Touched (11 page)

We walked through to the rear of the arcade, looking for a door. If we could get out onto Ocean Avenue, we could get around the booth and to the bicycle rack without any possibility of Old Scary Lady seeing us. “So, who is Sue?” Taryn asked.

And I’d thought maybe she’d forget. I cleared my throat. “No one. Really.” Which was the truth. Now she was no one to me.

“Old girlfriend? Current girlfriend?”

I just mumbled, “My wife. In a different lifetime.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean, different lifetime?”

“Like I said, every time I do something off script, I can throw things off. And once, before I met you, I had this future where I was going to marry a girl named Sue.” I had a momentary reflection back to that feeling, that feeling of safety and happiness I’d only had in that life, and cringed at the thought of losing it. Could I ever get that back? “It was a good future. A perfect one.”

“And the one you’re going to have now?”

I shrugged. It was hard to explain. That last future, I’d had time to settle into. It took a while, but eventually I learned all the ins and outs, and the more I learned, the more perfect I realized it was. I knew this new one didn’t feel right, but it was too soon to tell. All new futures felt that way. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. Maybe I would fly, maybe I would fall. It always took a few days or weeks to fully understand it. “I don’t know. I need time to sort it out.”

“It could be even more perfect. You don’t know.”

“I guess.” I didn’t bother to tell her I had had hundreds of futures set in my mind before. None of them was as good as the one I’d just lost. Sure, there had been okay futures, but in a good majority of them, I ended up alone. I understood that; I’d been alone most of my life so far. Nobody got me. Nobody could stand me for too long. Sue had been a miracle, even though I hadn’t met her. And Taryn … Taryn was another miracle, with a difference. She was here, in the flesh.

I looked at Taryn, filled in that moment with the urge to grab her and hold her against me and never let her go. Suddenly, she stopped and looked at me. “You look like you’re going to throw up.”

My throat was desert dry. I shook my head and started to say something to blow it off when she caught sight of something beyond me. “Oh, Skee-Ball! Let’s do just a couple of games.”

I agreed, even though I hadn’t done Skee-Ball since I was, like, five. Taryn fed all the quarters she could find in her bag into the machine and the balls fell down the chute. I did the same and then realized I was playing next to a master. One after another, she popped those suckers into the little circle in the center marked 50. I kept hitting the gutter. The You Wills kept repeating the same thing to me, like a record skipping:

You will hit the gutter, you will hit the gutter, you will hit the …

“So you’ve seen people get Touched, huh? What’s that like?” I thought maybe conversation would take the focus off my sucktastic abilities.

She straightened and threw her first gutter ball, then swallowed. “It’s … horrible. I don’t want to think about it.”

I stared at her as my brain quieted from the You Wills. “Then why would your grandmother make you watch from behind the curtain?”

She threw another ball. “Because I am the last grandchild. And in the lore, the last grandchild inherits the power.”

“Power?”

“The power to use the book. And … other things.” She looked away. “Not nice things.” She blushed a little. “I am afraid if I tell you this, you’ll think I’m a freak.”

I grinned, surprised. “Look who you’re talking to.”

“Well, I also attract certain people. People with a certain wanting or void in their lives. And people like that aren’t usually the best people to hang out with.”

“Like me?”

She finished throwing her last ball and shook her head. “You’re different. You didn’t ask for this. But I kind of lied to you about why we left Maine.”

“Your father wasn’t laid off?”

“Oh, no, he was. But it was because of me.” She bit her bottom lip. “I’m an only child and my mom and dad wanted me to be a doctor. They weren’t too keen on me growing up to be a fortune-teller.”

“Understandably.”

“Right. So when I was six, Grandma started taking me to see the Touches performed. And as I said, they were horrible. Then the nightmares started. When my parents found out what I was going through, there was a huge fight. My grandmother told them I’d never be able to escape my destiny, but they thought she was crazy. They dropped everything and moved me to Maine. And everything was okay for a while. My dad started doing really good. He was one of the top executives at the factory. Everything was great. I think my parents thought we’d escaped it. But like I said, I have these powers. The power to attract certain people. I had friends up there, or at least, I thought they were friends before I came here and realized they were just being drawn by the Touch. And you know how I am about saying no.”

“So you were a troublemaker, huh?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously?” I asked. She just didn’t seem the type.

“I was! I was terrible. It started when I was thirteen or fourteen. My friends and I would stay up all night, doing things. Mostly little, stupid things that bored kids do when they have nothing better to do. Breaking into houses. Destroying property. Stuff like that. I refused to listen to my parents, and no matter what they did, I found a way around it. They barred my windows, for God’s sake. And I knew it was stupid but—”

“You couldn’t say no.”

“Right. And I couldn’t shake them. Just as they were attracted to me, I fell for them, too. They kept following me around, worshipping me, and I never realized that it was because they were attracted to what I could do for them. The Touch. I kept running away from home and my dad took all this time from work to go looking for me or deal with the trouble I’d gotten myself into. So he was fired. And we were forced to move here. The funny thing was, all those great friends I had back in Maine never emailed me, called, texted … not even once. They didn’t want me, they just wanted to be Touched.”

“That sucks.”

“Like my grandmother said, I can’t escape my destiny. I have to take over for my grandmother and perform these Touches, or else things will get bad. Really bad. My parents are finally accepting that, I guess.” Her face had paled past its normal pale, to an unnatural and deathly bluish-white. “They have no other choice.”

“What do you mean by ‘really bad’?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “The worst. But I don’t want to talk about that. I get really nervous thinking about it. That’s why I like hanging out with you. I don’t think about it constantly when I’m with you.”

I ran out of balls, so I stood there and watched her throw her second gutter ball. When she threw a third one, she grimaced and massaged her arm. As soon as she started throwing again, she hit the 50.

“And that’s why I knew you were Touched. The second I felt your hand, it was like I understood everything. But it’s more than that. We’re alike. Usually, people get Touched of their own free will. But you didn’t. We’re both cursed, but it’s not our fault.”

I nodded. “When I touched your hand, I couldn’t see the future anymore. It made me almost feel normal.”

She stopped throwing balls and straightened. “I guess that makes sense.” Then she said, “Do you like it?”

“What? Touching your hand?”

She grinned. “Feeling normal.”

I smiled. It didn’t matter which question she had been asking; either way, the answer was yes. “Of course.”

She reached over and grabbed my hand. “Better?”

My mind stopped in the middle of a You Will and I just nodded. “Yeah. Much. It’s like … almost …”

She squinted. “Like what?”

“Almost too quiet. I’m used to multitasking. Doing things while seeing what’s coming next. You know, like if you have two televisions tuned to the same program, but on different signals, and one is a few seconds ahead? That’s what it’s like. I’m used to it. This is …”

“Exciting?” she said, giving me this coy smile. “For once in your life you have no idea what is coming next.”

I was going to say scary, but then I realized that made me sound like a wuss. “Um, yeah. I guess normal life can be exciting.”

Never letting go of my hand, she ripped her tickets from the dispenser and dragged me to the prize center, where she traded in her twenty-five tickets for two neon slap bracelets. She gave the blue one to me and kept the hot pink one for herself. Then we walked onto the boardwalk, away from her grandmother’s tent and toward the rides. I felt two feet taller. I’d never held hands with a girl before, much less a hot one. Other guys were checking her out, and each time I stuck my chin out farther. It felt freaking phenomenal.

“So,” she said as we walked. I guess we were walking aimlessly, because our bikes were in the other direction. I didn’t care. I could have walked all night like this. “What else do you know about me?”

I smiled. “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“Well. I’m curious. It’s nothing bad, is it?”

Holding hands with Taryn did nothing to erase the image of that birthmark, of the curve of pale skin on her lower back, leading to her backside. It didn’t matter how many girls I cycled through; I knew that would be etched in my brain permanently. “No. It’s nothing. Really.”

“Well, I think you must know something. Your face keeps getting red every time I bring it up. Do we get really close or something?”

I swallowed, fully aware that anything I said now could totally destroy that future. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” she teased.

“Look,” I said under my breath. “The future isn’t set. And I don’t want to …”

“Oh, you don’t want to blow it. I get it. But you know, normal people don’t worry about these things. They just take it naturally.”

Even though the ocean air was cool, my hand was sweating in hers. How the hell did I know what normal people would do? All that confidence I had a second before drained away and I found myself wondering again why she’d want to be seen with me, the abnormal person who didn’t even know how to take things naturally, whatever that meant. “Okay,” I mumbled.

“We can go on a ride. Like the Tilt-a-Whirl? Or the haunted house?” she suggested. “What do you think?”

“Surprise me.” She was still contemplating, unaware, so I said, “Get it? Surprise me? That’s a joke.”

She gave me a look. “Oh, right, because you can’t be surprised. Funny,” she said, like it wasn’t. “Wait, can you be surprised? When you fell into the water at the pier, you were surprised.”

“Nah. I knew it would happen. But by then I couldn’t stop myself. It’s okay, though. I don’t really like surprises.”

“You don’t? Are you scared of them?” she taunted.

“No, I’m—I like to be in control as much as I can.”

“Booor-ing!” she singsonged. “You should forget about that. Live a little. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

She didn’t get it. I could see the worst things that could happen. A lot of them would make her lock herself in her bedroom for the rest of her life. “Most surprises are bad.”

“That’s not true. There are lots of good ones, too.” She surveyed the amusements and her eyes widened. “Oh yes, the haunted house. I love it. Don’t you?”

“I—I’ve never …” I clamped my mouth shut. It was obvious I was a dork. That I led a sheltered life because of the curse. I should just take things naturally and tell her. But from the way she was looking at me, I think she already knew.

“Don’t worry. It will be fun. Lots of surprises in the haunted house.”

“Bad ones,” I answered, reluctant, as I tried to understand what about the concept of surprise could be good. Surprises sucked. It was so much better to be in control.

Taryn dragged me toward the stucco housefront at the end of the pier, with the fake wrought iron fence and cobwebs everywhere. There was a raven with a skeletal hand in its beak perched on the sign that said 6 TICKETS, but even that looked pretty pathetic. Taryn must have come here a lot because she had a book of tickets in her bag. She handed the attendant twelve and we squeezed into a car.

Then she clutched my hand tighter. “I’m scared,” she said, but in a way that I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Before I could look at her face, the car jerked forward and we careened into darkness.

It was pretty dumb. The scariest thing was how the ride twisted us around, almost dislocating my spine, and our car shook back and forth so much I was sure the whole thing was going to collapse. The squealing of the wheels on the track drowned out any scary noises we were supposed to hear. Occasionally someone in a scary mask would jump out at us, but it wasn’t dark enough to make it a complete surprise. I think Taryn was disappointed, because the first time it happened, she let out a high-pitched, deafening yelp, which dissolved into laughter, but after that she just muttered things under her breath.

When the ride found daylight again, we squinted at each other and then said “Lame” at the same time. I shrugged at her as we got off. “Oh, well. At least you paid.”

“Hey!” she began, but stopped short. She was walking in front of me, so I couldn’t see her face, but then I looked up and saw him.