Текст книги "Touched"

Автор книги: Cyn Balog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoa.

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

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

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

She had no idea what whacked could look like.

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

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

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

I let out a short laugh. “Bingo.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mind went quiet.

No cycling. No You Wills …

Everything. All the future memories. Just gone.

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

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

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

I squinted at her. Now who was acting crazy?

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

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

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

And so it began again.

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

At least, to her, we were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.