The Karma Club

by Jessica Brody

  I look at him with the same expectancy that he held for me, but he just stares calmly back. Almost like he knows there’s more to the story.

  I fidget slightly with my fingers and say, “I mean, at first it worked. A little. At least, I thought it was working. But then everything came crashing down on my head and I ended up worse off than I started. And I want to know why. Why didn’t it work for me? You said that life is a balancing act. And that’s exactly what I did. I balanced. And then just like that, everything got all out of whack again.”

  As soon as the term comes out of my mouth, I immediately realize that it’s quite possible he doesn’t even know what “out of whack” means. Because obviously this guy is like some sort of Gandhi or something. And here I am throwing out sentences that one usually only hears on MTV. So I clarify. “You know, like out of balance.”

  He nods, but still says nothing. I sit there and wait for him to ask me something. Anything! But he doesn’t. Not for what feels like hours. And then finally, he goes, “If we told every story from the middle, we would never appreciate happy endings.”

  I stare at him with my mouth open until I manage to get out a very eloquent “Huh?”

  His eyes are extremely patient as he replies, “What I mean is, you are telling me your story from the middle. I cannot help you figure out why everything is so ‘out of whack,’ as you put it, unless I hear it from the beginning. And I fear it is a beginning that you are not quite comfortable sharing.” His rich, soothing voice flows out of him like some sort of exotic song with a haunting melody that makes me feel both on edge and somewhat comforted at the same time.

  He’s right. I am afraid of telling him how this all started. I’m afraid of telling anyone about it. Because up until now, I haven’t uttered a single word about the Karma Club to anyone. And the only existing public record of it is now in the hands of Jenna LeRoux. So you can see how I’m not exactly keen on the idea of divulging any additional information.

  I realize after sitting here on this mat in the middle of a room where people come to seek answers within themselves that the answer I’m looking for won’t become apparent to me unless I tell him everything. Unless I say it aloud, from the very beginning. Because it’s quite possible that I need to hear it for myself as well.

  So I take a deep breath and speak.

  I start from the beginning and I don’t stop until I get to the end. I don’t spare him anything. I just let it all out. When I finish, I feel very relieved. Like a weight has been lifted. Somehow telling the whole story in one sitting is like therapy. Because it’s then that I realize that the story can be told in one sitting. In a matter of minutes. And if that’s the case, then it can’t be that bad. I hope it means that a solution can be found in the same amount of time.

  I wait for Rajiv to speak. I know he’s got something good. Something that he’s been holding inside for the past ten minutes. But after about thirty seconds go by, he’s still just sitting there staring at me with this dopey half grin on his face. I finally say, “So?”

  And then he goes “So” right back at me, but with this really definitive tone. Like he’s stating something that’s super obvious and he’s astonished I don’t see it.

  I’m not sure what to do with that, so I ask, “Aren’t you going to tell me what to do? How to fix this? How to make everything good again?”

  Rajiv simply raises his eyebrows and says, “No. I’m sorry, I cannot tell you that.”

  “What?” I practically screech. “Then why on earth did I come all the way here and spill this out to you?”

  Rajiv sits quietly on his mat with his hands in his lap. “So you could help yourself figure out the answer.”

  This is beyond frustrating to hear, because obviously I can’t figure it out for myself. I need help. That’s why I’m here. If I could figure it out for myself, everything would be back to normal by now.

  “But I can’t!” I complain, throwing my hands up in the air. “I can’t figure it out for myself. I’ve tried. I’ve spent hours brainstorming solutions, and all of them just seem to end in disaster. I can’t do it. I don’t know why this is happening to me. I tried to achieve balance in my life, exactly like you told me to do, and I—”

  “Ah,” Rajiv begins pensively. “But not only did you seek to achieve balance in your life but you also sought to achieve imbalance in someone else’s.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Rajiv flashes another one of those patient smiles that I swear he must practice every morning in front of the mirror before he comes to work because he’s got the whole thing down pat. “You cannot obtain balance by also seeking imbalance.”

  Okay, this makes absolutely no sense to me, and Rajiv clearly notices that because he continues. “We can only fix our own lives. We cannot play the role of the gods in someone else’s.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do!” I argue defensively. “To fix my life. Mason hurt me. He betrayed me. He used me. And the same with Ryan and Seth. They hurt my friends. The people that I care about most in the world. Don’t they deserve to be hurt back?”

  “Unfortunately, it is not for us to decide the path of someone else.”

  “I don’t get it,” I whine. “I can help myself as long as it doesn’t affect someone else?”

  Rajiv points at his nose as if we’re playing a game of charades and I’ve correctly identified the clue he’s been trying to act out for the last fifteen minutes. Then he says, “We must follow our own path, and sometimes that path can be laden with bumps and curves and rivers to cross. But we cannot block the paths of our neighbors, for that is not our place. We can only seek to groom and shape our own.”

  “But Mason and Heather affected my path. Why are they allowed to get away with it when I’m not?”

  “The universe has a place and a purpose for everything and everyone. Sometimes we cannot know what that place is. Or what the purpose of everything that happens to us will be. That is why we must allow the natural order of things to occur.”

  I shake my head and look at him with pleading eyes. “I still don’t get it.”

  For a moment, he seems very deep in thought. Like he’s run out of explanations and is about to give up on me. But then he looks at me and says, “Did you see Back to the Future Part Two?”

  I blink at him in disbelief. “Excuse me?”

  “Back to the Future, the film,” he clarifies.

  It’s not that I don’t know what he means, it’s just that I can’t believe this guy is actually referencing a movie. And a sequel at that! For obvious reasons, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who hangs out at the local theater chomping on popcorn and candy.

  I nod warily. Like I’m afraid of where this line of thought might be heading. “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  “Do you remember what happens when Marty and Doc come back to 1985 from the year 2015?”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Everything is messed up and stuff because Biff stole the time machine in the future, went back to 1955, and gave himself the sports almanac, which screwed with the whole space-time-continuum thing.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Or as the Doc so poignantly put it, ‘The time line skewed into a tangent creating an alternate 1985.’ ”

  I scrunch my face up in confusion. Rajiv notices and asks, “You don’t remember that line?”

  I squint at him. “No, I do. I’m sorry, but I just find it hard to believe that you’ve actually seen Back to the Future Part Two.”

  “Of course,” Rajiv says matter-of-factly in his thick accent. “It is a classic.”

  I scratch my head at this and try to go with it. “So you’re telling me that I’ve created an alternate 1985?”

  He chuckles softly. “In a sense, yes. You have skewed the natural path of the universe into the reality that you are now experiencing. If you want to use the concept of Karma to explain what’s happened to you then—”

  “Then I’ve created a new chain of Karmic events.” I complete the sentence f
or him as the thoughts slowly start to become less fuzzy in my own head.

  “Exactly,” he replies, satisfied.

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing right now. We were only trying to fix something that we thought was broken. But if Rajiv is right, then it didn’t need to be fixed in the first place. Or at least Karma didn’t seem to think so. When we interfered, by setting off a new chain of events that clearly weren’t supposed to happen, Karma had to step in and balance them out.

  So in reality, this whole time, I’ve been searching for someone to blame for everything that’s happened. The men who robbed Angie’s store. The woman who poisoned the turkey chili. Ryan for running my sister over with his bike. But as it turns out, they weren’t the culprits at all.

  Karma was.

  The very force that we attempted to emulate. It came back around to show us exactly who was in charge.

  Clearly, it didn’t want us messing around with its carefully laid out plan.

  I sit there with my mouth hanging open. “But,” I begin, “you said that you can change your own path.”

  “Of course,” he responds. “All human beings have control over their own destiny. That is, after all, our purpose on this planet. Not to interfere with the lives of others but to shape our own experiences.”

  “But how do you do that without interfering with someone’s life?”

  “Ah,” Rajiv utters again, this time with a certain air of mystery and suspense. As if he’s already got this part figured out and telling me is, without a doubt, going to change my life forever. Except the only thing he says is “Now, that is a very good question.”

  “One that I’m guessing you’re not going to answer,” I speculate with a slight annoyance in my voice.

  He doesn’t react to my irritation. He simply bows his head gracefully and says nothing at all.

  And I know, at that moment, that I’ve already gotten all the information I’m going to get out of this guy today.

  THE NEW GODFATHER

  I drive home in a fog.

  Literally and figuratively. Because yes, there’s actually a dense fog outside the windshield of my car, which is not that unusual for Northern California in March. But there’s also a dense cloud of fog hanging around my head. And unfortunately, unlike my car, I’m not equipped with any high-power headlights to help me see through it.

  I suppose what Rajiv said makes sense. I mean, we’re practically being punished for trying to interfere with Karma’s omniscient plan. But how on earth am I supposed to fix it? Well, that’s still a mystery.

  Who knows what other surprises Karma has in store for us. I mean, yeah, there’s the whole Jenna LeRoux notebook thing, which pretty much sucks big time, but is that it? Will that be the end of it? Or is there still more punishment to come? And how will we even know when it’s over? How will I know when my own universal imbalances have finally been wiped clean? Am I supposed to tiptoe around every corner for the rest of my life, never knowing when Karma is going to jump out and get me? Like some haunted member of the witness protection program hiding out from the mob. And yes, that is exactly how I think of Karma right now. Like a member of the Mafia. A gangster. An unforgiving, power-hungry, relentless mobster who will kill and destroy anyone who tries to cross it.

  And the similarities are pretty clear. I mean, food poisoning, robberies, broken legs, stolen possessions. Sounds like the making of any mob movie that I’ve ever been forced to sit through.

  So how do you make nice with the Mafia? I’m pretty sure that getting on their good side is no easy feat. They have tons of connections all over the world. If that’s any indication, then it doesn’t matter where I try to hide, Karma is going to find me.

  By the time I get home, I am no closer to a solution. This is normally when I would call Angie or Jade and solicit their help, but they’re still not talking to me. So I’m pretty much left with nobody. Because my friends are the only people in my life (besides Rajiv, obviously) who know the entire story.

  So I lie on my bed and stare up at the ceiling, as if I’m expecting a message from God himself to be sent down to me.

  There’s a knock on my door, and I tell the person on the other side to come in. The door creaks open and my dad enters and sits down on the bed next to me.

  At first he makes small talk. He asks if I’m enjoying having my car back, and I tell him that I am. He asks how school is going, and I say, “Fine.”

  I can tell he’s trying to get me to talk about what’s bothering me. Shed some light on my recent gloomy behavior. Unlike Rajiv’s more direct-to-the-point approach, my dad is employing chitchat tactics to get me to talk. But I’m not going along with it. Because he’s one of those people that would require an explanation before he’s able to help me. So I simply reply to his questions as politely as possible until he finally stops beating around the bush and says, “You know you can talk to Mom and me about anything.”

  “I know.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He can sense that he’s not getting anywhere, so he stands back up. “Okay, I guess you know where to find us.”

  And when he’s about halfway to the door, I sit up, and say, “Dad?”

  He turns around. “Yeah?”

  For a brief moment I think that maybe there’s a way to ask what I’m about to without divulging the secret background story. And if there is, it’s definitely worth a shot. “What would you do if everything you’ve tried to accomplish in your life doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to go? And even though you think you’ve been doing everything right, it all just falls apart right in front of you?”

  My dad seems somewhat surprised by my question. It’s not exactly a light and fluffy one that can be answered with a simple greeting card. “Well, you know what Einstein said?”

  “What? That time and space are relative?”

  He laughs and shakes his head. “Yes, but he also said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

  I sigh and fall onto my back. Why does everyone have to be so cryptic all the time? Why can’t anyone just talk in normal, straightforward sentences? Is that really too much to ask?

  My dad senses my frustration. “It means you should do the opposite.”

  I look at him. “The opposite?”

  “Yes. If something you did brought you failure, then shouldn’t the exact opposite bring you success?”

  I consider his logic. I guess it makes sense. But it’s not like it applies to me. I can’t undo what I’ve already done. I can’t unreveal that Mason cheated on his SATs so that he can get back into Amherst. I can’t get Ryan Feldman unkicked off the varsity baseball team. So I thank my dad and tell him that he’s helped a lot, because I know that’s what it will take for him to leave the room feeling satisfied and content.

  After he closes the door, I think about everything I’ve done in the past few months, trying to figure out if I can possibly “undo” it all using my dad’s brilliant theory of opposites.

  Well, let’s see. I’ve lied to the people I like, and I’ve plotted revenge schemes to get back at the people I don’t like. That about sums it up.

  Now the only thing I want to do is continue to lie to Spencer so that I don’t have to face the truth and figure out a way to make Jenna pay for what she did to my friends and me . . . and to Spencer. Or what she plans to do to him, rather. If only I could get her to admit that she’s the one who wrote that nasty word on her own locker and then secretly videotape her confessing. Then I could put the video on the Internet and completely humiliate her. Or maybe she has some kind of beauty-enhancing prescription drug of her own that I can swap out with . . .

  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  That means no more revenge plots. No more lies. Clearly that approach didn’t work for me the first time around, why on earth would it work for me now?

  If some
thing you did brought you failure, then shouldn’t the exact opposite bring you success?

  There they are. Two brilliant quotes from two arguably brilliant people. Einstein . . . and my father.

  The opposite. The opposite. Find the opposite.

  The opposite of lying is telling the truth. But what’s the opposite of revenge? What’s the opposite of payback? Pay forward?

  I suddenly sit bolt upright on my bed. My head is filled with a million tiny pieces all merging into one solid, halfway decent idea.

  Pay forward.

  Like that movie I saw once about the kid who started a whole pay it forward revolution out of his seventh-grade social studies project.

  Good deeds. Random acts of kindness. Goodwill. Unwarranted compassion toward strangers.

  Bad deeds will be punished while good deeds will be . . .

  Oh my God, it’s been right in front of me this whole time. It’s the very definition of Karma. Why didn’t I think of it before?

  We’ve been so focused on the concept of punishing those who have caused us pain that we’ve completely disregarded the entire other half of what Karma is.

  Good deeds are rewarded.

  If you want good things to happen to you, then you have to do good things first. You have to send out positive energy into the universe if you want positive energy in return. The Karma Club doesn’t have to be about punishment. It can be about compassion. Generosity. Kindness. Honesty. Instead of punishing those who hurt us in an attempt to ruin their Karma, we should be setting ourselves up to improve our own!

  I feel so inspired and revved up that I actually jump from my bed, grab my purse and car keys, and fly out the front door. I get into my car, start the engine, and take off.

  I don’t have much time. Jenna’s deadline is in four days. If I’m going to make a difference by then, I can’t afford to waste another minute.