible study with me Friday! We have electric guitars and tamborines."
"Forget that."
We hung out an hour longer, talking, Josh running through melodies. Josh had all sort of unchecked beliefs, some of them quite strange. There would clearly be no second date.
"So how much did you get off the lottery ticket?" asked Josh's sister Jessie. Jessie was short, overweight, and a flaming redhead.
"$2000," Josh told her.
"I'm surprised you did that at all. You're risking being exposed."
"A little. But $5 or a million are all about the same risk. And Ariana's pretty fixed in her beliefs."
"Why not a million then?"
"Look, it took me an HOUR to go through enough futures to land the $2000. I was lucky it was email, with her acting soon after. The futures were discrete instead of smeared like usual. I just had to find the right spelling to trigger the winning numbers."
"So why risk it at all?"
Josh looked unfocused, thinking what to say. "Ariana's IMPORTANT."
"So you're going to see her again?"
Josh thought some. "No plans."
"How'd you scare her off?"
"Invited her to bible study."
Jessie snerked. "Seriously, Josh, you usually stick to incomprehensible rather than outright lies. Why?"
"She's important. I'm using my talents to develop new music. You know that. Ariana has a gift, she can tell what will be popular and what won't. I ran her against a hundred pop songs on the radio in the pizza joint and she nailed every one. She can recognize good music when she hears it, and she can explain why it's good."
"Woah really?"
"Now don't get ideas," said Josh.
"Who me? Does it only work for music, or could she edit books too?"
"I didn't test that. If you want to redirect her talents, you'll have to do it yourself."
"But you'll give me hints, right?"
".... mmmaybe."
"How'd you vary which pop songs the radio could have played at the pizza joint?"
"Trade secret."
"Isn't that kind of ironic, that she has the ability to mystically pick out the right tunes, when she doesn't believe there is a mystical anything?"
"Hey I don't make the rules."
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "A supernatural debunker goes on a blind date with a guy with sixth sense."