She worked for minimum wage as a cashier at a convenience store on the outskirts of Seattle. Every evening she tied up her hair into a messy bun, pulled on her uniform, and adjusted her name tag on the front of her shirt. “Look at that weather. I’m going to be hit by a car on the way there – I can just feel it,” she would say to her husband, who sat on a couch in the living room, staring at the television blankly. “If you find me dead in a ditch somewhere, you’ll know why.” Then she would groan one last time about the relentless rain and impatiently pry open the door, mumbling about the probability of receiving her paycheck late, again – which, in her mind, was already a sure thing. This was assuming, obviously, that she survived her commute to work.

She had predicted her own imminent death innumerable times in the past – incorrectly, although whether or not that was fortunate depended on who was asked. She had also predicted her own multiple failures, although in most of these instances she was more or less accurate in her forecasts. In high school, every test was a guaranteed failure, every worksheet an automatic class low. Every project was destined to be a disaster, a catastrophe. And every time her papers came back, they were full of red marks, some accompanied by parent phone calls or conferences, others with the words see me scrawled on the front in spiky letters.

“Well, of course I didn’t study. How are you supposed to study for something you know you’re going to fail?” she would ask her parents exasperatedly when they confronted her in the kitchen at dinner. She would then storm up to her room, muttering about how, if she was unlucky, her grade would drop just low enough that she would be kicked off one team or the other, even though her teachers tried to convince her that she wouldn’t if she pulled her grades up. A week or so afterwards, the worst would happen, as expected, and she would throw her hands up, waving a letter from her coach in the air, silently glaring at everyone who would meet her gaze and daring them to contradict her. After all, she had failed – just as she had told everyone and just as she had expected.

Senior year didn’t change the accuracy of her predictions. She applied to two colleges – hastily and carelessly, much to the chagrin of her parents – the community college nearby and a college a little further away, with a high acceptance rate and few requirements, and proclaimed that she was waiting for a rejection letter in the mail. When she was accepted into the community college, she rolled her eyes in mock delight, clutching the letter to her chest. “How wonderful. A community college. I should start finding a nice bridge to live under.” Upon reading her letter from the other college – a rejection letter – she tossed it in the trash, shaking her head as if she had known it all along – which she had.

College was a struggle. She called her parents sometimes, telling them all about how low a grade she could get on a certain final to maintain a passing grade in the course – and about the minimal chances that she could achieve such a grade. When she did pass – occasionally – she attributed it to a fluke, a stroke of good luck. “Not that it happens often,” she would say to her mom, smiling bitterly and opening her mail, not even glancing

at them as she tossed them, one by one, in the pile for bills. “I guess the professor was feeling really benevolent that day.”

She got out of college – just barely, and just thanks to the few professors who had been “benevolent” to her – and took a job at a fast food restaurant, convinced that she wouldn’t be offered anything better, where she met her husband. She had told her college peers that she knew she would be stuck with a good-for-nothing couch potato with nothing to his name except shady connections, and when it happened, she shook her head and sighed a fatalistic sigh, the tell-tale I told you so look written all over her face. “He’ll be the death of me,” she confided in one of her former classmates over the phone, glancing disgustedly at him as he slept on the other couch. “He really will. It’ll be like all those horror movies, the ones where the wives are brutally murdered for their money. Mark my words – I’ll be on the news one night. You’ll see.”

It turns out that, for all her finesse in predicting her future, she was right on only one of those counts. Her name did appear on the news one dreary, wet evening, sure enough, not long after that phone call. It wasn’t for anything good, either. But it wasn’t quite for the reason she had suspected it would be.

On her way to work that same rainy evening, having just finished muttering about her late paycheck, she lost control in the downpour on the slippery road. Reportedly, although her body was mangled and almost unrecognizable, her face was intact, just barely visible through the curtain of hair covering her face when the medics pulled her out of the wreck.

When they pushed her hair away, they saw that she wore a look of resignation.