All friends tune in to each other. My friend Jane sees me chewing my lip and knows I’m upset. Lindy can read my mood just by the colors I’m wearing. But one of my closest friends doesn’t even have to see or hear me to tell the state Im in—or the state I will be in years from now. She’s a bona fide professional psychic—and the ultimate irony is that, despite my entreaties for her to give me a reading, she won’t.
Rochelle Jewell Shapiro and I met through a mutual friend ten years ago and instantly hit it off. She was smart, funny, warm, and engaging. We were both writers, both wisecrackers, both addicted to books and movies. She lived a few hours away, but we talked nearly every day and met for lunch every month. I thought I knew everything about Rochelle, but it wasn’t until three months into our friendship that she told me the most important thing of all: She has a thriving practice as a psychic. She tells people’s futures and talks to the dead, and she has been able to do it since she was 3 years old.

MIXED SIGNALS
I was stupefied—and thrilled. I had gone to psychics for cosmic solace, for fun, and now I actually had one as a friend. I had a million burning questions. Would I have a baby? Would I have success? And I wanted to talk to everyone in my family who had died.
“So when can you read me?” I asked.
“Never,” Rochelle said cheerfully. “And there are good reasons why.”
A psychic likes to start with a blank slate, so that she can objectively interpret the images she receives. “With you, I already know too much. I’m too close,” she said. “I might see a broken watch face, and because I’m your friend the image will take on meaning it might not have at all. I’ll worry all day, when really, that image could mean nothing more than that your watch is running slow. It’ll end up upsetting us both.” Love, she tells me, clouds the images, or stops them entirely. That’s why she doesn’t read for her husband or children, and why she won’t do it for me.
She will, however, read my friends, who clamor for referrals.
“She’s astonishing!” they tell me when they call up afterward to gush their gratitude.

Despite her resolve, Rochelle does sometimes reveal things to me—when she feels she has no choice. A few years ago, I became friends with a writer who lived far away. “I have to tell you, be careful,” Rochelle warned me. “Your friend’s suffering from severe mental problems.”
I was angry with her for casting such a shadow. “I’m sure your intuition is clouded,” I snapped, and she never mentioned it again—until two months later, when my friend killed himself in a hotel room, despondent over his failing marriage and a shocking array of legal problems I had no inkling he faced.
“You see why it’s so difficult to know things about people you care for?” Rochelle asked. “Sometimes telling people things doesn’t help because they’re not ready to hear them.”

“See a doctor,” she tells me.
“Will we get the house we’ve bid on?”
" Talk to your real estate agent,” she says calmly.
I try e-mailing her the eternal questions I want answered: Have my relatives who have died ever come to Rochelle with messages for me? And where exactly are they? Can’t she tell me just those two little things?
When I finally get a reply from Rochelle, it’s a chatty letter about her kids. I don’t need to be a psychic to get the message.
Sometimes Rochelle’s being psychic creates an odd sort of friction for me. No matter what she says or writes to me, I can’t help wondering: Is she giving me a hidden message? What does “hope all is well” mean? Is she being psychic, or is she simply being a friend? I don’t ask. She doesn’t tell.
Still, the next time we’re on the phone, I can’t resist blurting, “Will Jeff and I get a baby to adopt?” Rochelle sighs so theatrically, we both laugh. “You never change,” she says affectionately. But I have changed. I’ve made peace with knowing I can’t have first dibs on her second sight. That the only super, natural thing about my relationship with Rochelle is, and always will be, our friendship.