Touched

Touched - By Cyn Balog


It had taken years, but finally, I had everything down. Perfect. For three months, everything had been perfect.

But of course I went and screwed it up.

You will pedal three blocks. Slowly. You won’t be out of breath. You’ll see the cat lady on her front porch and she will wave at you, ask you how that mother of yours is doing. She will be wearing her red housecoat and fuzzy orange slippers, and she will be petting either Sloopy or Joe, one of the calicos, though you won’t know which. You will answer, “Fine, thanks.”

“How is that mother of yours doing, Nick?”

I glanced up at the decaying home, just enough to see the orange and red on the old lady’s skeletal figure, and a furry creature in her pockmarked arms. “Fine, thanks.”

That morning I’d awakened with the prickling sensation I always got when something big was on the horizon. Every turn of the wheels on my rusty old bike seemed to shriek “Something’s coming, something’s coming, something’s coming.…” I knew I would save a little girl on the beach one day, or at least, that was what the jumbled flashes of memory in my head seemed to say. Since summer began, I’d relived the experience over and over in my mind, my mouth against her cold, salty lips, the moment her eyes flickered open and I knew I’d done it, saved her. Was today that day?

You will notice how the sun sparkles on the blacktop, as if it’s covered in crystals. Steam will rise from it. You will see a little boy on the boardwalk, eating a rocket pop and carrying a green bucket. He will have a cherry mustache.

I turned to the pavement. Noted that. Looked up on the boardwalk. Smiled at the kid, but wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. Wondered if that smile would come back to haunt me. The smallest mistakes were the ones that kept me up at night.

You will bike across Ocean Avenue, right in front of a green pickup, and the driver will beep at you and yell something that sounds like “Dumbass!” You will not turn around.

I veered to the right. Held my breath. Wasn’t sure I was supposed to. Cringed. The sound of the horn wasn’t what I expected. It was a blaring honk instead of a cheerful beep, and it rattled me. I had to straighten out the bike to keep from swerving into a pile of sand, and suddenly found myself in the middle of the next memory.

—straight up the ramp to the boardwalk, climb from your bike and lean it against the fence, under the Dogs Prohibited sign. You will twirl your whistle cord around your fingers and ask Jocelyn how it’s going.

I jumped off the bike and carefully propped it against the fence. It started to slide, so I reached over and grabbed it, realizing this was going to make me late. “—going?” I huffed out, a good portion of my words getting lost in my struggle to breathe. Jocelyn, the badge checker at the entrance to the Seventh Avenue beach, gave me a confused look, confirming my suspicion.

You will not stop to say anything more and will arrive at the lifeguard stand as the noon siren sounds.

Great. Wasn’t I supposed to twirl my whistle or something? Was it too late for that? I reached into my pocket and pulled it out, gave it a few rolls around my wrist for good measure. I could sense that the noon siren was about to go off, and there I was, a good football-field’s length from the stand. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be toast. I started to break into a jog, and that was when I heard a kid’s voice. Had I been farther down the beach, where I was supposed to be, it’s likely the fragile voice would have been drowned out by the crash of the surf or the sound of kids playing hide-and-seek in the dunes. But there I was, a step away from the boardwalk, turning to see the little boy with the cherry mustache screaming at something on the street below the boardwalk, out of my view. I couldn’t be sure why he was frantic, but what he was saying was perfectly clear:

“Watch it!”

There are certain phrases that are impossible to ignore. I knew I should have hurried off to the stand, head down, completely oblivious. But in my past three months as a Seaside Park lifeguard, I’d gotten cocky, I guess. For a split second, I thought, Maybe it will be okay if I let my guard slip for just a moment. And by the time I realized it probably wouldn’t be, the damage was done.

You will climb to the top of the lifeguard stand and Pedro will be asleep, snoring.

Just great. I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone. I started to pick up the pace but then stopped short when I heard a whistle blowing behind me.

You will nudge him awake. He will sit up, blink, and point, saying, “Pink bikini at two o’clock.”

Of course Pedro would be pointing out the hottest pieces of ass on the beach instead of doing his job. I found myself wondering why, of all the lifeguards in Seaside, I had to be paired with the biggest horndog in Jersey, when another memory broke through.

You will follow his pointing finger down the beach.

My pulse quickened. It was getting way ahead of me. I knew I looked like a total jerkwad to everyone nearby, pretending I didn’t hear that boy on the boardwalk as I continued onto the beach, but they didn’t understand. My whole life was on the line.

Like a mole, Jocelyn quietly poked her head up from her three-foot-by-three-foot box. She was so unremarkable, like a streetlight or a piece of litter, that people often walked onto the beach without seeing her. Even her “May I see your badge, please?” was feeble and spiritless and rarely turned heads. She always had this look on her face like she’d smelled something bad. Her eyes fell on me. “Can’t you do something, lifeguard?” She had to have known my name. Ten years ago, Jocelyn had been part of a long line of sitters Nan had used for me when she’d gone off to play bridge, before it became obvious that babysitters shouldn’t do the Cross house. We scared them all away. Unlike Jocelyn, we Crosses were unforgettable. I’d liked Jocelyn, though. She’d tried to play games with me, unlike all the others, who spent the time ignoring me and blabbing away on the phone.

Maybe that was why, when she asked, I stopped. Forcing a new memory down, I backtracked toward the boardwalk, kicking up scalding sand as I ran. I took all three steps at once and followed the little boy’s line of vision into the street.

You will …

A girl about my age was crouched down, tying her running shoe. She was wearing nylon shorts, a tank, and earphones, which accounted for her nodding along to the music, completely oblivious to the fact that a furniture delivery truck was slowly backing into her. Okay, yeah, in terms of distance, I was pretty close to her, maybe only twenty yards away. But though it was a hot August day and the place was swarming with people, everyone else was just staring, like invalids, or like they wanted to see the girl get flattened. Some of them looked at me expectantly, like it was the duty of the guy in the red shorts to break into action à la Baywatch and save the day.

I strained to see the lifeguard stand in the bright noon sun. I could see only the top of Pedro’s head. He was slumped down, still, unmoving. Asleep. That morning when I’d arrived at the stand, he’d smelled like a brewery. He’d said he had the hangover from hell, but I thought he was still drunk. He kept pointing out hot girls and whistling at them, as if he was at some bar in the Heights. I probably shouldn’t have left him alone for lunch, but it was in the script. And I never went against the script.

Until now. I turned back toward the girl. Crap. I knew that even just standing there, frozen with indecision, was probably going to throw everything off. Sure enough, the first pangs of pain rapped at my temple.

You will …

My grandmother always said that God puts signs everywhere. Maybe if the girl in danger hadn’t looked like my best description of an angel—a lion’s mane of curly platinum hair pushed back with a headband—I wouldn’t have destroyed that perfect future I’d found for myself. In that split second that she flipped her angelic white hair back to reveal skin so perfect it practically glowed in the sun, I realized it was a sign. God wanted—no, demanded that I step in.

You will …

It was almost like I was outside my body, watching myself break away from the script. I took a few flying steps and launched myself off the boardwalk and onto Ocean Avenue, my fall cushioned by a pile of sand. Something in my head began to whir, softly at first. Yet somehow, in that moment, I held on to the naïve hope that everything wouldn’t change.

It might still be okay, I thought as I grabbed the girl’s arm and guided her out of the way. She was limp as a rag doll and didn’t fight, as if she was used to being pulled in different directions by complete strangers. As I positioned her safely on a plank near the boardwalk, I could hear the bass thumping from her earphones.

It wasn’t a very heroic scene. The rather large audience that had gathered didn’t applaud; they just quietly turned back to what they’d been doing, almost as if they’d wanted to see a tragedy. By that time, though, I wasn’t looking for applause. My hopes of getting back everything I’d had dwindled as my brain began to pound, flip-flip-flipping as new memories shuffled like cards.

I grimaced and blinked hard to stop the throbbing, the commotion in my head so loud that it drowned out the noon siren.





I’d grown used to the cycling of my future “memories.” Before that summer, it had happened every day, just a little. When I was a kid, before I’d learned to deal with them, my mind would shuffle constantly, weaving in new futures in place of the old ones, leaving others in the dust, like dreams. Maybe I’d forgotten, but back then, the cycling hadn’t seemed to hurt this much.

Of course, I’d never been able to go so long without any major cycling. Somehow I’d managed to make it almost three months without veering away from the future I saw in my head. It was a good future. A future I wanted desperately to keep. And now it was gone.

I collapsed on the pavement, breathing hard. Lifted my arms over my shoulders and squeezed my head between my elbows like a vise. Senseless images of people I’d never met, things I’d never done, shattered fragments of my future, sputtered through my head.

You will … can.… be.… not …

“Hey, are you okay?”

It was a girl’s voice. The angel. In my blurry vision I could see two silvery pink running shoes, toes pointed at me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I blurted out, trying to look up at her, when a surge of agony pulled my head down again. “Sun glare.”

She didn’t speak. I tried to raise my head, but it was a no-go, as if a fifty-pound dumbbell was dangling from my neck and someone was playing the drums on my cerebral cortex.

“Well, thanks. I didn’t see. I, um …,” she babbled, all the while forcing me to the sad recognition that this girl was intensely sweet and shy and everything I would look for if I didn’t know I was destined to marry a redheaded nurse named Sue from Philly in ten years. Except, I realized as my memories shuffled at a maddening speed, that outcome was gone forever. Sue existed somewhere, still, but she’d probably never be with me. And now my crash-and-burn with this girl was inevitable. I’d lost two hot girls in one morning.

Without warning, I smelled apples laced with cinnamon, like someone was baking pies nearby. I could almost taste them. My salivary glands kicked into overdrive and my mouth began to water. Then, suddenly, the memory disappeared. Whoosh. Gone.

The girl was trying to tell me about how she was new in town. It was where any normal guy would say something like “Where are you from?” or “Can I show you around?”, but instead, my eyes bulged, heavy, and I couldn’t bring myself to raise them higher than her perfectly shaped ankles. To top it all off, I felt drool bubbling over my bottom lip. Awesome. Just my luck. Why couldn’t she just leave? Leave now, but come back later so we could continue this conversation at a time when I wasn’t cycling, when I felt more normal? But for me, abnormal was normal. I’d been fooling myself, thinking I could change who I was.

Suddenly I saw craft paper and a paperback romance novel and water dripping on hardwood. Fear curdled in my body. A scream bloomed in my throat but came out as a muffled moan. A jolt of pressure rocketed through my eyeballs, seeming to slice them in half. I pushed my palms hard against my eye sockets. “No. No. No!”

Most girls ran screaming from me, but this girl wouldn’t leave. Perfect. She put her hands on her knees, and though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was squinting at me like I was some experiment gone horrifically wrong. “Are you having an aneurysm?”

“No, I’ll be …” Another jab in my eye, and then a picture

Me, screaming flashed in front of my eyes. My next word was a muffled groan—“Fine”—because another memory was fighting against the rage of others, floating to the surface kissing soft lips, blond curls in my eyes and giving me a warm, tense feeling between my legs. What? I get to kiss her? Seriously? I was drooling in front of her, for God’s sake. I hadn’t completely ruined things with her with this moronic display? Just as I inwardly started to celebrate I caught another … it is unexpected tragedy that brings us together today the unexpected is often the most difficult to deal with and clenched my fists. Sure, in the future I’d perfected, there were funerals. But nothing horrible. My mother wouldn’t go until she was in her sixties. And my last official memory was digging for sand crabs in the surf with my grandson—I could even feel the ache of my bones with that memory, so I had to have been old. My poor grandson. That little blond kid. He was gone now, cast into dreamland with the others. God, I’d loved him. When I was young, I’d always hoped that when I cycled away from an outcome, all the progeny I remembered wouldn’t just disappear forever, that they’d have a chance to exist somewhere, with other families, like Sue. The more kids and grandkids I recycled, though, the less I believed that was true. Every time the experiences started to shuffle, I felt like I was murdering them.

Murderer! You killed her!

The words sliced through my head. I smelled something sour and felt a hot breath on my neck. The voice was so vicious and the memory so vivid, I thought it was real; I looked around and saw a small crowd of a dozen or so people in bathing suits, carrying their beach chairs and towels, staring at me. But no one was standing close by accusing me of being a killer. I would have wondered where the hell that came from if I hadn’t already known. The weirdest and most unimaginable things only came from one place: the land of the yet-to-be.

I shuddered and gripped my head tightly in my hands. “Green elephant,” I muttered under my breath.

She leaned forward. Apples again. Her hair smelled like apples. I inhaled deeply, feasting on the smell, since it was the only nice thing I could find about the moment. “Excuse me?”

I clenched my teeth. “Green elephant, green elephant. Green elephant.”

I figured that if anything could send her away, me muttering nonsensical phrases would be it. The phrase “green elephant” didn’t mean anything to her, but I’d invented it when I was nine or ten, and it meant everything to me.

“Do you want some water or something?”

Why did she have to be so damn nice? I pulled my head up and stared into her eyes, blue and endless, and

Blood on the staircase

I knew right then I was going to be sick. “Look.” I tried to keep my voice even, but it came out as more of a growl. “I don’t want anything from you, so just get the hell away from me.”

I was surprised by two things. First, at how I could bring myself to sound like a total jerkwad, which was what I probably was, but I’d always been too absorbed in my future to dwell on it. And second, at how she just nodded, as if it all made sense. She hurried up the ramp and jogged off, fastening the headphones over her ears as if we’d been chatting about the weather.

I sat alone for a moment, eyes closed, green-elephanting until the pain subsided and my mind slowed to a peaceful lull. A thousand new memories of the future bubbled under the surface of my eyes. On the bad side, there was something about blood on the staircase, and I had this strange ache in my chest. On the good side, there was kissing that girl. The rest I would have to sort out later. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds of a heavyweight title match. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the cycling or because the new memories would prove too horrifying to bear. I could change them. I could change the bad things, sometimes, by going off script.

The problem was, changing the bad things usually took away the good things, too. And there always seemed to be more bad things to replace the ones I managed to escape. The future I’d given up was a one-in-a-thousand future. I went to college, married Sue, who understood me as well as anyone could, had children and grandchildren. It wasn’t anything awesome, but it was normal, and that was all I wanted. The other hundreds of futures were like episodes of some bad television show. High drama, all the time. Once, I’d choked to death in my teens. Once, I’d accidentally caused a fire while making bacon in the kitchen and ended up homeless. Once, I’d wound up addicted to crack, in a loveless marriage to a Vegas stripper, and murdered in a drug deal in my early twenties. I’d done it all. In my head, at least.

And sometimes … sometimes, try as I might, I couldn’t change things. It was like certain past events sealed that certain future events would occur, and they couldn’t be changed, or it wasn’t clear how to change them. Once, when I was ten, I was trying so hard to follow the script that I tripped and broke my wrist. After that, I had this strong feeling I was going to get a huge bump on my head, but I couldn’t tell how. I tried not following the script, hoping to avoid that bump. But it didn’t work, because I didn’t know what in the script to change. Turned out that I had to give up skateboarding until my wrist healed, so I put my skateboard on the top shelf of my closet. I opened it one day and the skateboard fell out and whacked me on the head. So sometimes bad things were just impossible to avoid.

You will climb up to the boardwalk and smile at Jocelyn. She will eye you up and down, and a couple of children and a man with a Boogie board will step aside to let you pass.

Crazy Cross. That was what they called me at school, and as I felt the eyes of all the beachgoers on me, I knew it wouldn’t be too long until they thought the same. I knew they’d run home and tell their friends what they’d seen, and I’d be the talk of the town again, and not in a good way. As I climbed up the ramp, quickly, trying my best to ignore the stares, that same sinking feeling resurfaced. For three months, I’d shed it, but now, it wrapped around me, heavy, like a winter coat.

You will bury your feet in the sand and hurry down the beach.

I groaned and stepped off the boardwalk, sinking ankle-deep into the hot sand.

You will hear the radio crackle with “Ambulance … Seventh Avenue.” You will see the crowd gathered at the waterline. Chaos. Shouts. Pedro will narrow his eyes at you when you break through, and scream, “Where the hell were you?”

They will tell you there’s no hope of saving the girl in the pink bikini. And you will know it is because of you.





I was usually too busy getting tripped up by my future to think about the past. But that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about the past. I couldn’t get that little girl’s dead blue lips out of my mind. Those long eyelashes, coated in salt water and sand. She wasn’t one of my dreamland kids; she’d been living and breathing and growing on this earth. And now she was dead.

The girl had been playing in ankle-high water. We’d had a storm the night before, and she’d been dragged out by the strong undertow. In my memory, I’d shaken Pedro awake in time for him to point out the little girl. At the time I’d thought he was pointing out a piece of ass, but eventually I would have realized it was a drowning and I would have saved her. I did save her, dammit. I had the sore neck muscles to prove it, where her mother had hugged me so tightly, shrieking an endless supply of thank-yous into my ear.

In reality, though, Pedro slept through the noon siren, only to be awakened by the little girl’s mother screaming. Yeah, outwardly, it was Pedro’s fault. But my lunch break was up at noon, and I’d been late. I’d also known Pedro wasn’t in any condition to man the stand himself. I could easily have prevented it. But I didn’t.

It would take days or weeks or months to sort out what lay ahead in this new future, but I already knew some things. I knew that Bill Runyon, our captain, had summoned me to headquarters to can me. I knew he would give me that pity look, the one teachers reserve for students who “had so much potential” but still manage to become total screwups anyway. I knew he would use phrases like “good kid” and “take a breather” and that he would shift uncomfortably behind his desk while fingering the cords on the hood of his SPBP sweatshirt. He could single-handedly carry a four-man rowboat down the beach, but he was piss-poor at confrontation. I guess I could have left my whistle and ID on the bench outside headquarters, then biked away and considered my three-month tenure as Seaside Park lifeguard finito. That was what Pedro did; he’d wandered off quietly somewhere in the middle of the chaos, and I found his things lying on the bench. But I went in for the torture anyway. I had nothing better to do.

Besides, if I listened to Bill, chances were I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else. It was the thinking that killed me.

You will sit on the chair at Bill’s desk and start to fidget. He will pretend to be going through papers, but you will know he is just avoiding this.

I sat down and laced my fingers in front of me. I fidgeted even when I wasn’t nervous, though I couldn’t actually remember a time I wasn’t nervous about something. Bill riffled through papers, and I wondered if he was thinking about my mom. Supposedly, they’d gone to high school together, which was why he always asked me how she was doing. Usually with the same kind of face you’d have if you were inquiring about a puppy that got run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

No, I wasn’t the first Crazy Cross he’d had to deal with. But I knew that if he—if anyone—had the chance to see things the way my mom and I did, he’d be just like us. I’d been the only one who’d seen the happy ending—the one where I’d carried the kid to the sand and performed CPR until she regained consciousness, coughing up seawater, in my arms. Now that outcome existed only in broken fragments, bits of sensation—the relief when she finally began to stir, the feeling of her sandy cheek against mine as she hugged me—somewhere in a corner of my mind. The rest of the world—the real world—had seen me arrive on the scene minutes too late and try to get her going, screaming “Breathe!” and pressing on her tiny little corpse chest over and over again, way past the time any normal dude would have given up. People in the crowd turned away, disgusted, but did I care? No. Instead, the EMTs who arrived with the ambulance five minutes later had to tear me away from the dead body.

You will hear the faraway screams of glee from the children on the Tilt-a-Whirl at Funtown Pier and you will think of the little girl in the pink bikini. Bill will turn at that moment and see the anguish in your face. “Tough day,” he will say.

The children’s shouts made me cringe. The dead girl was probably in kindergarten, at an age when kids love school. Her friends would probably wonder where she was on that first day in September and then they would learn the awful truth. It would be their first taste of death, of mortality. It would likely scar them for years, maybe forever. Way to make your mark on the world, Cross, I thought. A dozen kindergartners will wet their beds for years to come because of you.

Once, Nan had sat me down to watch her favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. I hated that movie, maybe because I envied the Jimmy Stewart character. He had such a positive impact on the world. Everything I did always turned to crap. I mean, lifeguarding? What was I thinking? Of course I couldn’t be a lifeguard, not when I could so easily go off script and have thousands of futures competing in my mind, destroying my concentration. It was like Betty Crocker running a weight-loss clinic.

“Tough day.”

You will nod but say nothing.

I pushed away the thought of five bright-eyed tots being reduced to tears in the back of the school bus when another kid let the news spill that the little girl was dead. That wasn’t real. After all, I assured myself, I couldn’t be on the school bus with them. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish my thoughts of the future from the spirals of my imagination. Still, I could clearly see that snot-nosed kid sputtering “—is dead.”

Hell, I didn’t even know the little girl’s name.

You will—

Sometimes I could think something so hard, I couldn’t see the script. I did that now, picturing instead my old standby, the green elephant. “What was her name?”

My mind began to shuffle before I could finish the sentence. But it wasn’t like the cycling had gone on a rampage, like before. It was only a small pang-pang-pang against my temple. I rested my elbow on the padded armrest and dug my fist into the side of my head to steady the throbbing.

Bill’s eyes were always soft. He was the good-natured, back-slapping, even type whose voice never rose beyond a whisper. He’d been readying the Good Kid speech, but his eyes narrowed. “Come on, Nick, let’s not go into—”

More shuffling. “Tell me.” But the truth was, I really didn’t need him. All the answers were already there in my head. I just needed to commit in my mind to travel far enough down a path to retrieve them. I could do it, if the answer could be found somewhere in the immediate future. I could find out anything if I wanted it badly enough. I just had to contend with the pain. I sat for a moment, imagining myself tracking down the answer, the pain escalating all the while. If I stopped right now and went back on course, followed the script like a good boy, the cycling would stop. But I couldn’t. I needed to know. Once I followed the path far enough in my head, the one where I lunged over the side of the desk and ripped the paper from Bill’s hands, receiving a punch from him that would make my lips bloody and swollen like raw sausages for weeks, I squeezed myself back in my chair, digging my fingers into the armrest to keep my body from actually doing it. Then I pressed my eyes closed and silently green-elephanted until only two words appeared in my mind.

Emma Reese

I opened my eyes. My mouth still smarted from the punch I’d never receive. “Emma? Emma Reese? Is that her name?”

Bill’s eyes flashed surprise for only a second before melting into acceptance, and I knew he was thinking of my mother. I really didn’t know what strange things he’d seen my mother do that summer before she confined herself to her bedroom, but it was clear he’d seen something. I was afraid to know what. “Yes, it is.”

Finally, peace. That lasted about one-tenth of a second. Somehow, knowing her name made the burden heavier.

He put his hands up gently, as if motioning a car to a stop in a tight parking spot. “Listen. This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have done any more than you did. Jocelyn said you were helping her with a situation on the boardwalk.”

I’d been so busy concentrating on what I needed, the mention of Jocelyn surprised me. “She said that?”

He nodded. “Pedro, well … I’ll deal with him separately.”

I cringed at the mention of Pedro. Maybe he thought his mirrored sunglasses could disguise a little catnap, but in my vision, he’d been out like a light, snoring. I could have done something. I could have told headquarters that he was hungover. I could have stayed at my post instead of getting lunch. I could have ignored everything else and arrived at my post five minutes earlier, like I was supposed to. Bill went on about how “these things happen,” but he didn’t see what I saw. It was my fault.

He closed a thin manila file. On the tab, I saw CROSS, NICK in black block letters. “I’m sure a bunch of us will attend the funeral, and you’re more than welcome to—”

“Let me ask you a question.” I leaned forward, took a breath. “If ‘these things happen,’ like you say, and it’s not my fault, then why am I being fired?”

He sighed. “Aw, kid. Look. It’s politics. And you don’t want to be caught in the middle of an invest—”

“I killed her.” I spit out the words. “It is my fault. You can tell them whatever you want, but I could have saved her.”

I wanted to see what else he had written in the file. Maybe Terminated. Crazy as His Mother. But I didn’t want to get punched in the face again. Just the memory of the punch hurt. I flinched at the thought. My mind revved a bit more, like a computer’s hard drive being tested to its limits. I could almost feel the future memories, memories I hadn’t even sorted through, being plucked from my mind. A crease grew at the center of Bill’s forehead. I wondered if my mother had seen that crease.

Shutting my eyes, I spoke. “I want to—” I held out my hands but dropped them to my sides again when I realized they were trembling. My voice was, too. The pain was intensifying by the minute. I crunched down on the words, biting off each one. “I. Need. To.”

In that memory I’d had prior to entering Bill’s office, the one where he’d given the Good Kid speech, his features were a lot softer and, on the whole, more sympathetic. Now he looked disgusted, worn out. “What you need is to go home.

Get some rest. Take a breather.”

“What I need”—my voice cracked—“is …”

I wiped my eye and looked down at my hand. Wet. Perfect. When had I started crying?

He stood up and walked to the edge of his desk. Sat down on it so that his flip-flop dangled off one tanned foot. “Look … it’s not your—”

I closed my eyes again. Clenched my fists. Sometimes I hated people. They didn’t see things the way I did. “You. Are. Wrong.”

He went back behind the desk and began to scribble something on a notepad, all the while saying that he recommended I settle down before heading off, as he put it, “half-cocked.” My mind cycled a little more, so I squeezed my head between my hands and let the memories fall into place.

“Emma. Emma Reese,” I said aloud.

We know who you are and what you did and because of you she is dead you killed our Emma

The words lingered in my brain; a man spitting and growling them in such a way that I could feel his breath on my ear and smell something sour and dank, like old milk, on him. The vision that accompanied this was of a vaguely familiar brick ranch house, surrounded by pretty white pebbles. And there was the taste of lemonade. Lemonade and blood. Even though some of the images made no sense, it was clear that they blamed me. Whoever they were.

More cycling. You will …

I tried to green-elephant, but all I could see was a picture of the girl lying dead on the sand, surrounded by a circle of onlookers.

When I snapped back to reality, I realized that Bill had come over to my side of the desk. I found a piece of paper, folded, in my palm. I stood and thanked him. A cool ocean breeze greeted me when I opened the screen door and stepped outside.

The pain in my head subsided.

You will pick up your bike, straddle it, then open the sheet of paper in your hand.

I did so, but before I even read the paper, I cringed at what I knew was written on it. Scrawled there were nine words:

Get help before you end up like your mother.