I was too stunned to follow her. I just stood there, surrounded by my fishing gear, mouth hanging open.
I spent the rest of the time walking back and forth on the boardwalk, feeling like crap. This was useless. First of all, when I got out there, I realized the reason my nose had begun to sting in the sub shop. It would be fried by the time I got home, but I didn’t have enough money with me to buy sunblock. And every time I set out to cast a line, I saw the outcome of my expedition. No fish. It wasn’t that they weren’t biting. It was that my hands would be shaking too much to steadily reel in the line.
And Taryn somehow knew I could see the future.
All my life, I’d been hiding it from people, doing whatever I could to throw them off. I’d always wanted to have someone understand what was going on with me, but I knew that if I told, they’d never believe it. Or if I showed them what I could do, they’d be so freaked they’d run far away or summon men in white coats to take me to a laboratory for a lifetime of painful tests. But she believed it. She sought me out. And not only that, she acted like it made total sense.
Of course I always wondered why my mom and I were like this. There are pictures in the house of my mom when she was in high school. She was a cheerleader and on the debate team, and you could just tell that back then she was normal. She didn’t have the dark circles. She didn’t have the worry creases on her forehead. Nan said she “got it” around the same time I was born, whatever “it” was. I assumed it was me. Something about being pregnant with me. My mother would always say it had something to do with my dad, but she’d shut up whenever I tried to pry more out of her. I didn’t know who he was, but maybe he had something in his blood. Maybe he poisoned us.
But that was a long time ago. I’d never met my dad, never wanted to. And yeah, there was always something tugging at me, some hole begging to be filled. But he clearly couldn’t fill it. By the time I realized that he existed I was old enough to know that if he didn’t want to be in the picture, I didn’t want him there. I figured he probably saw me like everyone saw me. A freak.
That was my own father. So how could this girl I barely knew not see me that way?
“What is it like?” a voice said gently as I sat there, legs dangling over the side of the pier, staring at the ripples in the brown bay.
I knew she would be coming back, even after she found the fish in her “lunch.” I knew she would sit down next to me and her red toenails would glisten in the sun, against the backdrop of dark water. I knew her hair would smell like apples. “How was lunch?”
She wrinkled her nose. God, she was cute. “Great. Thanks.”
I didn’t apologize. The last time I did that, she told me to go away. I just sat there, feeling my nose baking and wondering if it was already stoplight-red. “Are you going to tell me how you knew?”
“Don’t you already know that? I mean, if you can see—”
I snorted. “You’d think.”
“So, like, do you know what’s going to happen right now?”
I shook my head. “No. Well, yeah. I knew you were going to ask that. But the further you go into the future, the more fuzzy things get. Because little things in the future change—you know, the butterfly effect. So I can see pieces of everything that could have happened, all the outcomes based on where I am at a certain moment. And at first, they all fight against each other, so I can’t tell which is real and which isn’t. After I stay on script for a while, it becomes clearer. I can figure out what’s real and what’s not. But it’s really hard to stay on script.”
She gasped. “On script? How do you—”
“You can remember best the things you just did, right? I can remember best things that are right about to happen. They’re more real to me. I call it my script. My You Wills. You know, you will start running. You will fall and smack your face against the pavement.…”
“Script? So wait. You actually see the phrase ‘You Will’ in your head, like in a real script?”
I shake my head. “No, I see myself doing those things in my head. If I stay on that script, my mind doesn’t get clogged up with lots of possibilities. It just stays on one future. But if I go off script, even a little—”
“So that day when we met, you were—”
“According to the script, I was supposed to save that girl. Emma. I saw myself saving her. Instead I met you. And my mind went haywire with all the new outcomes.”
She stared at me, uncomprehending at first. I saw the moment it made sense to her, because her breath hitched. “Oh, my God. Really?”
“Yeah. And now something’s going to happen, and I have to fix … Oh, forget it.” I’d never explained this to anyone, and it felt so foreign coming out of my mouth. Unbelievable, even to me. “Did you make the team?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
She nodded. “You?”
“Nah. Probably better if I’m not on it. I’d know when we were going to lose and just drag down team morale.” I meant it as a joke, but it came out bitter and sad.
She stared into the water for a minute. “Well, why did you even bother trying out? You must have known you were not going to make the team, right?”
I shook my head. “You would think. But it’s like this: think of the last movie you saw.”
“Okay.”
“Are you thinking of it?”
“Yeah.”
She said it so quickly and dismissively I thought there was no way she could be thinking of it. Without even realizing I was doing it, I said, “Wow, The Little Mermaid? Seriously?”
Her eyes grew wide for a second, then she glared at me. “I babysit a lot. How did you know that?”
“I can do it sometimes. If I have something concrete to focus on, I can just go forward into our future to where I find out what I need to know.”
Her jaw dropped. “You can do that?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. I mean, I can’t go too far into the future. A couple of minutes at most. Anyway, back to The Little Mermaid. Do you remember all the lines, everything that happened?”
“Yes.” When I raised my eyebrows, she smiled. “Like I said, I babysit a lot. I’ve seen the movie four hundred times.” Then she began to sing, “ ‘Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat. Wouldn’t you think my collection’s—’ ”
“All right. But with movies you’re not secretly obsessed with—”
“I’m not obsessed!” There was a small smile playing on her lips as she punched my arm. “Right. I only remember the really big things that happen.”
“Right. Or the dialogue or action or whatever that really hit home or meant something to you. Or just random things, pieces of the whole. But if you hadn’t seen the entire movie, and you just saw that random thing out of context, you’d be a little confused, right? That’s what I see. So no, I had a strong feeling, but I didn’t know for sure I wasn’t going to make the team. I guess it didn’t matter to me so much. I remember the things that matter more.”
She nodded. “Oh.”
I took a breath and suddenly I saw red velvet, like from a tent. A gypsy tent, like the ones on the boardwalk in the Heights. Taryn was standing there, beckoning me into the tent. Then, Old Scary Lady at a table, surrounded by red velvet. “Your grandmother is a fortune-teller on the boardwalk? Seriously?”
She gave me a severe look, like it was nothing to laugh about, and it was only then I realized I was kind of laughing. Because the fortune-tellers on the boardwalk were all old crackpots who were so senile they didn’t remember their own names. Only idiot tourists went to them. Of course Old Scary Lady was a fortune-teller. It totally fit.
“Well, why not?” Taryn said. “Hey, you shouldn’t knock it. She makes a good living. You could probably make a killing doing it.”
I shook my head. “I can only see my own future. And I don’t even see that very well. Like I said.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip, another one of the cutest little mannerisms I’d ever seen on a girl. “She’s not a fortune-teller, anyway. She’s a bibliomancer.”
“A what?”
“She can tell a person’s future by passages in certain books.”
“Passages in books? Sounds shady.”
“It’s an ancient practice,” Taryn said. “Dates back to medieval times, or so my grandmother says.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So, like, what does she do? Open up a book and just tell a person’s future from it? How does that work?”
“Well, it’s a little more scientific than that. Most bibliomancers use the Bible, but my grandmother has people bring in their own books. Whatever book they like best.”
I laughed. “I’m partial to Dr. Seuss. Can she do it with Green Eggs and Ham?”
It was like I was floating above my body, unable to stop myself. I didn’t even have to touch her to be at ease; just being near her made my mind calmer. Yeah, the script was still there, but muted, not so insistent. I was in danger of getting entirely too comfortable with her. Never had the one-liners come so easily to me, never had I felt so witty. Somehow, I was getting cocky again. She had that effect on me, I guess. But bad things had a way of happening whenever I got cocky. The script suggested politely to me to be quiet, and I agreed, stifling the laughter remaining in my throat.
She gave me a look that said she wasn’t happy with me taking it so lightly. Like she actually believed in that kind of crap. Then she picked through her beach bag. “Look, I’ll show you how it’s done. Pick a number between, say, um, one and fifty.”
“Look, I really don’t need any more help seeing my future, thanks.”
“It’s just a demonstration,” she said, producing a worn paperback.
I couldn’t see the title, but I could see a man and woman locked in an embrace, bare skin everywhere, on the cover. “Wait, you’re going to tell my future using”—I reached for the book and stared at its cover—“Sins of Tomorrow by Rebecca Stanhope? Epic.”
She turned a flattering shade of red. “I said, it’s just a demonstration. And it’s a very good book, despite the cheesy cover. Don’t make fun until you’ve read it.”
“Okay. Can I borrow it from you?” I said, studying the back cover. Something about a young woman who loses the love of her life in the war and then, after marrying another dude, discovers her first love is alive! He has amnesia and has no idea who she is, but “can her undying love rekindle the flame of their passion?” That’s what it said on the back cover. Definitely epic.
“When I’m done.” She stood and said, more insistent this time, “Pick a number.”
“Okay. Twelve.”
She closed her eyes and threw the book into the air. It landed on the boards on its back cover. “Wait.” She ran to it, picked it up, and did it again, with the same result. Then she did it again. It landed on its front cover this time. She sighed. “It’s easier with a hardcover. It’s supposed to land on an open page. Oh, well, let’s just pretend it landed on page … um …”
“Two-ninety-three?” I offered.
“Yes. Great.” She flipped the book open. “And starting with line twelve, it says, ‘ “Oh, Holden,” she murmured, as her kisses trailed down to …’ ” Taryn stopped and looked up, her face redder than ever.
“So what does that mean?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face. “Am I going to get it on with some guy named Holden?”
She stomped her feet on the boardwalk, but because she was so tiny and wearing rubber-soled flip-flops, it didn’t have any effect. “It. Is. Just. A. Demonstration!” She threw the book down again and this time it skittered toward the edge of the pier. I lunged to the side as it was happening and it landed in my waiting hands. “Saw that, did you?” she began, astonished by my foresight, and for a second, I felt proud of myself. Maybe even a little cocky. But it only lasted a second. The next thing I knew, I saw what was going to happen, clear as day.
You will lose your balance and fall backward into the water.
Damn. I couldn’t steady myself in time. I tried to save her book as I splashed into the bay, but it was no good. The water was over my head.
The water was slimy and gross, and fingers of seaweed entwined themselves around my toes. I surfaced, hair over my eyes, spitting out a mouthful of salty green water, then stroked as quickly as I could toward the rickety wooden ladder. Crabs that had been feasting on my bait were probably now looking at my ankles. “Are you okay?” I heard Taryn ask. When I wiped the veil of hair away, she was bending over the side of the pier, looking worried, either for my safety or for her reputation, being seen with such a spaz.
Did I say I felt cocky? Suddenly I felt like a spider must, trying to scurry up the side of the toilet bowl before it’s finally flushed.
When I climbed up, she laughed. “So, you didn’t see that one coming?”
“Um, sort of,” I said, water dripping off the end of my nose. “Too late, though.”
“Anyway, that passage might mean you’re going to have a whirlwind romance. Or something,” she said, blushing, as she waved the book in the air to dry it. The damage had been done, though. The pages were already starting to ripple. “Thanks for rescuing my book.”
“No problem,” I said, thinking how ironic it was. I might not be any good at saving toddlers, but dime-store paperbacks, I could handle. As I looked at the cover, with those two entwined semi-naked bodies, I was hit with a feeling that nearly knocked me back into the bay.
Her favorite color is red. She likes to make construction paper snowflakes. She lost her favorite aunt in a car accident. Her first pet, a goldfish, was named Harry. She has a bright-red birthmark on her upper thigh. The list went on and on. I’d known there was something about her, something that crushed my chest every time she turned to walk away, and here it was. I knew her well. Better than Sue, my former wife. Better than anyone. The weight of all that knowledge that a day ago hadn’t been there pushed me down to the rotten planks. She looked at me, lying on the boards like a dead fish, and I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t find the words. What could I say? Nice birthmark? The script had me fumbling around, tripping over my words again. And if I went off script, if I messed anything up, she could just become a stranger to me again.
But I had to go off script, as much as possible. I had to save Nan.
So we sat there for a moment, not saying much, while my mind was working overtime. Follow the script? Veer off a little and hope she still liked me? It wasn’t hard to follow the script; it just had me sitting there, next to her, quiet, afraid to say anything and mess things up. When I was almost dry, the script had me packing up to go home. I started to pull in my lines.
“Why don’t you just come with me?” she said, tugging on the sleeve of my T-shirt. “I want to show you something.”
There probably was nothing I wanted more than to follow her. But the thought of my grandmother kept intruding. That and the nagging suspicion that this undeniably cute girl couldn’t be so into me after all the stupid things she’d seen me do. There had to be something behind it. Maybe I’d wanted to know her so badly that I just made it all up in my head.
That was it. She was the one talking about how people always wanted things from her. Maybe she was thinking she could use me. Maybe she thought I could provide her with the winning Pick-6 numbers or tell her who was going to ask her to the homecoming dance. “Why?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Because. I might be able to help you.”
“You? Help me? Don’t you mean the other way around?”
“No. I mean, you can’t help me. No one can—”
“And the idea of picking winning lottery numbers never entered your mind?” I asked, crossing my arms.
She swallowed, looked away. She could have said something. She could have denied it. Instead, she said nothing. Her silence told me everything. The sun was so hot I was already almost dry, but because of the salt, my skin felt tight and itchy. Of course she wouldn’t be interested in me. How could I even think that? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Something stuck in my throat, making my words come out clipped and distorted. “Your grandmother used her”—I wiggled my fingers again—“powers to learn that I can see my future. Great. The secret’s out. I can fulfill my lifelong dream of appearing on national television as America’s Biggest Freak.”
She stared at me, confused.
“Don’t you get it? I can’t help you become a millionaire. And I can’t help you find true love or whatever. It doesn’t work that way. It sucks.” My muscles were so tense and my body so hot that I had the momentary compulsion to bolt out of there, leaving her, the fishing equipment, everything far behind. But then I took a breath, counted to ten. Exhaled. Felt better. My voice was calmer when I spoke next. “Look. I’d rather people not know. I just want to be normal.”
The confusion wasn’t leaving her face. And that’s when she said it. Well, she didn’t say it, because she didn’t have to. I heard her next words, clear as day in my head, before she even thought them. My grandmother did this. They were crazy. Absolutely insane. I interrupted her as she opened her mouth to speak. “That’s not possible.”
She stopped, her jaw slowly falling.
“How can your grandmother have anything to do with this?” I muttered, getting more and more disgusted by the minute. What the hell did she think this was? Some nifty little parlor trick? Our seeing the future was more than a living nightmare. It was constant, unstoppable, and wholly devastating. Something so terrible could only be explained as an act of God. It couldn’t be something that one being, one human created. That would make it seem so trivial, so silly, so small. And it was big. Big enough to ruin my life a thousand times over.
Taryn swallowed. She didn’t have to say it, but I let her words come out anyway, because maybe if they were outside of my head, that would make them more believable. And so she said it, exactly as I had imagined. But when the words were out there, hanging in the humid summer air, it didn’t help.
“Say that again,” I murmured.
Her face was serious. There was a hint of remorse in her eyes. “Nick. It’s true. My grandmother made you this way.”
I needed to get away from Taryn. Taryn, who was just as crazy as her grandmother, her all-powerful grandmother who somehow made me this way. Yeah, right. Once I scurried across Bayview Avenue and past Charlie’s ice cream shop, the cycling became a little steadier and I could make out some of the visions passing through my head. I could see my grandmother lying in that now familiar position at the bottom of the stairs, almost as if it had just happened. Somewhat more faded was the image of sunlight glimmering on the deep mahogany cover of a closed casket.
The sun was still hot enough to roast my shoulders and create a haze on the streets as I climbed the decaying concrete steps at the front of the house, flung open the screen door, and let it slam behind me. My mom had retreated to her bedroom, of course. I didn’t think she could stand being outside her tomb for longer than a few minutes. I climbed the stairs two at a time and they creaked as if the house was going to fall down. When I burst into her room, I realized I was sweating, out of breath, and still holding my fishing gear. Salt water sloshed from the bucket onto my feet and the hardwood floor. I knew Nan would scream bloody murder if she saw.
My mom looked up from the latest issue of People. I didn’t know how she could read that trash, but she had piles of celebrity tabloids in her room, littering the chairs, floor, and the tops of the dresser and night table. Who seriously cared what celebrities did in their effed-up lives? Most of them had everything going for them and still couldn’t manage to hold it together. But hey, I guess anything that worked to keep her mind off the future. She stared me up and down. “You got sunburned.”
I looked cross-eyed and saw that my nose was the exact color I’d seen in my vision. I wiggled it a little and it stung. Perfect. “Mom. Why is some fortune-teller on the boardwalk claiming that she’s responsible for making us the way we are?”
Her eyes went back to her magazine. “No idea,” she murmured.
I used my index finger to push the magazine down to her knees so that she’d look at me. “This girl knows I can see the future. I never told her. She just knew.”
“Is that so?” she asked, clucking her tongue. She shrugged and went into the same speech she used to give me when I was a kid and wanted to show off my abilities at show-and-tell. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would stay away from her. You know what could happen if you say too much. If you trust too much.”
“But she knows. I didn’t have to say a word. She just knows.”
“Oh, Nick. She doesn’t know. She suspects. That’s dangerous. The curious ones are always dangerous. Maybe she’s just perceptive. Some people are. Bill Runyon was. I still think that he might know. But they don’t have any way of proving it. And it’s not like this is of any use to anyone. If you keep your distance, she’ll leave us alone. We don’t want people coming around, asking questions. Believe me.”
“I got the feeling that she really understood it, though,” I said, sitting on the edge of bed. “And Mom, if she knew what started it, she might be able to tell us how to stop it.”
She shook her head. “That isn’t possible.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t you think I already tried everything possible?”
Actually, I didn’t think that at all. From my earliest memory, she’d been confined to this bed, hopeless. She’d never once talked to me about finding a way to stop the visions. “Did you?”
She sighed. “Do you really think I wanted you growing up like this? I did everything I could before you were born. And then I just prayed that it wouldn’t be passed on to you. But of course, I knew it would be. When I was pregnant with you, I went to fortune-tellers and gypsies and all those charlatans, hoping one of them could help me reverse the curse. But none of them could.”
“Curse?” I stared hard at her. It was the first time I’d ever heard it referred to as a curse. Usually it was just “the thing.” The thing I got, somehow, when she was pregnant with me. “But why did you say that Dad—”
She looked away. “We’ve been over this before. I don’t know what it is. I did a lot of stupid things, though, before I knew I was going to have you. One of those things was being involved with your father. You know it started around the same time I met him. Maybe … I don’t know. But I do know that there’s a good side to it, too.”
“Good?” She always insisted this, and yeah, she was right. Sometimes, every once in a while, we could juggle our futures and prevent bad things from happening. But ninety-nine percent of it sucked. That cool one percent never seemed worth it.
“Look, I’m tired. Can you please—”
“But what could Dad have done? And why does this girl know about it? What if she knows how to fix—”
“She doesn’t.” My mother cut me off, fuming. She leaned back in her bed. “And I said I’m tired.”
That was one problem with us communicating. We could have whole conversations without them ever taking place, but so many topics were completely closed to discussion. My dad was one of them. Nan was better about it, but every time I asked her how Mom and I ended up this way, I got the same story. My mom was normal until she was my age. She was pregnant and planning to marry my dad that summer. And then, something changed. Something intervened. This illness, this curse, whatever it was. It tore everything apart. By the end of the summer, my dad was gone and my mother, six months pregnant with me, had locked herself in her bedroom.
Nan opened the door to Mom’s bedroom then. Her eyes focused on the net and dripping bucket before anything else. She gasped at the water puddling on the hardwood. “This is not a bait shop!” she said to me, disappointed, and suddenly I had that feeling. The prickling feeling on the back of my neck, whenever something big was about to happen. I whirled around and Mom must have felt it, too, because her eyes were wider than silver dollars and her face paler than its normal pale.
My grandmother stepped toward the staircase, muttering something about how I needed to be more responsible and how she was always cleaning up after me like I was some three-year-old, and the entire scene flashed before my eyes.
You will hear her muffled groans as she slips on a puddle of salt water and falls down the stairwell. You will rush to the top of the stairs and slip once yourself on the water you spilled. She will be dead before you get there. You will see the pool of blood already—
I’m not sure how I ended up at the top of the stairs. I slipped twice on the salt water and kicked up the worn braided throw rug on my way, but before I could take even one breath I was beside Nan. She’d just begun to lose her balance on the top step and I saw her bare feet slipping out from under her. She turned her head toward me with a frightened look in her eyes, her mouth shaped as if letting out a silent scream, at the same time I moved toward her. I reached out and grabbed her by the upper arm, using, in my overexcitement, far too much force than common sense would dictate I should use with her. When I pulled her up toward my chest, toward safety, there was a sickening popping sound.
But she was safe. I hoisted her in my arms to the other side of the banister and set her down on steady ground, while she let out a little terrified squeak. “My arm,” she said.
It hung down at her side, limp. She tried to lift it but winced. The cycling began at once in a torrent, a hailstorm thudding against my eye sockets, but I knew for sure that her arm was broken. Despite the pain in my head, I sighed with relief. The alternative was a lot worse.
My mother stood in the doorway to her room, clutching the side of her head with one of her hands and wincing a little despite a small, contradictory smile on her face. “See?” she said to me. “The good side.”