I walked Taryn home on the boardwalk. It was a long walk, two miles, and a cold breeze was blowing in from the ocean, but it felt good to move, to have the wind blowing against my chest. It was a reminder that we were still here.
“Have your visions changed?” she asked me quietly.
“Maybe,” I said to her, silently adding, Doubtfully. I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d seen it again, in the pizza place. And that it scared me. I wasn’t sure why the vision of us in Beauty was so persistent. Just making the promise never to get into her Jeep should have been enough to steer it off course. And these past few days, I’d often disregarded the script, so much so that the ache in my head was a dull, constant pain between my eyes. I’d hoped that by doing that, something would change. Still, whenever I let the visions come in now, it was always there, the final act of the sad and tumultuous play that was my life. I’d been starting to wonder if some things about life were like that: meant to be, unbreakable. Destiny. Like building a house of cards, it doesn’t matter how you build it, or what you do to make it strong. Eventually, it always comes down. But I couldn’t tell Taryn that. She had enough going on anyway. “It’s hard to tell. The You Wills aren’t as strong when I’m with you. And I haven’t been paying attention to them as much because I was trying to … I don’t know.”
We walked a little while longer, until she stopped and said, “I want to walk on the beach. Don’t you?”
I didn’t. It was freezing, and after Emma I didn’t know if I’d be okay with going out there. But I kicked off my shoes and followed her anyway. The sand was warm between my toes. She was right. It felt good. When we were halfway down the beach, she turned to me.
“Thank you for being there tonight,” she said.
I laughed. “I ruined everything.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “It meant a lot to me that you would be there. I knew it probably wouldn’t be easy for you to see what your mother went through.”
That didn’t bother me. After all, she’d signed up for it. “Not so much. I can be there for the next one. And I won’t mess it up. I promise.”
“Yeah? Okay, cool.”
She looked up at me, and we were standing pretty close to each other, so I thought it would be a good time to kiss her. I mean, beach, romantic sunset, et cetera. But I didn’t know how to go in for the kill. I had a vision of me gnashing my teeth against hers and I couldn’t tell if that was real or me being paranoid. So I just said, “Your grandmother … when she gave up the practice for a lot of years … do you think she did it because of my mom? Because she found out she’d given a Touch to a pregnant woman and infected an innocent kid?”
“Oh,” Taryn said, thinking it over. “Yeah. Maybe. That makes sense. I think Grandma would hate that. She always talks about her subjects taking responsibility for their actions. But to give it to someone who didn’t ask for it …”
I laughed again and sucked in a mouthful of cool sea air. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just realized how much I’ve ruined your life.”
She stared at me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if your grandmother hadn’t given it up for all those years, because of me, she would have most likely been able to dispense with all the Touches left in the book way before now. And didn’t you say that once the book is done, your family curse is over? You wouldn’t have had to …”
Her eyes widened. “Oh.”
She started walking another few steps, and all the while I let it sink in. Whatever attraction we felt for each other, it was dangerous. All this time, I was thinking that my attraction to her was endangering me. But first I left her to a lifetime of slavery under the Book of Touch. And then I went ahead and stopped her from performing the Touch she needed to perform in order to stay alive. Not to mention that we were going to die together. Even if we vowed to stay away from her Jeep, something else would probably get us. We were bad for each other. Bad. Sure, it felt good being with her, but that was the problem. In my life, bad always accompanied the good. Always.
Suddenly she grabbed my hand and said, “Let’s go,” pulling me in the opposite direction.
Her pace quickened, and I had to pick it up to follow. At first I thought maybe she saw it, too. The writing on the wall in capital letters that we were going to be the death of each other and needed to separate as quickly as possible. When we got to the boardwalk, I caught her looking over her shoulder. I followed her gaze to two forms in the gazebo. Two men, it looked like, standing on the wooden seats and smoking cigarettes. They were staring at us.
Maybe it was just because of the chill in the air, but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. “Who are they?” I asked.
They were standing in our way. To get by on the boardwalk we would have had to walk right past them. And from the way Taryn stood there, frozen, it was like she was facing a rabid dog. The men stubbed out their smokes and started walking our way. The only thing I could tell was that they were wearing all black, and in movies the bad guys always wear black from head to toe. She tugged on my sleeve. “Let’s go another way.”
I was not really in the mood to get my ass whipped in front of her, so I followed her. “Who are they?” I repeated.
“No one,” she replied, hustling down the ramp on Third Avenue.
I looked over my shoulder. They were coming closer. “More weak people with an unexplained attraction to you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Bryce is an old … family friend.”
“Bryce?” I swallowed and looked back. It was dark, but the taller guy looked vaguely familiar, from photos I had seen at the Reese home, and from the cemetery. I hadn’t been able to get that picture of him, standing over Emma’s grave, out of my mind. He wasn’t much bigger than I was, but grief did things to people, which was how he’d been able to knock me down at the cemetery. He hated me. And he had every right to. I picked up the pace until I was walking in front of Taryn. “He’s a family friend?”
“He lives next door to my grandmother.” She mumbled, “He’s Emma’s brother.”
This was all getting worse and worse by the minute. “I know. I had a little run-in with him at Emma’s funeral.” I pointed to my eye, which was turning yellow in places.
“He did that to you? I thought you said—”
“He wanted to kill me. Because of Emma,” I said. “He knows that I’m responsible.”
“You’re not responsible,” she said. “He’s a weak person, looking for someone to blame.”
“Weak? He sure didn’t feel that way when he was pressing my face into the grass.”
“I bet he’s drunk. I’ve heard he’s spent every night since he got back to town at the Sawmill.”
Even better. Likely he was getting drunk to numb the pain of Emma’s death. Not only had I killed her, I’d created an alcoholic.
The two men slowed down and then disappeared somewhere among the darkness and the dunes. It was worse, not being able to see them. We were in Seaside Park, and nobody was nearby. This could be incredibly bad. I’m putting Taryn in danger, I thought. We shouldn’t be here, together.
She said, “Maybe he’s not following you. Maybe he’s—”
“He told me he wanted me dead.” I grabbed Taryn’s shoulder a little rougher than I meant to. “Let’s go.”
She looked at me, eyes wide with surprise. All I wanted to do was bolt, away from this whole thing. Someplace safe. Home. My bedroom. Somewhere I couldn’t feel anything, because everything always ended up hurting. But Taryn was just standing there, this confused expression on her face, as if she was trying to figure Bryce out. But there was nothing to figure out. Bryce Reese hated me.
“Let’s go,” I muttered, turning. I didn’t want to see her expression. At that point, I didn’t care if she followed. I didn’t care about anything as I hurried down the street, toward home. Everything about me being there, in that moment, was wrong.
Taryn called after me, “Wait up! Wait up! You’re not mad, Nick, are you?”, but I only increased my speed. Finally she let out a small, strangled “Please!”
I had to stop. I turned. Waited for her to catch up. “What?”
She studied my face in the streetlight. “You are mad?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t. I was tired. Tired of trying for things that the universe didn’t want me to have. “I’ll walk you home.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence. I didn’t even stop when we reached her house, and I didn’t say goodbye, just left her alone in her front yard, where she probably stared after me until I was gone from sight. She was like that. Good. Too good for someone like me.
When I left her, I broke into a run. As I raced, breathless, toward home, I thought of my mom, staying in her room day after day, alone. Battering through the salty mist swirling in the streetlights, for a brief, flickering moment, I understood her. Some people have a knack for messing up everything and everyone they touch. Love. Happiness. Walking down the beach, feeling nothing but the wind on my face and the hand of someone I care about in mine. Those things would never be for us. Any momentary thought that they could be ours was just an illusion. That was the house of cards.
I spent the next two days in bed. The You Wills fought to get me out, but I ignored them and thought of the low, dull headache they caused as punishment for my stupidity. When I slept, I dreamt of Emma, floating to the surface of a black sea, but when I was awake, I found myself thinking mostly about Taryn. I tried to convince myself that she was in more danger near me than without me. I wondered if she’d performed the Touch yet. When I wasn’t thinking about Taryn, I felt guilty and disgusted with myself for the large portion of time I had spent thinking about her. I should have been thinking and caring about other things, things I could do something about. Nan with her broken arm. My last year of high school. Not turning into a recluse like my mother. Despite all that, the thing center stage in my brain was Taryn. I didn’t want to care about her. But I did. Too much. And I hated it.
Strangely, even though I vowed to myself I would never talk to her again, that I would run in the other direction if I ever saw her, the visions of us in her Jeep didn’t change. It was useless to tell myself it was over, because I didn’t mean it. After all, school was coming up. I wouldn’t be able to avoid her there.
And then it was the first day of school. I realized that it was also Taryn’s birthday. She was seventeen. I had what I thought was a vision of buying her a cake and singing happy birthday to her on the beach, but then I realized it was just my imagination. We were not together. We could never be together.
But why did it seem, in my muddled mind filled with future and past and everything in between, like we were? It was as if every day without her was killing every happy vision of the future I’d ever had, over and over again, slicing through them until only shredded, faded remains.
I woke up late. Actually, I hadn’t slept much, but I couldn’t manage to get myself out of bed. I didn’t want to think of facing the day. Of facing school.
I threw on the first T-shirt I could find, my favorite blue one with the words DON’T BOTHER ME on the front. Totally appropriate. Then I trudged down the stairs, where Nan had put my backpack and lunch. She was so prepared; even with the broken arm, she’d managed to go through the normal routine. Nan always made a big fuss over the first day of school, so I slipped out the door before she could ask me if I wanted breakfast.
I felt bad as soon as I left. I saw the smiley face in ketchup on my eggs, which she’d been doing since I was four to psych me up for “big days” like the first day of school. I hated school completely. The academic part was downright painful, since I could barely concentrate on anything with the script in my head. And as bad as that was, it was no match for my social life, or lack thereof. I pretty much kept to myself. I was the one who sat in the back of the classroom, alone. People didn’t mess with Crazy Cross.
When the bus dropped me off and I walked toward the front doors, thinking of too much perfume, Bill Runyon’s Land Rover, silver butterfly, I saw the piece-of-crap vehicle I had so many memories of dying in parked in the first spot in the nearest lot, taunting me. She’d peeled all the bumper stickers off; all that was left was their white, flaking remains. I wasn’t really surprised to see Taryn’s Jeep. Of course, without me to interfere, her life was going fine. She’d performed the Touch, and now all was right with the world.
I tried to convince myself it didn’t matter. What she did was her own business. It had nothing to do with me.
The problem was, I couldn’t not think of her. I had nothing else that was interesting enough to fill the void.
When you get to the twelfth grade, the first day of school is numbing. You don’t even get that nervous feeling in your stomach; you just have that sense of exhaustion that overpowers you when you’ve run most of a ten-mile race and know the finish line is coming but can’t see it anywhere. I got my schedule and locker combination and made it to homeroom, where I was told I needed to see the guidance counselor, Mrs. Gross, which was a misleading name because she was really pretty. The only thing was that she tried too hard to look young and like “one of us.” She was wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt, and had pulled one knee up to her chin as she studied some papers on her desk. I didn’t buy it. I knew that somewhere in her closet were pearl earrings or a sweater set or mom jeans or whatever it was that old people wore.
“Oh, Nick!” she said, coming around to give me a hug. She was totally touchy-feely, too, and even more so with me, probably because she thought I was one of the mental ones who needed her. “It is so good to see you. Have a nice summer?”
I thought about Emma. “Wonderful,” I muttered as she embraced me. She smelled like stale coffee and too much perfume.
It was weird to be summoned here on the first day of school. I’d spoken to Mrs. Gross a handful of times during my high school career, and mostly she asked me questions about where I wanted to be and what I saw myself doing in ten years. Hilarious. Sometimes I could tell her exactly where I’d be in ten years, but it always depended on the day. She was wary of me because once, on a particularly bad day, I made a really stupid slip in my foul mood and told her I saw myself dead. It was the truth; that was when I ended up in Vegas, married to a stripper and dealing drugs to make ends meet. But the obvious inference was that I was contemplating suicide. Mrs. Gross called in Nan and set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for me and I had to spend the next three months trying to convince them that no, whoops, I misspoke, I’m actually just fine. So for the past couple of times I’d told her I wanted to be a dentist. It’s something I have no interest in doing, but it keeps her from calling the men with strait-jackets.
Anyway, even though it was weird to be summoned, I knew why she did it. She wanted to ask me why I hadn’t used the “wealth of helpful free services” the school provided to put together my college applications. Truth was, applying to college was the furthest thing from my mind. But I guess an aspiring dentist like myself should have been knee-deep in applications by now. I just smiled when she said, “I’d be happy to look over your application materials.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Her face turned troubled and by then the You Wills had traveled far enough into the future to allow me to see it. And then I suddenly realized something.
I was a sucker.
She hadn’t called me in here at all to talk college.
She wanted to … oh, hell.
“No. I’m fine,” I said quickly, then cleared my throat when I realized she hadn’t asked the question yet. “I mean, I have to go to class.”
“I found out that you tried out for cross-country,” she said brightly. “That’s so wonderful. You have no idea how happy that made me, to see you finally trying to participate. I know I’ve told you time and time again how important extracurriculars are for a well-rounded college app. It upset me to find out that you didn’t make the team, though. As you can imagine.”
“Yeah, but that’s okay. I don’t want to—”
“No, it’s not. You’re a good runner. And so I spoke to Coach Garner about having you try out again.”
I stared at her, feeling the horror slowly cracking through the mask of indifference on my face.
She gave me a look that reeked of sympathy. “Nick, we heard about what happened before tryouts. That unfortunate incident. Of course that would affect your performance.”
I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. I felt all the blood in my body rushing to my face. “It didn’t affect me. I was fine. And I lost, fair and square.”
She shook her head as if to say, “Silly you.” As if I should jump at the chance to receive her charity.
“Look, I am not trying out again,” I said, wooden.
She smiled at me. “Now, Nick—”
“No, listen,” I seethed.
I hadn’t meant it to come out as a seethe, but I guess it did because I saw little droplets of spit shooting out of my mouth. She leaned back in her chair, surprised and probably a little grossed out. Guess kids didn’t cut her off very often, because her eyes narrowed.
“I mean, thank you,” I managed, backpedaling. “But no thank you. I mean it.”
She just stared at me for what felt like a year.
“Am I done here?” I asked, motioning toward the door. As if I couldn’t wait to be in physics. She waved me on and I escaped into the hallway, closing the door with such force that the frosted glass panel clattered in its frame.
Gritting my teeth, I stalked down the hallway, completely oblivious to everything else going on around me. Not even seven in the morning, and I was already in a crappy mood. I was sure physics, my worst subject, wasn’t going to help anything. I checked my schedule. Room 231.
I wish I had kept my head down as I found my way to the math wing. I wish I had been so well versed in the layout of the school that I didn’t have to look up to see the room numbers. As it was, though, I’d never been to Room 231, and it was in the middle of a very busy section of the building, where two hallways intersected. If I had kept my head down, I wouldn’t have seen Taryn walking down the other hallway, right toward me, holding hands with a guy wearing a black leather jacket, gloves, and a nose ring.
She looked up at him and gave him a smile, while I stared, too dumbstruck to look away. Not three days ago, that guy could have been me. And wasn’t she supposed to be concerned about dying? She’d really been devoting her time to finding someone to Touch, but in a totally different way than I had thought. All this time, I’d been worrying about her, and she … she didn’t give a crap about me.
At the last second before I made it to the classroom, her eyes brushed over me. She pulled away from the guy and whispered, “Nick!”, and the redness was already starting to pool in her cheeks. I could hear her trying to say something to me, but I didn’t care what it was. By then, I was so out of there. I went into the room and slammed the door in her face. The teacher, Mr. Baumgartner, started screaming at me immediately. Something about “This is not your personal office, Mister. What is your name?”, but I just shoved myself into a seat, the first seat I could find, and clenched my fists.
The door opened a second later, as the teacher was screaming, “Answer me!” Taryn walked in, her eyes wide. She was wearing cutoffs that made her legs look phenomenal, but the second I thought that I hated myself for thinking anything good about her. Her gaze shifted between me and the teacher, and she started to walk toward me, cautiously. Baumgartner’s eyes flashed to her, like he was trying to figure out what part she played in all this, but he didn’t say anything. I stood up, grabbed my schedule, and faked like I was coming toward her, then quickly skirted around another row of desks and out the door.
The crowds in the hallway were thinning. The bell was about to ring. Taryn’s Nose Ring Dude was still hanging out there, waiting for her with a stupid expression on his face, and I scowled as I passed, wanting to do a whole lot worse. I mean, what the hell? He wasn’t anything like her type. And he was just plain nasty-looking. There were a thousand things wrong with him, but I forced myself to remember that it didn’t matter what she did with him. We were over. That was the way it needed to be. She needed to get on with her life so that she could have one. A nice, long one, probably filled with many more dudes who weren’t me.
Baumgartner shrieked behind me, the noise echoing down the hall—“Stop right there! You! Listen to me! Mister!”—but I didn’t care. People were gawking at me, stepping aside to let me pass like I had some infectious disease, but it didn’t matter what they thought. In the future, the near future, I was dead. Nothing I did now mattered. Not teachers, or students, or cross-country, or even Taryn.
Only one obstacle dared to stay in my way. I heard him before I saw him. “What did you do now, Cross?” the voice said, sparkling with amusement.
Sphincter.
And I thought the morning couldn’t get any worse.
He didn’t have time to wipe the smile off his face. I blew into his broad shoulder with more force than I knew possible, knocking him back, so he stumbled a little before he recovered. I didn’t see who he was with, only caught a glimpse of a red mane. The air was perfumed with competing scents, a stew of flowers and chemicals that clawed at my nostrils, making it even harder to breathe. Sphincter laughed and turned to the red sea of hair. “Crazy Cross,” he said with the same affectionate tinge in his voice I’d come to know and hate.
I lost it.
I turned to him, my hands balling into fists. My first punch hit him squarely in the jaw, throwing him back against the locker. The second jab, from my other arm, drove him upward, so that his chin was thrust up, and the blood, which had begun to course down his face, pooled in the crease of his lips, which were pulled into a tight grimace. He tried to say something but spat crimson droplets into the air, like a fountain. I pressed my forearm against his throat. “Stop laughing. You’re rotting from the inside,” I snarled, in a voice foreign even to me. “You hear me?”
His eyes had widened for a second, but now they narrowed. His mouth parted, revealing a black window in his once perfect set of pearly whites.
“Nick, stop it!” someone called down the hall. Taryn. I turned to see her running toward me, two teachers and a security guard on her heels.
I released him. “Freak,” he sputtered, clamping his hand over his bloody nose. “You broke my nose. My tooth.”
“You’re rotting. Go to the doctor. He’ll tell you,” I muttered as the security guard grabbed me from behind. The bell screamed overhead as I turned to follow.
Sphincter’s arm candy, the other students in the hall, Taryn … Everyone was looking at me in the same way as the guard led me away. Like I was, just as Sphincter had said, Crazy Cross. It wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. Strangely, it was a relief to stop pretending and finally own up to what I really was.
“Suspended on the first day of school,” Nan said under her breath as we pulled up the driveway. We were both sitting in the back of Bill Runyon’s Land Rover, being chauffeured like celebrities. She’d had to call around to get someone to drive her, and Bill was the lucky winner. I could tell the second she came to pick me up that she was pissed, because she didn’t bother to say hello to the ladies in the principal’s office and her face looked like she’d sucked on lemons. Bill was cordial when I’d first gotten into the car, but eventually he fell under Nan’s spell and just drove, though I caught him inspecting me a few times in the rearview mirror. After fifteen minutes of icy silence, I was kind of relieved when words finally erupted from her mouth.
I didn’t answer. I was busy staring at my knuckles. They were red and ached. Maybe my hand was broken.
“For an entire week, no less,” she said when Bill threw the car into park in front of the house. She pulled open the door and thanked Bill.
As I got out of the car, Bill whispered to me, “You know, kid. Take it easy. You’re going to be the death of her.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I mumbled, slamming the door with unnatural force. I rolled my eyes and they caught on the sky. The clouds were perfectly round and white in the shockingly blue sky, like stepping stones to heaven. I pulled open the front door and trudged into the house. The floorboard at the doorway to my mom’s room creaked. I knew she was standing there, waiting to give me crap. I climbed the stairs quickly, but she’d already begun her assault: “Suspension? Nick! You will mess up your life!”
“You already took care of that,” I muttered, slamming the door behind me. It was about a thousand degrees in my room. I opened a window and stripped off my T-shirt and jeans, then lay in bed in my boxers, clenching and unclenching my fist, massaging my knuckles. Okay, maybe my hand wasn’t broken. But that still didn’t stop the rest of me from feeling like crap.
About ten minutes later, someone knocked on the door. “Go away,” I muttered, figuring it was Nan bringing me crackers or a cool washcloth or whatever it was she felt I needed at this time. I tried to convince myself I didn’t need anything from anyone, that all I wanted was to be left alone. But the thought of being alone felt like stumbling down a long dark hole with no idea what was at the bottom.
The door opened a crack. Leave it to Nan to never listen to my pleas for privacy. I looked up, about to yell at her, and instead of Nan’s wizened face, I saw platinum blond curls. “Can I come in?” Taryn asked softly.
“What? No.” I stumbled over my words, then realized I was practically naked and did a visual check for my jeans. All the way on the other side of the room. Great. Luckily my T-shirt was within arm’s distance, mingling with some dirty socks and underwear on the floor. I grabbed the shirt and threw it over my head. “Why—why are you here? You should be in school.”
She opened the door wider. Her hair looked as if she’d ridden all the way here in Sphincter’s convertible, and who knew? Considering his weakness, maybe she had. But her eyes looked heavy and her skin had a sickly green tinge to it. She cleared her throat and it looked like she was swallowing marbles. “I cut out. I need to explain.”
“You don’t have to explain to me. You and I are … nothing,” I said, almost choking on the word. “You should be in school.”
“No, this is important.”
“School is important. I shouldn’t be.”
“No,” she said, closing the door tightly behind her. “You seem to know I have trouble saying no. But I do know how to say no when it matters. So I’m not going anywhere.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, shrugging in an “it’s a free country” kind of way. But it wasn’t possible to ignore her when we were the only two people in a nine-by-nine-foot room. I knew I should kick her out, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.
“What did you get?”
“Suspension. One week.”
She nodded. “Brutal. But not entirely unjustified. You nearly killed him! Considering how sick he is. Where did you get those Ali moves?”
Great. First she gets cozy with Nose Ring Dude, and then she pours sympathy on Sphincter. Not what I wanted to hear right now. “I did him a favor,” I muttered. “Now he’ll go to the doctor and find out what’s wrong with him. Maybe it won’t be too late.”
“It’s already too late. The tumors are spreading. They won’t be able to stop it,” she said softly. She dropped her bag and sat down on the edge of my bed. She must have noticed the dump trucks and airplanes on the sheets because she smiled a little but didn’t say anything. Then she looked around, probably trying to find out what other things I had in my room that the normal four-year-old would go crazy over.
“I have glow-in-the-dark planet stickers on the ceiling,” I offered. “But you can’t see them since it’s daytime.”
“I have them, too!” she said brightly, then started to cough. It was a horrible, wracking cough, like that of someone with TB, and it went on long enough that I wondered if I should get her some water or smack her on the back. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and said, her voice weak, “Well, I had them at my old house, in Maine.”
She stared up at the ceiling for a long time, and finally I said, “You were about to explain something? Something about why you were getting with that guy in the hallway? What was his name?”
She blushed. “His name’s Kent. Kent Something. And we were not with each other!” she said, slapping me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Well, Kent Something looks charming. I can totally tell why you’d get with him.”
“Stop being so smug. You know he’s far from charming. And if you say I was getting with him one more time, I will smack you. It’s all perfectly innocent.”
I stared at her. “Don’t tell me he’s your brother. That excuse has been pretty much done to death.”
“No. He is not my brother,” she whispered. “And he’s gross. Seriously.”
“You were the one getting with him,” I said, emphasizing the words she didn’t want to hear. Just because.
“Clearly, you’re an idiot,” she mumbled, smacking me again on the shoulder, which was starting to hurt. “I needed skin-to-skin contact to see what was going on with him.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, he’s … Touched?”
“No, but he wants to be. He’d been following me around ever since yesterday. He really has a need. It’s so strong. And I was trying to figure out what it is, if maybe I have the Touch he’d want.”
“Do you?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to process it. It happened so fast. I saw you and I felt so terrible.” She sighed, but then ended up coughing the last bit of air. “I am really sorry if I made you feel bad in front of Bryce and his friend. Is that why you ran away?”
I shrugged. “It’s not that. It’s … you’re right. I want to protect you. The vision—the bad one.”
Her eyes widened. “It’s still there? But we changed—”
“I know. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s going haywire because that’s what my Touch does around you. Maybe I’m seeing things in my head that aren’t real. I have no idea. But to be safe, I think we have to stay away from each other.”
She threw up her hands, exasperated. “What? Why? Really, Nick, you’re so infuriating. Every time we talk about this you keep saying you need to stay away from me. But you never do. I mean, what’s the deal? Do you want to stay away from me?”
I shook my head immediately. “No way.”
“But that’s what you make me think. I don’t want to stay away from you, either,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I like you. You make me happy. When you aren’t avoiding me or thinking I’m trying to get with other guys.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t do a really good job of that.”
She nodded. “Yeah. You pretty much suck at that.” Then she surprised me by leaning forward. She lifted up a small chain around her neck. “See what I got for my birthday?”
She was so close. I tried to concentrate on the piece of jewelry, a silver butterfly or a dragonfly or something, but the only thing registering in my head was that she smelled so good, apples again, and that she wouldn’t be this close if she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her. So I kissed her. “I meant to tell you … happy birthday,” I whispered into her hair.
She looked a little dazed, probably as dazed as I felt, when she finally pulled away. She smiled.
“Better than Kent Something?” I asked.
“I never …,” she began, and then she sort of fainted. She leaned backward, closed her eyes, and then straightened up and shook her head. “Whoa. I feel sick.”
I fanned her face. “Want some water or something?”
She shook her head, a small, embarrassed smile on her face. “No, I’m good.”
“I have that kind of effect on women,” I joked. But then I realized something. “The Touch. You haven’t performed it yet?”
The corners of her mouth turned down. “No. Tonight. Hopefully. Grandma has the person all lined up. But it’s … I’m so nervous.”
I nodded. I got it.
“I mean, what if the person doesn’t show up? What if they change their mind? That was why I was … with Kent … I thought maybe he could be my backup.”
“Calm down,” I said. “Don’t worry. They’ll show up. Do you know who it is?”
“No. But it’s not just that,” she said. “Grandma says this person wants a whole different Touch. So I had to learn a new spell. And it’s a hard one. I didn’t have a lot of time and I’m not really sure I know it. And I feel so weak. And—” She stopped and buried her face in her hands. “Nick. It’s terrible. This whole thing is so terrible.”
I took her in my arms and that’s when she started to cry on my shoulder. So of course it went without saying that I would be there tonight. I had no doubt about that. “I’ll be there for you, okay? I promise. Even if my family bars my doors because of the suspension. And I won’t get in the way this time.”
She sniffled. “Okay.”
“And if this person doesn’t show up, I’ll kidnap some poor loser off the street and you can perform the Touch on them. Okay?”
She laughed. “But nobody should have this Touch,” she said into my T-shirt. “It’s the really bad one. Invisible Assassin. The one that scares me the most.”