Touched

If you have this uncanny ability to see your own future, it’s not a good idea to let other people in on it.

After Carrie Weldon moved away, the Crazy Cross thing calmed down. I was nine when I met my first, and only, best friend. He liked me despite my everyday weirdness. Or at least, he tolerated it.

So say you’re nine, and your best friend tells you that he’s going to Disney World with his family and suddenly you realize that if he gets in that station wagon, he’ll never be the same. He’s so excited, parading around in his mouse ears and talking about the Tower of Terror like it’s his life’s purpose, but you just know something bad is going to happen. You can see the vigil at the elementary school, and you know that your grandmother will try, and fail, to hide the newspaper from you, the one with the article about the horrific ten-car pileup on Interstate 95. So you warn him. You scream at him that he can’t go. You even go to his house late at night and let the air out of the tires of his parents’ station wagon.

Of course, doing that means they have to get the wagon towed to the gas station so the tires can be inflated again, and when they do leave, two hours later than planned thanks to some stupid prankster, they arrive in Orlando safe and sound. They have a lovely trip and return home with a slew of pictures and one former best friend who thinks that you are a complete nutcase and never comes within ten feet of you again.

Well, unless it’s to pretend to offer you his hand to hoist you onto the boardwalk.

Evan Sphincter and I used to be best friends. A lifetime ago. Back when he didn’t have rippling muscles that made all the girls line up for him. And okay, maybe it wasn’t just that one incident that forced us apart. There were probably a thousand and one incidents where I acted weird or said something weird or looked weird, and each one drove that wedge between us deeper and deeper.

I tried to be normal. I tried to blend in, to not make waves. But this thing affected me every moment of every day. So I learned not to get too involved with anyone. Every year it got easier. Over time, pretty much everyone had discovered Crazy Cross was not someone to associate with.

I don’t really know why I wanted to go out for track that year. I loved running, and I was damn good at it, but I’d always shied away from organized sports. I guess I thought it was something normal people would do. Like lifeguarding. I think I’d gotten cocky, managing to keep that same future intact for three whole months. Managing to be not just a lifeguard but also a good one. I’d surprised myself this summer. When I’d penciled my name on the sign-up sheet for tryouts, I had this new, invincible feeling, like, I can do this. I thought all that Crazy Cross stuff was finally behind me.

Wrong.

I tried not to think of Emma as I started the mile, but of course I did. I couldn’t shake the vision of her small limbs sprawled on the sand, lifeless.

Normal. Yeah.

Anyway, I was a good runner. If I’d been normal, I bet I could have been a great one. I ran steadily, navigating around the few late-day beachgoers with umbrellas and chairs. The other runners lagged behind me; even with the headache from hell, I was on track for a record. I wasn’t even out of breath. A couple of hot girls in bikinis grinned at me. I’m not bad-looking; I’m tall, with thick black hair and an okay build, maybe not as good as Sphincter’s, but I always got looks from girls. After a minute or so, though, my charm wore off. I’d develop a tic or nervously go off in one direction or another, blowing it. This accounted for me being seventeen and never having gotten to second base with a girl. Even my first base was on account of an error; I’d been running on the boardwalk late one night, which I sometimes did to calm my mind, and when I stopped at the fountain to get a drink, a drunk girl must have thought I was her boyfriend because she grabbed me and kissed me.

Kissing soft lips, blond curls in my eyes

The image lit a fire under me. My pace quickened even more. It was the second time this afternoon that I’d had that memory. How could that be real? The picture was so strong I got lost in it. I forgot everything, even the simple rhythm of my legs pumping and my feet pounding on the boards. But when I passed the entrance for the Seventh Avenue beach, everything changed. I lost the rhythm. My lungs constricted and burned. The last image I saw was that of the little girl, lying dead on the sand.

You killed our Emma

Suddenly, I fell forward, onto my knees, so unexpectedly that I didn’t have time to put my hands out to stop the fall. I smashed my face against the boardwalk. Then I rolled off, onto the sand, gasping and choking.

Coach Garner was a guy who perpetually smelled like Bengay and probably clicked on his stopwatch buttons in his sleep. He’d never run, even if something with large teeth was chasing him. When he stood over me, his beer gut blocked out the sun. “Wow. Just wow.”

I hoped he was talking about how masterfully I’d run that first nine-tenths of a mile.

“That was the most pathetic fall I’ve ever seen.”

Eh. I rolled over and propped myself up on one elbow. Across the way, a bunch a girls giggled at me, but I wasn’t sure if they were part of the regular group of people who giggled at me, or new ones, because my vision was blurred. I looked down and saw blood soaking into my white tech shirt. My knees were dotted with blood and sand and little black splinters.

“So, um, does that mean I didn’t make the team?”

Coach Garner laughed long and loud, like Santa Claus with a sadistic streak, then turned and ambled away without bothering to help me up. I scrambled to my feet, still feeling woozy. Then I tilted my head back and shuffled over to a bench, squeezing my nose, which by this time was seriously gushing. I think bits of major organs were leaking out. Every runner in school was staring at me, and most were laughing their asses off.

“Good one, Crazy Cross,” Sphincter called across the fence to me, flashing me a thumbs-up. He was standing with The Sergeant, who was giving him the ol’ New School Record shoulder rub and watching me like I was a glob of gum in danger of getting on his son’s running shoe.

Rotting from the inside, I repeated to myself, over and over so that it drowned out the next You Will. Screw them.

Before I could sit down, someone came up beside me. At that moment, I knew who it was. My stomach lurched even before I heard her say, “That looks bad.”

I looked up for only a second. She was wearing the same exact expression she’d worn earlier today—a horrified kind of confusion. Was I doomed to always see her every time my head was exploding, or about to? Yeah, that totally explained why she would be kissing me. Maybe that wasn’t part of my future. I’d probably wanted it so bad that I’d just been hallucinating.

“Nah … too … bah,” I said, trying to act casual but feeling the blood course over my upper lip with every word.

She sat down on the bench beside me and handed me a crumpled tissue. I clamped it over my nose, but it was soaked in a matter of seconds.

“You should go to the hospital.”

I waved her away with my free hand. “Naw. I gef nofbleehs all de time.”

“Your knees are bleeding, too,” she pointed out. “And your forehead. And your elbows. Well, just one of them.”

I lowered my head slowly, still covering my nose, and inspected my knees as if that news didn’t completely freak me out. Sure enough, blood was running down my knees, pooling at the cuffs of my socks. Rocky had had it better after his fight with that Russian dude. I pointed to the lifeguard stand. “Well, in that caif, I gueff I’ll go and geh a few Band-Aids.”

She stood up. “I’ll go with you.”

I knew she would offer to come, and that I would protest. By that time, the pain in my joints was getting unbearable. Not wanting to look like a total wimp in front of her was the only thing keeping me from weeping. “Nof nefeffary.”

“Sure it is. You might have a concussion.”

“Naw, I’m fine.”

“That’s what my uncle said after he was rear-ended. And then two days later he nearly dropped dead.”

“Uh …” The last time I’d met her, I’d also told her to leave me alone so she wouldn’t have to witness my breakdown. The script had me accepting her offer and her holding on to my good arm as we limped down the beach. The script had me … Oh, hell. The script had me crying in front of her because it hurt so bad. That kiss had to have been a hallucination. There was no way she’d want to get with me voluntarily after this.

When we stood up, my nose had stopped bleeding, so I didn’t have to squeeze it shut. As we passed some girls, they stared after us. I thought they were just gawking at the dumbass who’d performed his own facial reconstruction, but then a short girl with a pixie haircut called out, “We’ll wait for you by the car if you’re not back by four, okay?”

The girl was looking right at us and there was no one else around, so I guessed they were her friends. She had cute friends, ones I had never seen before. She had to be a freshman, and considering the number of hot girls in that group, a popular one. But the weird thing was, instead of answering, she just kept on walking toward the lifeguard stand.

“Hey, Tar! We’ll wait for you! By the car! Okay?” Pixie called out, a little louder, her voice an octave higher with desperation.

The angel just swung her head back and called over her shoulder, “Fine!” then muttered under her breath, “Whatever.”

Okay. Didn’t know what the hell that was about. They seemed nice enough; some of the other kids nearby reenacted my trip as I walked past them, but one of her “friends,” a tall girl with crazy black hair, called after me, “Take care of yourself.” I really couldn’t think about it, though, because I was beginning to feel light-headed. I blinked a few times, hoping I didn’t lose consciousness from the blood loss.

“Don’t feel bad. I’m a little bit of a klutz myself,” the angel said brightly. I knew she was just saying that to be nice, since her every movement was done with the grace of a ballet dancer. Even when I’d pulled her out of the way of that truck, she’d looked good. I noticed some of my blood had gotten on her bare shoulder, but I felt awkward rubbing it off. In my half-assed state I probably would have grabbed her boob. Sadly enough, that would have been, like, the most action I’d ever gotten from a girl. “And who needs cross-country anyway?”

The script had me completely mute, trying to think of something to say. Finally, I put a sentence together. “You know, you don’t have to be nice to me.”

“What do you mean?” I noticed she had a little accent, one I couldn’t place. Not the annoying kind, but the kind that melts hearts.

“I mean, just because I helped you today. It’s okay.”

“Oh, I know.”

“So, what? Is it Be Nice to Dorks Day or something?”

She laughed. “Are you a dork? You’re not a dork.”

I nodded. “I am. Ask anyone. I don’t have a single friend at the school.”

“That’s not true. You have me.”

“You can have any friends you want. You already have a lot of them. Don’t think you need me. Go be with them. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, yeah … those guys.” She motioned to the cute girls on the boardwalk and screwed up her face. “Fake, fake, fake. They want things from me. I try to get away from them and they just follow me. It makes me so sick. You don’t, though.”

I tried to figure out what she meant. Just what did people want from her? She seemed to like hearing me tell her to get the hell away. I’d heard girls liked it when guys treated them like crud, something which boggled my mind. I didn’t want to find out that she was one of those stupid girls, so I just said: “It depends on what you have. I accept monetary donations.”

She laughed. Whoa. I’d never said anything that made a girl laugh before. “Do you live around here?” she asked.

“Um. Yeah. Seventh.”

“Oh. I’m in the Heights.”

The Heights was about two or three miles away from Seventh. “That was a long run you were taking this afternoon,” I said.

She shrugged. “Five miles or so.” I was just trying to understand what lunatic would run that far, before tryouts, at the hottest time of the day, when it was over ninety degrees, when she said, “I run because it helps me think. I kind of have a lot to think about.”

I nodded. Couldn’t argue with that.

We reached the lifeguard stand, and I hadn’t cried yet. I was silently congratulating myself for that accomplishment when she said, “You know, you are really brave. I’d be crying.”

I smirked. Actually, she’d taken the edge off the pain, made it tolerable. I realized I wouldn’t be able to shake her; she was planning on coming in with me and watching the lifeguard bandage me up. This girl was harder to avoid than the flu. And there was something about her. Something that just seemed … right. It was all adding up to one thrilling and terrifying realization:

I had a chance with this girl.

Geoff, a lifeguard, ushered me into his seat on the stand when he saw me. He didn’t have the gentle, female nurse’s touch my hormones would have really liked, so when he started to swab up my knee, I winced.

And this girl, this angel, stayed with me the whole time.

I knew I would eventually fall madly in love with her. But I’d had no idea it would start right then.





Twenty minutes later, I walked her back to the street. By then it was pretty dead. The sun was starting to slump in the sky. Most of the late-day beachgoers were gone and her friends weren’t there. It was completely quiet except for the crash of waves, the ping-ping-ping of the flag’s metal hardware striking the flagpole in the breeze, and an occasional screech of a seagull. The angel broke the awkward silence by saying, “Well, I just wanted to say thank you. Um, you know. For saving me this afternoon. You’re my hero.”

I thought of Emma. Yeah, right, me a hero. My lips moved in answer, but nothing came out.

She took in a sharp breath and moved away from my side a little, like she was about to say “See you” and leave. Like most girls did after a minute in my presence. It was like I could almost see any chance I had with her ticking away in those moments. Before she could go, I opened my mouth, still not sure what I would say, so I looked kind of like a fish gulping water. When I asked the question, I realized I already knew the answer. “Uh. So you—you go to Central?”

I cringed at how unsmooth I could be, while at the same time this creeping sensation overtook me. Something about her, about us, was weird. I couldn’t place it, which was why I stared at her with my mouth open, as if trying to pull something out of the far corner of my brain. She didn’t notice. “Yeah. Well, I will be.” She nodded her head a little like a yo-yo. “Just moved here from Maine a few weeks ago.”

“Er. Oh.” My hands were shaking so much I had to lace my fingers together. I’d sometimes had a fantasy—and this was definitely a fantasy, there was no mistaking it for my future—of me being smooth with the ladies, of always knowing what to say and when. I’d practiced those slick phrases over and over again in my head, but whenever I had the opportunity to actually use them, I’d failed miserably. Words would pile up over one another, confused in the jumble of future thoughts passing through my mind. This time, I opened my mouth and one of those cool witticisms came out. It didn’t even sound stilted. “What brings you to Sleazeside?”

She screwed up her face, confused. “Sleaze? Why? I think it’s nice here.”

The momentary sense of victory I’d felt dissolved into a pang of fear over having to speak again. But I handled it well. “Well, it’s not exactly Falmouth.”

“Well, no, but—” She paused. “Wait. How did you know I lived in Falmouth? Did I say that?”

“Um, yeah, you did,” I said, but all the while something began to dawn on me. She hadn’t. And yet I knew. I knew that and … and while she lived there, she liked to go out to the pier at the back of her house and eat peanuts and feed them to the seagulls. She had a red bikini that she never wore because she was always too cold and hated sunburn and sand in her suit, and one day she made the top into a flag and put it on her little sailboat, which she called The Mouse, after her first pet hamster she had when she was three.…

Whoa.

Her voice broke through then. “Oh. I guess I did.” I could feel her eyes on me, heavy, like they were cracking through the flimsy disguise I’d set up.

I expected her to run like hell in the other direction. But again, she didn’t. Instead, she plopped down in the sand and motioned me over with her chin. She wanted me to sit next to her. When I walked over, the sun reflected off her eyes; they were almost the color of the sky, so light blue they were almost white. I didn’t say anything as I sat. I was afraid of saying something else about her I shouldn’t have known. I swallowed, thinking of her in that little sailboat.

She filled in the silence. “My dad lost his job at the semiconductor factory, and we had to move in with my grandmother.” She wrinkled her nose. “Gram’s a little whacked.”

She had no idea what whacked could look like.

She was quiet for a moment, sifting sand through her fingers. “I heard what happened here today.”

I reached over, snatched a handful of black witch’s-hair seaweed, and started yanking it apart. “Yeah, it was a bad day.”

“I saw the ambulances. The Reeses are Gram’s neighbors. They live next door to us. She used to sit for …” She trailed off when she saw my body tense. “You probably don’t want to hear this.”

I let out a short laugh. “Bingo.”

She shrugged. “Fair enough. But it’s no wonder you fell. You’re obviously upset. Why did you …?”

“I just wanted to do the normal thing, I guess.”

She snorted. “The normal thing would have been to go home and sleep it off. At least, that’s what I would have done.” I cringed as she said that. Of course I didn’t know what was normal. I couldn’t even pretend to know. “Anyway, it’s not your fault.”

“I know,” I lied, not wanting to talk about it anymore. To her, it wasn’t my fault, but she didn’t know I’d knowingly left an unfit guard in my place.

More awkward silence. I put out my hand, lamely, wondering all the while if that was the way casual introductions were supposed to go, or if I would look too formal, like a bank teller extending her a loan. “I’m Nick.”

She looked at my hand and contemplated it for what seemed like a lifetime. Then she sighed and took only my fingertips in her hand. Her hand was soft, surprisingly cool. Mine felt all sweaty next to hers, and probably not just from the run. “Taryn,” she said, but I knew that already. That she was Taryn was as obvious as a house being called a house or a bird being a bird.

Before I could search for another slick thing to say, something happened. Something big.

My mind went quiet.

No cycling. No You Wills …

Everything. All the future memories. Just gone.

I was too busy trying to figure out what had happened to notice that her smile had disappeared. Her hand trembled, and she wrenched it away from me. It was almost like … could she feel it? No, that was crazy. Her blond corkscrew curls whipped in her face in the ocean breeze, but I could have sworn she mouthed the words “Oh, God.”

Damn. I knew my palms were sweaty, but they weren’t that bad.

“She told me I could feel it when I touched them,” she whispered to herself, looking out onto the horizon. “I didn’t believe … Oh, God.”

I squinted at her. Now who was acting crazy?

As if she’d heard my thoughts, she shook her head, scrambled to her feet, and edged back from me, as if she was afraid. Of me. She said something dismissive like “I’ll see you around” and then turned away.

As I watched her hurry up the beach, toward the boardwalk, my mind began to rev again, whirring until it felt like the bones of my skull would shatter.

You will stand and make your way back to the boardwalk, slowly.

And so it began again.





My life was pretty depressing as a whole, but watching Taryn walk away was probably the most depressing thing I’d ever really experienced. My stomach started to churn and then there was this pain—this squeezing pain in my chest. I had an overwhelming desire to run after her, to beg her to stay. In fact, as she walked down the ramp toward Ocean Avenue, I took a few steps after her, stopping in my tracks when I realized I couldn’t do that. She would have thought I was a lunatic. We were practically strangers.

At least, to her, we were.

You always hear those stories. Two people meet, get married, live for decades and decades together. When one of them dies from old age, the other one, though perfectly healthy, falls ill and dies a month later. There’s always some medical explanation, but at the funeral, most people would nod knowingly and whisper that the real cause was a broken heart.

After Taryn left, all the glee I’d felt from finally being able to say more than three sentences to a girl without completely freaking her out deteriorated into this horrible feeling of emptiness. The squeezing pain inside got worse, like my heart was being stepped on. I spent my walk home rubbing my chest and cursing myself for the stupid thing I’d done to drive her away.

Whatever that was. I’d been running, so maybe I stank. I picked up my T-shirt and sniffed. Not so bad. The salt in the air kind of overpowered any other smell. She’d bolted right after shaking my hand, so maybe my palms were sweaty. Maybe she hated calluses. I looked at my palms, then rubbed them against my shorts. Bits of hardened skin caught on the nylon.

Yeah, that was probably it. Driven to a heart attack at seventeen because of my chapped hands. Fitting end to my life.

By that time, I was sick of the constant headache that came with not doing what I was told, so I followed the script home. Two leather-skinned older women in bikinis glared at me from the porch of their stately mansion as I passed them. Though Nan had lived here decades longer than those ladies, they still treated us more like dirt than like neighbors. The only person on our street who talked to us was the cat lady, but that was because with more than a hundred cats, she had her own issues. Our house was the only tiny bungalow on the block, and surrounded by megamansions, so it was dark and overshadowed most of the day. Sunshine never made the mistake of leaking through our windows. When Nan was growing up, all the houses had looked like ours: tiny and cramped, with rotting black shingles. I’d seen pictures. But now it was common practice to tear down the bungalows and build up to the sky to get that priceless ocean view. These monstrosities either had yards filled with millions of perfect smooth white pebbles, or even worse, lawns with grass so green and unnatural it looked spray-painted. To me, those lush lawns were just plain wrong. They didn’t belong here. But I guess from the way those old ladies looked at us, they felt the same way about me.

If people knew we could see the future, they’d probably think we could have had our own mansion. That we could have had a lot of things, if we wanted them. One night, I was sitting in front of the television watching the Pick-6, and I said every number two seconds before the ball shot out of the popcorn popper. Of course that gave me an idea. I thought I could stretch it, so that I saw the Pick-6 numbers early enough for Nan to buy a ticket. But the thing was, I couldn’t. Things like Pick-6 numbers were short-term memory. The numbers only occurred to me a few seconds before they were drawn. Before that, they were lost in the muddle of outcomes competing in my head. Besides, Nan was dead against using our power for profit. Every time I thought of a way, she’d just roll her eyes. “We’re perfectly comfortable,” she’d say, looking out the kitchen window, past the plump red tomatoes ripening on the sill. “Besides, money is the root of all evil.” Nan was like a brick wall when it came to certain things, and this was one of them. Eventually, I stopped asking, though she would never get me to believe that only evil stemmed from money. Some good came out of it, too. Like a new iPod. Or running shoes with treads that hadn’t been worn so smooth that running sometimes felt like ice-skating.

My muscles and head hurt as I climbed the steps, and once again I couldn’t tell if the pain was from the fall on the boardwalk or some horrible future memories swirling in my head, waiting to be unleashed from my subconscious. The thing clearest in my mind, besides the unraveling of the script, was Taryn. Somehow, everything I knew about the future disappeared when I’d touched her hand. Somehow, she already meant so much to me that my chest ached for her, even though we’d only met a few hours ago. As I opened the screen door, one clear thought stood out from all the others rattling around in my head: there was something different about her, and I had to find out what.

Nan lay in her silver-blue pleather recliner. It had a combo of red plaid dish towels and packing tape over the arms to hide the rips there. She kept the packing tape on the card table nearby since a new rip sprang up every time she sat in the chair. It was the same recliner she’d pass away in. She was watching Wheel of Fortune. Okay, not really watching. Snoring and staring at Pat Sajak with one glazed eye. Behind her, on the kitchen table, was a plate covered with foil.

The fish.

I pulled off the wrapping and, not finding a fork nearby, tore off a ragged piece of whitefish and popped it in my mouth. The salt stung my tongue. Gagging, I found a Coke in the fridge and downed most of it in one swallow. Funny how my knowledge of the future never seemed to protect me from things like that.

Then I heard my mother upstairs, the creaking of her mattress springs. She couldn’t understand why I tried to live a normal life. She thought that in order to truly control her own destiny, she had to remove herself from everything. And I guess it worked, somewhat. It never really mattered what she did in her room; because she always did the same things, like clockwork, it very rarely affected me in such a way that I would cycle. If she did go off script, say, choosing to watch Die Hard instead of Gladiator, it didn’t change her or my future a heck of a lot. But she had learned that even confinement didn’t make her immune to pain. If it was up to her, she’d isolate all of us. I could still remember being four years old, and my mom holding me to her chest. Sobbing. Just stay here, Nicholas. Stay with me. It’s the only safe place.

She saw that loft bedroom as her sanctuary. I saw it as a coffin.

I’d even told her that, once, a year or two ago. “It just became too much,” she’d told me. As if I hadn’t seen her and Nan and so many others die over and over again. As if I hadn’t lost enough. I didn’t care. No way was I becoming a hermit. Not if I could help it.

Just then, Nan turned to me, still bleary-eyed. “Oh, honey bunny. What happened to you?”

“Nan, the weirdest thing happened to me after tryouts,” I said, ignoring her question. “My mind … stopped.…”

“And so why do you look like you just took a beating?”

I’d totally forgotten, but the second she mentioned it my wounds began to sting. “I fell.…” I tried to explain, but as I stared at Nan, my mind went into overdrive, forcing the script to the background. It revved for a second, and in that second I stopped talking, the memory popped into my head. A memory of the future.

Of Nan. With that halo of clownish orange hair. Lying in fetal position at the bottom of the loft staircase, surrounded by broken plates and what was likely the remainder of Mom’s breakfast.

Her head was perfectly encircled by a large pool of blood.

“Nan!” I shouted instinctively, as if the danger was only seconds away.

She startled and kicked up the recliner. Her eyes ran over my body, probably looking for bleeding wounds.

I slunk backward, feeling guilty. She had diabetes and high cholesterol and all the other things that went along with enjoying food too much; I could have given her a heart attack. And for what reason? The vision could have been of tomorrow, the next day … who knew? I knew it would be soon, because in that vision, her hair was still the wrong color, that neon orange she’d accidentally dyed it. But it wasn’t going to happen right now. “Uh, nothing. Uh. Have anything for dessert?”

Her eyes narrowed for a second, then softened. She’d long since given up on trying to figure me out. “There’s a new half gallon of Turkey Hill ice cream in the freezer.”

I opened the freezer door and took the ice cream out.

“That fish was plain awful, wasn’t it?” she called into the kitchen. “I don’t think I’ve ever fouled up so bad in all my life.”

“It was okay,” I muttered, thinking, Just wait.…

I trudged upstairs intending to take a shower but stopped as I was gathering my towel and things and threw them against the shower curtain. My toothbrush made a little chip in the ceramic on the tub, almost a perfect square. I sat there for the rest of the night staring at it, resisting the script, which kept telling me to get myself clean. It hurt like hell, but I’d fight everything that was in the script, with every ounce of strength that I had. That useless, piece-of-crap script that was leading Nan to an early death.