Touched (6 page)

I awoke the next day, knowing I wouldn’t follow whatever the script had laid out for me. It had me hanging around the house, moping about Emma and feeling guilty. But that could wait. Now, more than ever, I needed to try to throw the future off course.

The clues from my memory told me that Nan had fallen down the stairs while bringing—or taking away—my mother’s breakfast tray. So I decided that I would have to do it. But I met my mom at the top of the stairs. For the first time in I don’t know how long, she was out of bed. She was wearing slippers and a flannel robe despite the early-morning temperature being at least eighty.

“I’ll eat downstairs,” she said, brushing past me.

“Wha?” The shock made me lose my vocal capacity.

“What?” she asked, turning and staring at me like I was the one who’d suddenly decided to make an appearance on the lower level of our house after years of seclusion in my bedroom. “This is my house, too.”

Sure it was, but I could count on one hand the number of times she’d come downstairs in my lifetime. I think the last time, the house was on fire. “You know about Nan,” I said as I set the tray down on the kitchen table.

She took a bite of her toast. “Yes.”

“If you eat downstairs, that ought to fix it.”

She shrugged. “Fix one thing, another breaks. I’m so tired of this.”

“I know, but we can’t let this go.”

She nodded slowly. “So did that change things?”

I tried to think of Nan’s death. There she was, lying at the bottom of the stairs. “No.”

My mother squeezed her eyes closed. “How could it not? I said I was going to eat all my meals downstairs, so—”

I concentrated on the picture in my mind. Then I noticed that the remains of my mother’s meal were no longer surrounding Nan’s crumpled, fragile body. So she would still fall, just not carrying the tray. Great. My mother must have noticed that at the same time I began to say, “It doesn’t matter. She still—”

“Still what?” Nan appeared in the kitchen. She took one look at the burnt eggs and toast I’d made for my mom and smiled. “To what do we owe the pleasure of you cooking, honey bunny? And why are you downstairs, Moira?”

“How could you tell it was my cooking?” I asked, but I knew the answer the second I asked. I burn everything.

“You burn everything.”

It was true. I never cooked because every time I got the urge to, I’d think forward to the vile end result and give up. Nothing about being able to see my future could stop me from sucking at cooking. Actually, it didn’t stop me from sucking at a lot of things.

Mom and I looked at each other. She nodded. She understood the plan.

That was the cool thing about us both being able to see our futures. Sometimes we could have whole conversations without them ever taking place. In my head, I saw Mom pulling me into the living room, telling me, Well, we need to change things up as much as possible. Go off script. And I said to her, I have been, but it’s not helping. She said, Well, we just need to change the right thing. It could be something really small. She grabbed her head just then, so I said, But how will you take it? Because I know her headaches are way worse than mine when the cycling starts. At least, her moaning and carrying on is way worse. And she said, I don’t know. I have to try.

I nodded back. But the flipping had already started and my head was beginning to ache. This was going to be a long day.

I burst outside into the humid air and gulped it in like a fish. It was already late morning; my lifeguarding job would have had me on the stand at the Seventh Avenue beach for a full hour by now. I didn’t miss it. I wasn’t cut out for lifeguarding, and at least now, any more Emma Reese incidents wouldn’t be my fault.

Holding my head to stop the cycling, the You Wills that were compelling me to turn back and go straight to bed, I headed toward the Heights. I tried to convince myself I was wandering aimlessly once I got up there. But I wasn’t. In truth, I was looking for platinum corkscrews. I scanned each car in every driveway for Maine license plates.

Crazy, right? After all, I needed my gift, my power, or whatever you call it, more than ever now. I needed to figure out how to stop Nan’s death. I shouldn’t have been trying to seek out a girl who, whenever I touched her, made all the visions go away.

But for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself. All night long, instead of green-elephanting, I’d thought of her instead. Even the thought of her quieted things. She was my green elephant.

As I rounded the block onto Lafayette Avenue, I stopped.

Almost like an oasis, she was sitting there, on the porch of a little bungalow even smaller than Nan’s, staring at her feet as if engaged in some serious thinking. Somewhere between the You Wills sputtering through my mind ran the thought that I should turn around, leave, go anywhere away from her. But I was only half listening to the You Wills. I ran across the street, remembering too late about traffic. A VW Bug screeched to a halt and a brunette in sunglasses gave me a deadly glare, then lay on her horn with a sneer. Taryn looked up, and I realized she wasn’t in the midst of contemplating the meaning of life. She had a bottle of red polish next to her and was carefully applying paint to each of her toenails.

The look she gave me wasn’t much happier than the VW driver’s. I considered backing away, but only for a second.

“Sorry if I offended you.”

Guy Law says nice dudes finish last. Girls like guys who ignore them, who tell them to get the hell away. She clearly didn’t want me apologizing. She raised one corner of her upper lip in a part snarl and said, “You didn’t,” as if I really had but she was so disgusted she didn’t want to waste any more of her precious breath.

“Then what’s up?” I asked.

Guy Law also says that when a girl’s pissed off at you, prying out the “why” is like brain surgery. Again, totally right. She said, “Nothing,” and continued to paint her dainty toenails. I moved closer, but she didn’t like that. She jumped to her feet and tottered, pale toes raised, up the staircase to her front door. “Look. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t talk to people like you.”

She made it sound like I had a disease. “People like me?”

“You know,” she whispered. “Touched.”

I reeled back, feeling the rejection swell everywhere, from the tips of my toes to my head. Even the new girl, a girl with whom I’d managed to have what I thought was a somewhat normal conversation, thought I was a nut job.

“But get this,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, but it was coming out as a defeated mumble. “I have this problem. But all of a sudden, when I touched you, this thing I’ve had my entire life is … just … gone.”

“I’m sorry, really I am, it must be horrible, but—” She turned to me and drew in a breath, then finally looked me in the eye for the first time today. I expected her to ask a question as to what the problem was, so her next words took me by surprise.“Wait. You’ve had it your entire life?”

I nodded, then felt the need to explain. “Yeah, you’re really not going to believe this, but—” But what? I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought of how nine-year-old Sphincter had looked at me when I explained he was going to die. I clamped my mouth shut so fast and hard that I bit my tongue.

“Your entire life?” She murmured it more to the ground than to me. “What are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just—there’s something about you that …” Okay. Clearly it was impossible to explain why she was different without explaining why
I
was different. And I couldn’t do that. I threw my hands down. “Forget it.”

She bit her lip. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Welcome to my world,” I muttered, turning away.

“You’re Touched, right?”

I turned back around, narrowing my eyes, frustrated. “Touched?”

Just then, a figure appeared behind the screen door. I could see dark, cavernous eyes, like the empty sockets of a skull, and a pyramid of silvery black hair. In the shadows of the porch’s overhang, her skin shone a cold, metallic bronze. She had on a flowered blouse, but they were not cheerful flowers. They looked brown and dead. Actually, her entire presence had an air of death to it, especially those eyes and that mouth, which bore no expression. Her mouth was just a lifeless gash in her brown face. This was the grandmother Taryn had mentioned yesterday on the beach. The “whacked” one. Instinctively, I took a step back.

Her voice was deeply accented; Italian, maybe. “Who is this?” she asked, her eyes never leaving mine.

Taryn turned toward the woman and whispered tensely, “He’s one of them.” She said the last word as if there was a war going on, and I was on the other side. Then she shrugged. “I think.”

Grandma opened the screen door, came outside. Her eyes were so fastened on mine, I had to look away. I saw then that her ankles and wrists were just as thick as the rest of her body, like tree trunks. And that in one of her meaty hands, she was holding a … freaking butcher’s knife.

Another step back. Suddenly I was shivering, despite the near-ninety-degree heat.

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s that you say,
sevgili
?” she snapped.

I wasn’t sure who she was addressing, but I wasn’t capable of speech at that point, either way. Taryn finally answered, “You’re right. I felt it, just like you said. I saw what he has.”

Her grandmother’s eyes narrowed even further. “Impossible! Not this one.”

Taryn looked confused. “But I saw it. I—”

“No,” the woman growled. I could see why Taryn didn’t get along with her. She was about as much fun as the flu. This woman had a freaking knife and was waving it over Taryn’s head as if getting ready to slice a Thanksgiving turkey. If that wasn’t God telling me to just play the hand I’d been dealt and go away, I didn’t know what was.

“But he—” Taryn protested.

“I’ve never seen this boy before in my life!” Old scary woman was getting vicious. This was not good.

The You Wills had me turning around and running in the other direction, and I knew I was supposed to go off script, but this time, I couldn’t agree with them more. “Sorry,” I said, holding out my hands. “Sorry. I mean, I still don’t know what the hell you guys are talking about. But I’m just going to go. Now.”

Taryn’s expression was guarded, remorseful. Remorseful for what? Meeting me? Having to send me away? I couldn’t tell. As I mentioned, I sucked at reading girls. But I didn’t have any problem reading her grandmother. She waved the knife some more and spat out: “You never come back, you hear me? Never!”

Oh, don’t worry about that, crazy lady.

By the time I made it back to Seventh Avenue, my brain was revving like a sports car. But that was good. The more I cycled, the better the chance I’d change Nan’s death back to that peaceful one I’d envisioned once before. And I would just have to forget about that brief moment with Taryn. That moment when for once in my pathetic life, I was just like everybody else.

When I returned from getting reamed out by Old Scary Lady, I thought I’d just go and hang out at the Tenth Avenue beach, away from the Seventh Avenue regulars who would undoubtedly stare me up and down after what happened yesterday. Work on evening out my tan, since the lifeguard uniform’s tank top had left me a lot paler on my chest and stomach. Sort out some of those messed-up visions I’d been having. Try to find what would prompt Nan to fall and somehow remove the problem.

Instead, the cycling just made for the kind of headache a cartload of Excedrin couldn’t fix. That was the problem with going off script: once I went off, a thousand jumbled next-steps in my life began to compete for attention. I tried to concentrate on the waves, the sand, the sea, which had always calmed me before. Now, every crashing wave whispered Emma’s name, and when seagulls cried overhead, it sounded like they were proclaiming my guilt. I couldn’t focus for a second on the mystery surrounding Nan’s death. The only sane thought I could make out was a picture of Taryn. Touched, she’d called me. What was that supposed to mean?

You will be annoyed by the greenhead flies. You will stand up, fold up your towel, and put on your T-shirt
.

It was a west wind, too, so the greenhead flies were biting. West winds sucked; they meant cold water and flies so vicious and determined, most tourists ran away crying. But I was a local. I could handle it.
Rrrrrvvvvv
, went the gears in my mind. Meanwhile, an insect feasted on my skin and drew blood on my forearm. Pressing one finger into my temple, I swatted the fly away with my other hand. The nasty thing came back to my foot. Once a fly found its target, the only thing that could tear it away was death. I swatted it again, watching an old lady down the hill applying Skin So Soft, and remembering how Nan used to slather me in that stuff when I was a kid. It smelled like old lady, but it kept the flies away. When the persistent little bugger landed on my knee, I smacked it, and its crushed body tumbled to the sand. The victory was short-lived; when I flicked its little corpse away, two more flies appeared in its place.

You will start getting bored, so you will stand up, fold up your towel, and put on your T-shirt
.

Actually, I told myself, I’m not really that bored. I could hang a few more minutes. I need to think.

Rrrrrvvvvv
, went my mind.

You will be annoyed by the children playing tag nearby, kicking sand on your legs. You will stand up, fold up your towel, and put on your T-shirt
.

No, I can handle those kids. I’ll just hang out here a little while longer … and think.…

Rrrrrvvvvv …

You will think about standing up and leaving but you will not. A Frisbee will hit you in the head
.

What? I scrambled to my feet and tried to get over the cycling that had my mind whirring and my head pounding. More nonsensical images flashed through my brain, which might or might not have become part of my future: pine needles, goopy black tar, a pink smiley face, brown craft paper.

Then, clunk. The Frisbee bounced off my shins. I screamed, unfortunately like a girl, in front of two hot chicks in bikinis. They laughed at me mildly, like I was a bad entertainer planted there for their amusement, and rolled over onto their stomachs.

That was it. Thinking was barely possible on script. How could I expect to analyze the situation with all those possible options whirring in my head like chain saws? Yes, there were bad things in my future, things I somehow couldn’t change or prevent, but maybe I just wasn’t meant to. After all, that was what the future was like for most people.

But Nan …

Finally I trudged through the sand toward the street, noticing the girl in the yellow bathing suit with the pink smiley face on her round tummy. She was probably Emma’s age.

Crap. Step one: I needed to get away from the beach. From everything that reminded me of that little girl.

Nan used to have a boyfriend who would take me fishing off the pier at Fifth Avenue. That would always calm my mind, kind of like the ocean once had. I needed calm. I didn’t want to go home and listen to my mom’s moans of pain from the cycling. My head ached like there were a thousand needles in my scalp, and I knew she was feeling just as bad. Probably worse.

Almost without thinking about it, I found myself at the bait shop, getting minnows. I must have stopped by the garage to pick up the net, bucket, and poles, but I couldn’t remember doing it. I held them in my hands, so tight I knew I’d probably get blisters, and they smelled like brine and old seaweed. The guy at the register gave me a careful smile as he handed over the roll of bait wrapped in brown craft paper: a smile because he’d known Nan for fifty years; careful because every local on the island had heard the Crazy Cross stories.

I was so deep in the thought that I didn’t realize how quiet my mind had become until I heard a sweet voice whisper, “What did you get?”

I turned and saw Taryn. Not two hours after her grandmother gave me the tongue-lashing of my life, not two hours after I promised myself I’d never see her again. She was smiling as if that conversation never happened, as if she hadn’t called me one of the despicable “them.”

I should have been able to say something tough, something to show her that she’d made a huge mistake telling me to leave her alone. Instead, all I could mutter was “Huh?”

She pointed at the board over the counter. “I was going to get a number eleven. The Italian. But number six looks good. And then there’s number twenty.”

I looked up at the board above the head of the guy at the register. It might as well have been in Chinese. I never bought subs here. “Uh—”

“You’re the local.” She pointed at the paper-wrapped roll in my hands. “So I’ll let you make the decision for me.” She turned to the guy behind the counter. “Give me whatever you got him.”

I grinned slowly. Revenge.

At the guy’s confused look, I said, “You heard her.”

He got busy packaging up her “sandwich,” as Taryn gave me a shy glance that made me a little remorseful for what I was doing. Just a little. I’d shaken it off, when suddenly my nose began to sting. Out of nowhere, I thought of pine trees.

She asked, “What’s in it?”

I pressed my lips together. “It’s a surprise.”

“No anchovies, I hope.”

I shook my head.

She quickly peered over the counter at the worker. “Oh, and make mine without onions.”

He looked at me, even more confused.

I shook my head at him. “Doesn’t come with onions.”

“Oh, good.” She looked down at her toes, the nails of which were now painted bloodred, a striking contrast against the paleness of her skin. I had the momentary vision of those pale toes against a backdrop of black-green water. “I’m allergic.”

“Um,” I began, focusing on a rack of chips and pretzels behind her head, a display of car air fresheners shaped like pine trees dangling near the register, not sure where I was headed. “Fancy meeting you here.”

The shy look returned. “I heard this place had the best subs in town.”

I shrugged. As if I had any idea.

“Really,” she said, as if she had just been caught in a lie. Then she smiled. “Actually, no, I followed you in here.”

Too good to lie. God, I was liking her more and more. And she was not what I needed right now. What I needed was to find out what was going to happen to Nan, and try my best to prevent it. Alarms were blaring in my head, but instead of helping me, they were crowding out the You Wills, allowing my hormones to take control. All I could do was raise my eyebrows and savor this new thrill surging through me. It was the first time a girl was admitting to following me instead of running in the other direction.

“I wanted to apologize,” she began.

“Order up,” the man behind the counter said. He pushed the package over to her.

I took it before she could put her hand on it. “Allow me,” I said.

She grinned. “Seriously? Thanks.”

It was the least I could do. “It’s nothing.”

As I paid for the two packages, she inspected the net, poles, and bucket at my feet. When I collected my change, she said, “Look, do you have time?”

I stared at her. Time? Did she want the time? I pointed to a clock on the wall.

She shook her head. “No, do you have time for a talk? I want to explain things.”

“Things? You mean the”—I stretched out my hands and wiggled my fingers—“touch?”

She nodded.

“Fine,” I said, but then I realized that if I had to be present when she opened that wrapped package, it wouldn’t be pretty. Didn’t need a vision of the future to know that. She might sic her scary grandmother on me. “After lunch? I’ll be at the pier.”

“Great,” she said, chewing on her lip. “Again, I’m sorry for acting a little crazy, but you don’t know … well, I’ll explain it. After lunch.”

She started to shuffle down the stony path in her flip-flops, cradling the fish in the crook of her arm, and then turned. “You really have no idea why you’re the way you are,” she mused. “That’s fascinating.”

“What way am I?” I asked, amused by her attempt to understand me. Most people wouldn’t bother. There were so many easy ways to fill in that blank. Neurotic. Looney. Obsessed. Pathetic.

She narrowed her eyes. “Duh. Able to see your future.”