“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

Victoria Lee read the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities over for the fourth time before it penetrated her tired brain. For her it WAS the best of times considering her parents had finally left that morning. After two weeks with her at their suburban San Francisco McMansion, they were on their way back to Hong Kong.

On the other hand it was also the worst of times. Second semester of her junior year at Manderley with her old friends left far behind, a huge Dickens novel to read, and not much of a new social life in California.

Instead of reading further, Victoria picked up her pencil and sketched the outline of a dress on blank page in her notebook. In a minute she was more engrossed in the getting the lines of the slouchy sweater dress right than she could ever be in any old nineteenth century novel. Now if that novel had pictures of nineteenth century fashions, that would be another matter.

“Homework, already? The semester hasn’t even started.”

It was Cindy, her best friend at Manderley, her only friend really, who’d joined her on the second floor of the Thurston Howell III Memorial Library.

Victoria shoved her notebook aside. “Just fooling around, wasting time.” That’s what her parents would say. Wasting time drawing clothes. Fashion design? Just what the world needs another designer making clothes no real woman in her right mind would wear.

“Good vacation?” Cindy asked, setting her backpack on the corner table.

Victoria sighed. “What vacation? My parents came to town and I never had a chance to catch my breath. When I wasn’t chauffeuring them to business meetings in Silicon Valley they were dragging me to the art museums in San Francisco.”

“I thought you liked art.”

“Not the kind they like. They love the Palace of the Legion of Honor with all that old European art. Portraits of fat rich women stuffed into satin dresses and stiff looking men standing next to them. I wanted to go to the MoMa with the cool abstract paintings. But no. Next it was, what else? The Asian Art Museum. As if they couldn’t get their fill of Asian art in Hong Kong. I hung out in a coffee shop and tried to read my book there while they insisted I was denying my heritage. What heritage? I said, I’ve got two. In case they forgot. Of course we had to stop in Chinatown for a tour of a fortune cookie factory.”

“You can’t get fortune cookies in Hong Kong?”

“Would you believe fortune cookies are a San Francisco invention?”

“Like Rice-a-Roni?“

“I guess so.” Victoria reached into the Vuitton Murakami bag she got for Christmas the year before, pulled out a cellophane-wrapped cookie and handed it to Cindy. “We came back with a half-gallon carton of cookies. This one’s for you. You’ll see why. Go ahead, open it.”

“Mmmm, this looks good. They make chocolate dipped fortune cookies?”

“Chocolate, coconut, strawberry, traditional, jumbo and everything in-between. You name it, they make it. We saw the whole thing because the owners are friends of theirs. The assembly line, the chocolate vats, everything. They do special fortunes for showers, parties, weddings or whatever with fortunes like ‘He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, we tied the knot.’”

Victoria wrinkled her nose at this sappy sentiment. If she ever got married, she’d avoid the cookie factory.

Cindy opened her cookie and read the fortune. “’You will get 1600 on your SATs and travel across a great ocean.’” Her face lit up. “Hey, do these come true?”

“Guaranteed or your money back,” Victoria said. “I thought you’d like that.”