Scorpio and astrological predictions

Scorpio and astrological predictions are a recurring interpretive framework in Kelly Kelleher’s story, giving a borrowed language to desire and risk even as she explicitly disbelieves it. The horoscope tells her to claim her wishes after disappointment; its romantic promise shadows her choice to go with The Senator, then turns bitterly against the accident and her struggle to survive. Astrology does not explain or prevent what happens. Its significance lies in the contrast between an alluring script of personal agency and the bodily conditions that constrain Kelly’s choices.

The Horoscope as a Script for Desire

The night before the Fourth of July, Kelly, Buffy St. John, and Stacey read the July Scorpio forecast in Glamour, giggling over its urgent advice: “Too much caution in revealing your impulses and desires to others! For once demand YOUR wishes and get YOUR own way! Your stars are wildly romantic now, Scorpio, after a period of disappointment—GO FOR IT!” The capitalized commands turn a horoscope into a performance of confidence. Its prediction that romance is imminent supplies an appealing story just as Kelly is weighing what she wants and how freely she can act on it.

The language returns in Kelly’s thoughts as she travels with The Senator. Recalling the prediction, she is called “Poor Scorpio” and “Cunning Scorpio”; the horoscope’s encouragement to demand her wishes is later recast as “Scorpio don't be shy,” and as a claim that she deserves to make her wishes known. The repetition connects the reading to her decision to leave Buffy’s gathering with The Senator, but it does not establish that astrology caused her choice. Rather, the forecast gives her a ready-made idiom for desires and impulses she is already confronting.

That idiom sits uneasily beside Kelly’s actual experience. On the dunes, as The Senator grips her bare shoulders and the surf beats nearby, she thinks both that the encounter cannot be happening and that something is going to happen that cannot be stopped. The scene’s mixture of eagerness and apprehension resists the horoscope’s cleanly empowering instruction: prediction turns desire into a promise, while Kelly’s own thoughts register uncertainty and momentum.

Belief, Skepticism, and Vulnerability

The novel makes the gap between horoscope and belief explicit. Kelly does not believe in astrology and regards it as idiotic. As a volunteer for the National Literacy Foundation of America, she is contemptuous of what she sees as ignorance and of people left behind by the progress of civilization. Her skepticism is part of a broader resistance to conservative fatalism: she rejects the notion, associated in her thoughts with Artie Kelleher and Hamlin Hunt, that people with limited understanding cannot be helped and that others should simply protect themselves.

Yet disbelief does not prevent the forecast from lodging in her imagination. The repeated address to “poor Scorpio” makes a joke of how easily she is bruised or dissuaded, and links the sign to her susceptibility rather than to any supernatural knowledge. Her age—twenty-six years and eight months—does not protect her from feeling exposed or uncertain. The horoscope’s appeal is therefore psychological and narrative: it offers an emphatic vocabulary for wanting, not reliable evidence about what will happen.

The contrast also appears in Kelly’s intimate relationships. The text recalls that G----- sometimes hurt her while making love, and that The Senator grips her hand hard enough to cause a perceptible pinch. On the beach, Kelly experiences the jolt of desire as the man’s desire rather than her own; after it, anxiety and guilt rise in the familiar form of feeling that having made someone want her means she cannot refuse him. Against the horoscope’s demand that she claim her wishes, these moments show how difficult it is for her to separate her own desire from male attention and pressure.

From Romantic Prediction to Physical Danger

The prediction’s most pointed irony emerges when romantic anticipation gives way to the car accident. Kelly has just been kissing The Senator; as the Toyota skids off the road and crashes through the guardrail into black water, she is still tasting the beer on his mouth. The sudden change from a forecast of wild romance to a struggle inside a sinking car makes the horoscope’s confident direction feel radically inadequate. Its promise cannot tell Kelly where she is, protect her, or make the events unfolding around her intelligible.

In the submerged car, astrological language is displaced by immediate bodily calculations. Kelly speaks loudly that she is there, tries not to waste oxygen, and understands that The Senator kicked her in blind panic as he attempted to escape. She retains faith that he acted without knowing what he was doing, but the horoscope offers no practical route out of the wreck. The gulf between its easy imperative to get one’s own way and Kelly’s confinement makes the limits of imagined agency concrete.

The novel nevertheless places a second astrological image beside the drowning. A passage headed “SCORPIO'S MYSTERY” describes Pluto as originally female, a daughter of Rhea, and imagines suppressed Scorpio powers returning with the dawning of a New Age, when the Scorpion evolves into the “PHOENIX RESURRECTED.” This mythology contrasts a feminized origin and resurrection with the familiar image of Scorpio as a sign addressed through romantic advice. Its language evokes transformation at the very moment the narrative shows how little control Kelly has over her physical circumstances; it should not be mistaken for a rescue or a confirmed rebirth.

The Sign’s Final Irony

Scorpio imagery finally gathers together impulses that the horoscope cannot reconcile: Kelly wants to act on desire, recognizes her susceptibility to others, and struggles to preserve her life when trapped. The star column turns wanting into a cheerful command, while the story makes the consequences of choice contingent on other people’s actions and on immediate physical danger. That contrast gives the horoscope its force as a recurring motif rather than as a governing explanation of events.

In the sinking car, Kelly bargains with the emergency rescue team in her imagination, offering her right leg or even both legs if amputation is necessary and promising not to sue. The desperate specificity of that imagined bargain sits far from the forecast’s glamorous demand for her own way. Survival has narrowed her wishes to a single exchange: any bodily cost, if only she can live. Scorpio’s promised romance and Phoenix-like resurrection thus remain charged images around her ordeal, not guarantees that it can be escaped.