Meeting Sphincter was like throwing a bucket of water on whatever fire was going between us. Taryn still held my hand, which would have been a good sign if it hadn’t grown cold, stiff. I thought about asking her what was wrong, but I really didn’t want to know the answer. What about Sphincter had gotten her crying? I don’t think I could have looked at her the same if she and Sphincter had … well, if she and Sphincter had anything.
We got off the ride without a sound and stopped at the rack to get our bikes. Taryn had to let go of my hand to unlock her bike, and when she did, the You Wills began immediately. She saw the look of pain on my face and offered to hold my hand again, but it didn’t matter. I was going to have to deal with it sooner or later anyway. So we walked our bikes all the way back to her street, not talking much. By then I was feeling a little better. Still woozy, but the stabbing pain between my eyes was gone.
“So,” she said when we got to her driveway, tipping her head in the direction of the Reeses’ house. “Funeral’s tomorrow. Are you going?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I mumbled as my head pounded away. I felt that pain in my stomach again. Of course I would be there.
She narrowed her eyes. “I know it was probably traumatic for you. Are you blaming yourself?”
I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to talk about it at all, but I nodded. “I saw the other future. The one where I saved her.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You did everything you could.”
I shook my head, shook her hand away. A You Will popped through immediately, wanting me to get home. Instead, I looked at my feet. “I knew Pedro was not fit to be on watch. But I did nothing. I should have said something. But I didn’t, because I wanted to stay on script. You see? It was my fault.”
Her hand found its way back to mine. The cycling stopped again. A wave of exhaustion swept over me, as if my mind was sick of starting and stopping again and again. She whispered, “It’s Pedro’s fault. Not yours.”
I nodded. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She just held my hand for a while. Then I said, “I’d better go.”
She nodded, and I dropped her hand and started to walk away. Immediately these things found their way into my head: beauty, harder to kidnap, Saint Christopher. That was when she called after me. “Have you ever been to one?”
I swallowed and, for some reason, tasted grass. I could feel the blades of grass and earth on my tongue. I brought my hand to my mouth and licked it, expecting my hand to be black, but it wasn’t. Instead, my eye began to pulsate with pain. I moved the muscle in my cheek up and down. Yeah. It felt like I’d been punched there. What the hell? When I turned back to her, she was staring at me with an expression I’d come to know so well: horrified confusion. I tried my best to cover it up. “I, um, had a hair in my mouth. Been to one of what?”
She let it slide. “A funeral.”
I started to say yes and then shrugged. I’d been to dozens, in the future. Lucky for me, none of them had worked its way into my past. The real thing was probably a lot more unpleasant than the memory. “No,” I finally said.
She laughed. “Which is it?”
“Long story,” I said, not able to say more. My head was aching so much, I felt it down to my jaw. Probably my mom was having the same feeling. Good. For the first time, I was glad. This time, I wanted her to hurt.
“Okay. You can tell me later. So want to go together?”
My heart thumped. She wanted to see me again. Yes! I hadn’t screwed everything up yet. And whatever history she had with Sphincter, it didn’t matter. But then I thought about Nan’s boat of a car, sitting in our dusty driveway. I thought of the way my hands shook on the steering wheel, of how I had trouble most times meeting the speed limit, even on residential streets. I started to sweat. “I, um, don’t … I mean, I guess I could pick you up.… Ten-thirty okay?”
“Oh, great!”
We spent another long moment standing there, outside her house. I counted four anthills in her driveway.
Here was the point when a normal guy would have gone in for the kill. Instead, I froze up. Sure, Taryn came off as innocent and angelic. But I found myself wondering what trouble she’d actually gotten into in Maine. Most likely she was a lot more experienced than me. Didn’t take much to be that way, but still. The opportunity to majorly screw up that future I’d seen of her, of us together, was right here. Right now.
And so I blew it. “See you,” I tossed over my shoulder, as if I’d been talking to just anyone. I cringed almost immediately after I pulled my bike away from the curb.
And then I went back to face the future memories that had been flapping around in my mind like wounded birds.
Nan had this 1976 Buick that was the color of calcified dog crap. It was built like a tank, all square edges, and had one of those bench seats that took a team of oxen to move into position. The Buick turned more heads than a car accident when it came down the road. It was so god-awful, people would crane their necks to see the unfortunate owner. Not like they could see little Nan behind the massive steering wheel, which was the size of a monster truck’s tire. The Buick wouldn’t fit in a regular garage, but that was fine with Nan because, as she would proudly tell you, we had the only three-car garage in town. Our garage was bigger than our house, so the car was very comfortable among Nan’s strange collections of things, like the scoops from coffee cans and used pop-up turkey timers. It only had twenty-three thousand miles on it, “a classic!”, as Nan would say. She only used it to go to the A&P and church every Sunday. She walked everyplace else.
As the sun began to melt orange against the horizon, I got Nan into the passenger’s seat and slid behind the massive wheel, where Saint Christopher stared at me from a placard on the dashboard. I gripped the wheel and inched out of the garage like an old man.
Wow. I really needed the practice. Taryn would be wanting me like crazy after this ride.
It went without saying that I didn’t like driving. Before that day I hadn’t driven since I passed my driver’s test at the beginning of the summer. Something about seeing all the accidents I could cause rubbed me the wrong way. Once, when I had my learner’s permit, I thought about flipping on the radio but saw a ten-car pileup. There were just too many opportunities to cause bad things to happen on the road. But today Nan was drugged on something that had her snoring between sentences, not to mention she was down an arm, so it looked like I wouldn’t be able to avoid driving. She’d cornered me the second I got home and told me I had to take her to the pharmacy on the mainland, because she’d realized this afternoon she’d run out of heart pills. She’d called Ocean Pharmacy on the island for a delivery, but they didn’t have the kind she needed, and she was desperate.
But that was okay, I told myself. Normally I would have been a wreck. Despite the weird way it had ended, the afternoon with Taryn had me feeling good. Like maybe I could live a seminormal life, with someone who finally understood what I was going through. Getting there, I was fine. I joked with Nan about how she looked like she had been in a prizefight and how she could tell everyone “the other guy looks worse.” I turned up the modern-rock station on the radio and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music. I thought about how soft and small Taryn’s hand felt against mine.
On the way back, though, I lost it. It wasn’t simply the act of driving, of pressing on the gas pedal, that freaked me out. I made it over the bridge from Toms River (can’t tell you how many times I envisioned the Buick careering over the railing and into the bay) and all the way down Central, carefully following the You Wills right down to the letter. But when I was navigating around town hall, not half a mile from Nan’s cottage, it hit me.
Glass shards spraying in my face icy water droplets the smell of peanut butter
What the …?
Instinctively I squeezed my eyes shut, and doing so, I slammed on the brakes. Nan grabbed the armrest. A car horn blared behind me and a red pickup swerved around me. The driver gave me the finger.
It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be my future. First of all, I hated peanut butter. The smell made me so sick that I couldn’t stand it. And the car was all wrong. It wasn’t the easily recognizable Buick, with the tan pleather inside and St. Christopher staring from the dashboard. Nothing about it was vaguely familiar. It could have been something that would happen fifty years in the future, or maybe it wasn’t real at all. Maybe it was just me getting all worked up about driving, as usual. I needed to stay away from Skippy, which was no problem since just thinking about it made my stomach churn, and stick to my bicycle; again, no problem because I hated driving anyway.
I looked over at Nan. For someone who’d missed her last heart pill, this was probably not the best experience to have. She started to say something to comfort me and then began snoring again.
I clenched my jaw. No matter how good things were with Taryn, nothing could protect me. This curse always found ways to remind me who was boss.
Thanks, Mom.
Carefully, I pulled into our driveway and inched the boat into the garage. I helped Nan out and drew the massive wooden doors closed, then stared at the cottage. Something was going to be off in there. I felt the tingles already.
I helped Nan up the three stairs to the back of the house, and when the screen door slammed, I heard my mom’s voice. She sounded angry again. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, though, and I didn’t care. Was it me or did the tingles feel like a thunderstorm, like a thousand times worse than before Emma drowned?
“Up here,” she called. Floorboards creaked. There was a floorboard right in the doorway to my mom’s room that groaned whenever someone was standing on it. It made that noise now. She was out of her room, but just barely. Calling to me from the doorway. “Come up here.”
I figured she wanted to tell me something about what I’d found out from Taryn. She knew, obviously, since our futures were tied to each other’s. Maybe she wanted to explain herself. Apologize in person. Whatever. I wasn’t going to listen, even if she begged forgiveness. I was steel. Stone. Finished with her.
“I don’t want to hear—” I started, but stopped when I saw the look on her face. She had made it to the top stair with one white hand on the banister and was staring down at me. The shadows dug into the creases on her forehead, making her look about twenty years older, or like one of those skeletons in the haunted house at the pier. Her eyes were heavy with worry.
I started to say “What?” but before I could she whispered, “You haven’t been able to see the future yet, have you?”
I shook my head. “No, I have, I’ve seen—” Did I really want to tell her about seeing Taryn naked? Or about what happened in the car? “Why?”
“Have you seen anything from next year? Or even next month?”
I shrugged. Weird question. She knew it was so hard to tell when these future memories took place. I just inexplicably felt my bones aching in the ones where I was an old man. Or I’d catch a glimpse of my grandchild and feel this overwhelming love and pride. No, I hadn’t had any far-off memories of my future since the Emma accident, but I only caught them once in a while, when everything was still. And things had been really screwy lately. I tried to call up a memory of the future, but they never came when I wanted them to. Usually, when I least expected it, I’d see or hear or smell something and the memory would pop into my mind. “I have no—”
“You can’t, can you?”
I didn’t like the tone. She should have been begging forgiveness. Instead, she sounded like she was accusing me of something. It was the tone I should have had with her.
“No, but—”
“That’s because you have no future,” she said. “Whatever you did to change things, Nick … now you’re the one who is going to die. Soon.”
According to my mom, Christmas was really going to suck this year. Because not only might I not live out the year, I might not live out the summer. She said that because first, she knew I had trouble remembering anything in the future anymore, and second, she saw Nan dressed in the black dress she only wore to funerals. She was wearing the cast on her arm. The only other thing she could recall was extreme grief.
Well, that was good. I’d hate for anyone to be happy at my passing.
Oh, and that it was a closed casket. Not like she would get the guts to go to her own son’s funeral, but that was what Nan told her. Which probably meant that my body would be mangled beyond recognition.
All really awesome things.
I could almost feel the jagged glass shards digging into my cheeks. An accident. The car accident I’d envisioned on my ride home.
I knew it wasn’t the Buick. The inside was all wrong. I silently told myself I wouldn’t set foot in a car again. That would do it. I hoped.
But the more I tried to see my future, the more I couldn’t.
No wonder Taryn made the memories of my future go away. No wonder she made me feel normal.
This all started when she entered my life. For some reason, because of her, I had no future.
Trouble was, the more I tried to resign myself to stay away from her, the more I felt that big hole, that emptiness. My chest tightened and ached when I thought about it. It didn’t help that I kept seeing myself kissing her, feeling my hands working through her thick platinum curls. For some reason, I couldn’t see anything in the future but that, the most improbable thing in the world.
The morning of Emma’s funeral, I put on my suit and tie. The suit was too tight. I looked like a major loser. It was only ten in the morning, and it already felt like a hundred degrees. There was no ocean breeze. I contemplated staying home about a thousand times. Then I opened up the door to the garage and climbed into the Buick.
You know those cartoons where a character is contemplating doing something, and a devil appears on one shoulder, trying to tempt him to do the bad thing, and an angel appears on the other, telling him why he should do the right thing? It was totally like that. But this time, Angel-me was telling me I needed to go and pick up Taryn, because I’d promised and it was the right thing to do. And Devil-me said I needed to go straight to the funeral, because something about Taryn was seriously screwing with my future. I went back and forth, gripping the steering wheel and mumbling to myself, until eventually the devil and the angel looked exactly the same.
Finally I just shoved the car into reverse. Gritting my teeth, I headed for the cemetery.
I knew it was a cruddy thing to do, leaving her there. I imagined her sitting on the front stoop, waiting for me. But I could explain it away. I was going to die in a car accident, right? Even though I kind of knew the Buick was safe, she’d be a moron to accept a ride with me.
It was a bright, sunny day. My limited knowledge of funerals from television and movies seemed to suggest that this was wrong; it was supposed to be raining, so much so that we would all huddle tightly around the casket in a dense forest of umbrellas. In the backseat Nan had a massive black thing, almost the size of a beach umbrella, that didn’t fold compactly like new ones did. I’d expected to use it. It would effectively seal me off from the rest of the mourners; nobody would be able to tell who was under it.
Instead, the sun shone like a spotlight pointed right on my head as I stepped out of the car and made my way across the cemetery, to the crowd. I spotted Pedro. I hadn’t seen him since that day on the beach. I didn’t think he’d have the nerve to show up, but he was probably feeling as guilty as I did. “Hey, man,” I said when I’d made my way over to him. “How’s it going?”
He nodded, looking stiff in his suit. Funny how clothes could change a person. There was a sheen of sweat mingling with the pimples on his forehead. Finally, he mumbled, “Rather be anywhere else.”
There was no doubt about it. I seconded Pedro’s emotion.
He sniffed and brought a wadded tissue to his face. Allergies, I guessed. He wasn’t the type to cry. But when he pulled the tissue away, it was covered in blood. When I looked closer, I realized there was blood on the collar of his shirt. He didn’t turn to face me, but I could see a swollen, bluish pocket on his temple and under his eye. One thing about Pedro, he was almost girlish about his appearance; he didn’t get into fights. “Whoa, man. What’s going on?”
A few people turned, saw me, and whispered. I knew it was probably, “There’s the guy who tried to revive her. The crazy one.” One old lady gave me a reproachful look and shook her head.
I’d definitely rather be anywhere else.
We stood in the last row, as far away from the rest of the mourners as possible, but suddenly Pedro faltered, almost like his knees gave out. He staggered backward. “I—can’t,” he whispered, staring at the ground.
I stared at him. For the first time I noticed there wasn’t just blood on his collar. It was all down the front of his shirt, spattering his pale blue tie. Bits of dried grass clung to the knees of his dark pants. “What? Who did that to you, man?”
“I shouldn’t have come,” he hissed. I was aware some people were beginning to turn, but then Pedro just broke into a sprint toward the line of cars. It was like he was being chased by the devil. He even looked back a few times, as if he was expecting to see Satan.
It was over ninety degrees, but I shivered. Wow. What the hell had happened to him?
The priest began to speak about finding comfort in one another. He said, “It is unexpected tragedy that brings us together today.”
“The unexpected in life is often the most difficult to deal with,” I mumbled under my breath, along with the priest. I looked over and saw Mrs. Reese with her head against someone’s shoulder. Mr. Reese, I supposed. When she pulled away, I saw that it was a younger guy. Emma’s brother, the one at Penn State. He stared ahead, unblinking, as Mrs. Reese continued to sob into his suit jacket. Mr. Reese, a white-haired version of his son, stood next to him.
The crowd parted for a split second, and I managed to see the coffin. It was a little one. Too little. I bowed my head and rocked back on my heels and wished for it to be over. In my peripheral vision, I could see two pale feet in black stringy sandals coming up behind me. The toenails were painted red. I knew those feet. Hell, I worshipped those feet.
I cleared my throat. I would not look at her.
She stepped beside me and paused a beat, as if to say, Look at me, I’m here, I came anyway, and then kept right on walking, as if being at a funeral didn’t scare her as much as she’d said. Another girl was with her, the girl with the pixie haircut from track tryouts. The crowd accepted them, made room for them, making me feel like I was the one who had been left behind. After a minute, the boy with Mrs. Reese turned and looked hard, right at Taryn. It was the same look Sphincter had given her. She stared straight ahead, at the casket, but it was clear that there was something between them.
Great. First Sphincter, now this guy. She’s going to drive me to an early grave, I thought, before I realized I probably shouldn’t tempt fate.
After the longest twenty minutes of my life, the funeral ended and the crowd spread out. I kept looking around for some hint as to who had messed with Pedro, wondering if they’d pick me next. I meant not to look at Taryn, but I found myself staring right at her when she spun around to leave. I thought she would give me eye daggers. Instead, she smiled. And not a wicked smile, either; a hey-how-are-you? smile. The kind that’s out of place at a funeral. She made a beeline over to me, her friend following at her heels.
“Did you forget about picking me up?” she asked, still not sounding angry.
“Um. Yeah. Oh.” I tried to play it off as if I had forgotten, but realized too late that I should be apologizing. I mumbled a “sorry,” but I didn’t think she heard it.
“That’s okay. You’ve got stuff on your mind, I understand.”
I nodded. Why the hell was she being so nice?
“Anyway,” she said, “I made it. How are you doing with all this?” She motioned toward the coffin.
“Fine. I was just … leaving …,” I said stiffly. Yeah, I had to leave. Pronto. The You Wills agreed with that.
“Oh.” Pixie grabbed Taryn’s wrist and started to pull her away, but Taryn shook her friend loose, looking annoyed. Then it was as if she regretted it, because she smiled, embarrassed, and made the introduction. “This is Devon.”
Devon and I mumbled hi to each other. She looked about as excited as I was. She stood close enough to Taryn to be her Siamese twin, like she wanted her all to herself.
The only one who seemed interested in conversation was Taryn. But she didn’t notice this. “I had to drag Devon along. Didn’t want to go myself. I hate these things.”
I looked away, feeling like crud. She was too damn cute. I couldn’t take it anymore. “So you got a ride with Devon?” I finally asked.
“No, believe it or not, I have my own car.”
“You drive?”
She nodded. “But I hate it. I know, most people can’t wait to get their licenses, but I have this big fear of driving. I always have this feeling like I am going to die in a horrific car crash.”
I thought about the glass shards spraying in my face. It scared me, too. Another thing we had in common.
“Anyway,” she continued, “my parents wanted me to drive because they’re too busy to cart me around everywhere I need to go. So I got my license a couple of weeks ago. I’m sixteen. Almost seventeen.”
“Really? For some reason I thought you were a freshman.”
Now it was her turn to shrink back. Her face turned red. “I am. Well, I was born on the cusp and so my parents kept me back. And then I had to stay back because of … well, forget it. Long story.”
“That’s cool,” I said, dropping it. I figured it had something to do with that wild past she’d spoken of. I knew she was trying to escape that, because really, it wasn’t her. She was a good girl. A good girl with a bad curse. Probably as bad a curse as mine.
“So you want to see my ride?” she asked, motioning Devon along. “My dad bought it for me as an early birthday present.”
“Sure,” I said after a while. I didn’t want to because I had to get going, and because I wondered if it would be a better ride than mine. Then I realized that any ride was better than mine. Some Schwinns were better than mine.
We walked toward the parking area, and she and Devon talked about how sad the funeral was. Well, Taryn talked about that; Devon obviously wanted to get away from me, like most every girl in the world, because she kept saying under her breath, “We really should go.” I kept looking at the headstones, wondering how the people in the ground had died. One stone said MOMMY’S LITTLE ANGEL and from the years engraved into it, I realized the kid was only five. Like Emma. Soon, she would be in the ground, and I would be
Headlights flashing car horn blaring No no Tar watch ou
“Isn’t that crazy?” a voice said. I turned my head. Taryn had said something and now she was waiting for a response.
“Oh. Yeah,” I fudged.
“I thought that it was, but then, like, why was I waking up in the middle of the night?” she said with a sigh, which made me really want to know what the hell she was talking about. Instead I started thinking of kissing her. I could taste her lips. I knew I was turning red, so I muttered an “I don’t know,” which didn’t fit into the conversation at all.
She looked at me curiously for a second, and then said, “Anyway. Here it is. I call her Beauty.”
It was an old, and I mean old, dusty blue Jeep Cherokee. Nothing about this ride could be considered beautiful, since it was coated in dirt. It was also on a lift and looked too tough to be a Tarynmobile. As I moved around it, I saw a sticker on the back: BAD GIRLS LIKE BAD TOYS.
“Bad girls like bad toys, huh?”
She shrugged. “It was there when my dad bought it. Haven’t had time to remove it yet.”
I laughed. “Sure. You like your toys bad.” I studied the other bumper stickers. FAT PEOPLE ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP. And NICE TRUCK. SORRY ABOUT YOUR PENIS. Wow. If you put me in a room with a thousand cars and asked me to pick which one belonged to Taryn, this would be my last pick. I was just about to point that out when I peeked into the driver’s seat and my blood ran cold.
Dark seats. A center console brown with spilled Coke or coffee. A dream catcher dangling from the rearview mirror. In that instant I was transported to a rainy night, to headlights swirling around me, to the low, grating blare of a truck horn. To small, pale feet with pretty painted toenails pressing against the dashboard, and blond ringlets thrown forward over her face as she screamed and screamed. Suddenly her words played in my head like a recording at too slow a speed: I always have this feeling I am going to die in a horrific car crash.
This was it.
This was the car I would die in.
And worse yet, Taryn would be there, too.
“No.”
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it must have broken through my lips. My numb lips, useless as the rest of me. Because Taryn, who’d been talking about how her father had picked up the car from some lady in Island Heights, stopped midsentence, baffled. “No what?”
I took a small, feeble step backward.
She turned to Devon, shrugged, then alarm flooded her eyes. She tried to move closer. I backed away again. “Do you … did you see something?” she whispered.
I held out my hands in protest, and as I did I stumbled on a rock or a curb behind me. I nearly threw up my breakfast when I looked over and realized it was the gravestone of Mommy’s Little Angel. Devon was looking at me as if she was rubbernecking a horrible, ghastly car accident on the side of the road. “I think we should just go,” she muttered for the thousandth time to Taryn, but Taryn didn’t even sway.
I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care what normal was; I knew this wasn’t it, and yet I didn’t care. “No. I can’t do this. I really can’t be near you,” I sputtered.
I half-expected the ground to open up and swallow me. After all, Mom and Nan would bury me here when I died. When we died. So I turned and broke into a run, back into the cemetery. A blind run, not really sure where I was headed. The cemetery was surrounded by a small line of trees. I didn’t know what was behind them. Maybe I could go and live the rest of my life there. Away from Taryn. Away from everyone.
Like my mother.
When that thought hit me, I slowed down, breathing hard once I reached the chain-link fence by the trees. By the time I turned back, the girls were gone. A minute later I saw the Jeep heading toward the exit. So Devon had finally convinced her to leave. They were probably still watching me, wondering what was up. Well, maybe not Taryn. She knew. She knew what was bothering me. Most of it, anyway. Devon obviously thought I was two cashews shy of a nuthouse.
I realized I could have just taken Taryn aside and told her. She would have understood. We could have vowed to stay away from each other, and that would have been the end of it.
Or would it have been? Maybe it would have been like when we decided not to let Nan bring my mother breakfast anymore. She was still on course to die, but the pieces of Mom’s breakfast were no longer around her head in the memory. Maybe Emma’s death put the wheels in motion for something terrible to happen. Maybe evil would always follow us now, no matter what we did to prevent it. Maybe we were destined for bad things, and nothing could stop it.
I started walking back to the Buick, still breathing hard. As I walked, I loosened the tie, which felt like a noose, and undid the top button of my dress shirt. The collar was damp with sweat. I knew I should stay away from Taryn, but not a minute had passed before my mind kicked into overdrive, and between the You Wills, I began imagining all the different ways I could apologize to Taryn. I was probably paying more attention to my apology than to the You Wills.
That’s probably why I didn’t anticipate the punch. Out of nowhere, a force slammed against my cheek, throwing me to the ground.
Wondering what the hell had hit me, I tried to turn over and prop myself on my elbows, but the weight pressed on me, holding me down. A hand smashed against the back of my head, grinding my face into the hard earth so that all I could taste was dirt.
“You’re the other one,” a voice hissed. “Why did you come? Do you think Emma wants you here?”
The other one. Pedro. Fear curled in my stomach. I’d come out of this looking as messed up as he had. Maybe worse. I tried to open my mouth to speak but got a mouthful of grass instead, so only a muffled sound came out. The hand loosened its grip and I could turn my head a little. I tried to look up, but my eye was swelling and the lid felt heavy and useless. Birds twittered happily in the trees, as if what was happening to me was a good thing, as if this was how it was supposed to be.
“Who are you looking for?” I muttered, trying to be tough. But I’ll admit it. I was scared crapless. I hoped it was just a simple case of mistaken identity.
“Nick. Nick Cross? That you?”
Crap. One thing became clear to me: I was going to die if I said yes. “No.” I tried to think of a fake name, but my mind whirred with You Wills, proving utterly useless once again. Suddenly something spat through. A name. Bryce. Bryce Reese. “Bryce Reese,” I breathed.
There was a pause, and I thought maybe he was going to go for it, pick me up, dust me off, apologize for the misunderstanding. Suddenly a screaming pain whizzed through the back of my head. “That’s my name, you idiot,” he said.
Oh, hell. Thanks, brain. Reese. Bryce Reese. As in, Emma Reese. Emma’s brother. Her mother had said they did “everything together.” She’d said he’d been devastated. Of course. The visions I’d had of someone blaming me for Emma’s death weren’t of her parents. Mrs. Reese didn’t blame me.
Bryce was the one who hated me.
He leaned over, his breath in my face. It smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes, making my stomach lurch. “I know who you are and what you did. Because of you, she’s dead. You killed Emma.”
I tried to take a breath but my lungs were being crushed by his weight. “I … tried—”
“You left that drunk SOB alone to watch the beach, didn’t you?”
I swallowed. So they did know. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, tasting grass. “I feel—”
He pushed me down, harder, into the dirt, then let go. “I hope you feel like dirt. You’re a murderer. You’ll get yours soon.”
Then, quiet. I lie there after the sound of him faded away, too scared even to turn around and watch him leave. It was a good thing Taryn had left when she did. Once I got up, the cemetery was empty, except for Emma’s casket, sitting there alone beside the burial site. The front of my suit was covered in dirt; I tried to wipe it off but smeared it in instead.
I walked back to the Buick, my cheek and all the teeth underneath aching from where Bryce’s fist had met them. I tried again to think ahead. I focused hard on graduation. I usually could remember that.
But there was nothing. Hell, I couldn’t even think of graduation. I don’t think I’d ever not been able to remember something about graduation. Sure, things would be different every time I called up the memory. Once, I’d tripped going up to the podium; another time I got a sloppy kiss from Norah Cracowiczki, who sat next to me and was so drunk she thought I was her boyfriend. But graduation was always there. Nan was always there, smiling at me from the bleachers.
My mom was right. I had plenty of time to change it, and I would. Somehow.
You’ll get yours. Soon. I thought about those words and how fitting they were. He was right. I would get mine. If everything continues the way it was going, I’ll get the same thing Emma got, I thought, turning back to her gravesite.
I swallowed and let out an uneasy breath. Bryce was standing there, head down, near the pile of freshly dug earth, holding some pink stuffed animal with floppy ears and weeping. Weeping so hard, his body shook with his every breath. I couldn’t look at him for more than a second. He didn’t have to punch me to make every part of me sting.
And maybe that was what I deserved.
I drove back home at a slug’s pace. It was the middle of the day on the Saturday before Labor Day, and though some of the rich folk with summerhouses had already packed up and gone to their winter residences, the tourist activity was in full swing. I kept imagining the Buick plowing into beachgoers with their brightly colored umbrellas and beach chairs, which always brought me back to Bryce, at graveside, weeping. Which brought me back to Emma. The day she died, something big had been set in motion. I couldn’t get it out of my head that whatever had started needed to happen, that it was right. That it was my punishment.
When I got home, the first thing I did was run up the stairs. I already had my tie and jacket off, but I starting ripping at the buttons of my shirt as soon as I got in the door. I was halfway up the stairs when my mom called to me. “What?” I snapped, still clawing at my chest.
“We were just wondering where you’ve been. We were worried,” she said, all innocent. It made me all the more angry because she knew very well where I’d been. Whenever she was even the least bit worried about anything, she’d just think into the future and find out the answer she was looking for. She couldn’t not look.
“You know,” I muttered, slamming my bedroom door behind me. At that moment, I hated her. Hated her for having to meddle with everything instead of just taking things as they came.
I threw my sweaty, dirty clothes in a heap by my hamper and lay on my dump-truck sheets in my gym shorts, staring up at the cottage-cheese ceiling. With the door closed, the room felt like an oven, but I didn’t care.
I thought that getting away from Taryn would do it. She’d never want to talk to me again after that, right? But no, as I lay there, I could still see my future with her, so clearly it had to be real. I knew so much about her, and could feel that she was the peg in my life that held all the pieces together, and without her there, everything seemed to be loosening. I hadn’t really even cycled much. But though I knew her as if I’d spent a lifetime with her, for some reason, I still couldn’t see anything more than a few weeks into the future.
As I was contemplating what it all meant and what I could do, the door opened, blowing an ocean breeze into the room that dropped the temperature twenty degrees, making me shiver. Nan walked in. “Honey bunny?”
“Yeah?” I snapped. I was so angry at Mom, it was carrying over to Nan, even though she’d done nothing wrong.
“How was the funeral?” she asked, sitting down on the side of my bed.
It was a stupid question. Coming from anyone else I would have told them that. Instead I just rolled over and answered her. “Like a funeral.”
Then she saw my face. I hadn’t looked in a mirror, but my check still felt raw from where I’d been punched and smashed into the ground. She reached out her hand, but I flinched. “Who did that to you?”
I laughed bitterly. “Okay. It was like a funeral … with a gang fight thrown in for added excitement.”
“What is going—”
“Mom didn’t tell you? I found out why we’re like this. There’s a stand on the boardwalk where a freaky lady sells spells called Touches. Mom spent a crapload of money to be given a Touch that would make her able to see the future,” I said, watching with satisfaction as Nan’s face stiffened.
“Who told you this?”
“A girl named Taryn. Her grandmother gave Mom the Touch.” I exhaled.
Her face didn’t change. “Is this the fortune-teller you were talking about yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“That still doesn’t explain why your face looks like it was—”
“She effed up my life. I hate her.”
“Who?”
“Mom! Who else?” I clutched handfuls of the sheet and threw them back down. “She knew it was her fault. She knew all this time and she never told me. ‘Hate’ is too nice a word.”
“Oh, you don’t mean—”
“Yeah, I do. I really do.” I sat up and touched my face, thinking about how she was even responsible for that. For everything bad in my life. “All this time, I thought Dad was the bad guy. That he was somehow responsible for our messed-up lives. Now I totally get it. He’s normal. I don’t blame him. Hell, I would have left, too.”
She shook her head. “No. Well, I don’t know what went on between your mom and dad. But I do know that when your mom became pregnant with you, she changed. She was usually so crazy—she’d go on crash diets and drink and smoke and, oh, just about everything I’d tell her not to do. But when she found out about you, she quit smoking and drinking and made sure she ate well. She worked on the boardwalk and she used to bring a container of fruit and a bottle of water with her so she wouldn’t have to eat the greasy food up there.” She smiled. “You were—you are everything to her. Whatever she did to you by getting this—this Touch, as you call it, she didn’t mean it.”
I studied her. I knew what she was doing. Trying to keep the peace. She wouldn’t let me think my dad was the bad guy, and she’d do anything to keep me from thinking my mom was a villain, too. “But my dad—I mean, you met him, right? What’s he like?”
She gave me a surprised look. On the rare times I talked about my dad, I always did it with a glower, with hate, and she would always reply, “Your dad was a good man in a bad situation.” But coming from her, “good” meant nothing. To her, nobody was downright bad. You could steal her purse and whack her over the head with it, and she wouldn’t think you were bad. And she’d say the same thing about a roast she picked up at the supermarket. “It’s a good piece of meat.” It meant zero.
Now, she opened her mouth, and I knew what she was going to say, so I stopped her. “But what was he like?”
“You got your eyes from him. And your dark skin. I only met him a handful of times. The first time, he made quite an impression. I could see why your mother was charmed by him. He had that wild side to him, too. He was a rocker. The typical teen back then. Had blue hair. Wore tight leather pants. Pierced and tattooed all over. Your grandfather almost threw him out of the house!”
I knew some of this, but before, I didn’t care. Before, I wished I could have emptied my head of any bits of information that had to do with my father. Now, I listened intently. He was wild. Nothing like me. I wondered if I might have been the blue-haired rocker type had things been different.
“But he was an athlete, too. I remember he played basketball. He had all sorts of talents. And I liked him. Deep down, under all the tattoos and piercings, I knew he really loved your mom.” She looked down at the shag carpet, her mouth moving but no sound coming out, as if she was trying to figure out how to put her thoughts into words. “And I know that is why he left. He couldn’t stand to see your mom so weak. She was falling apart. It was difficult to see her so sick, so afraid. But it was as much the fault of your mother as it was his. She refused to speak to him. Partly she hated herself, but she also saw something in the future with him … something she didn’t want. So she shut him out, too. He left before you were born. But he was a good man in a bad situation.”
“You always say that he was a good man. Past tense.”
She sighed. “I think he desperately wanted things to work out between him and your mother. I don’t think he got over losing you both. I don’t know what happened to him, but he’s never tried to contact us since that day. I don’t know what your mother knows.”
Of course, Mom would know better than anyone. We had ways of finding these things out. Knowing her, she probably created futures in her head all the time that had her tracking him down. She was just so … She couldn’t leave anything alone. I sat there, surprised at how numb I felt. I guess nothing where he was concerned would matter to me now. He’d already been dead to me for too long.
“She didn’t tell you because she feels so terrible about what it’s done to you,” Nan said. “Haven’t you ever wished you could undo something in your life?”
Of course I thought of Emma. Of Bryce weeping at the graveside, of Mrs. Reese watering the asphalt. I’d ruined them. With one stupid decision, I’d ruined them all forever. When Nan patted my hand and left the room, I couldn’t get out of my head how strange it was that the smallest decisions in our lives can leave the biggest scars.