I was eight the first time I was called Crazy Cross. It was by a chubby red-haired girl named Carrie Weldon who lived next door and had only a day earlier come over for Oreos and milk. Nan had beamed, excited because I had found a “nice friend,” as she had called Carrie. But the next day, my new nickname was all over the playground. Carrie had told everyone at school that my family was a bunch of monsters.
Until that moment, I’d thought the kids at school were the weird ones for having mothers who would walk them to the bus stop and come to their holiday concerts. To me, that was a job for Nan. Nan was also responsible for feeding me, clothing me … well, basically for everything. She did the same for my mother.
When Bill said, “Get help before you end up like your mother,” he really knew only a part of what being “like my mother” meant. He knew that my mom was a recluse and never left the stuffy second floor of our cottage. Only Nan really understood what was up with my mother and me. Most people would just cross to the other side of the street whenever they saw us coming. They thought we were harmless, but they didn’t want to take any chances. They figured we had something going on, but they weren’t sure what.
I trudged into our house, stuffing the pink sheet of paper from Bill into the pocket of my SPBP Windbreaker. Three months. Three months I’d managed to keep myself together, keep that nice, comfortable future intact. And it was all gone in the blink of an eye. It had been foolish to think I could keep it. My head still throbbed, and I hadn’t yet been able to fully unclench my fists. I kept them in tight balls at my sides. As the door slammed, three competing thoughts popped into my head: spilled milk, clown hair, and Bruce Willis. A You Will sliced through them, and I braced myself for the sound I dreaded.
Immediately, I heard it. Moaning from upstairs. It was the same low buzz of anguish that Carrie had heard ten years ago. Often, it wasn’t bad, and I could block it out. But on the worst days, it nearly drove me mad, echoing in my nightmares.
Nan was playing Journey in the kitchen, which she usually did to drown out my mom. She had a dish towel in her hands, and something that smelled strongly of fish was sizzling in a fry pan behind her, right under a row of tomatoes and cucumbers ripening on the windowsill. She must have been working in the garden today, judging from the circles of dirt on her bare knees. There were bobby pins holding down three almost-fluorescent orange curls at the base of her forehead, over a big, toothy grin. Though the hair was shockingly different, the smile was a constant. You’d think we’d won the lottery with the way Nan smiled all the time.
She caught me staring at her hair and sighed. “Don’t say a word. Must have picked up the wrong color at the supermarket. You know how my eyes are. I’ve already bought new color. I’ll dye it back this week, when I—”
There was a moan, like the hum of an engine. Nan swallowed, but the smile returned, bigger than before.
“How long has she been going on like that?” I asked, even though I already knew. Mom and I were like two sides of a coin. Whenever I cycled, she did, too. Whenever my future spun out of control, her future, which was tied to mine, did, too.
“Since lunchtime. You must have done a doozy.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. Mom moaned again. It made my eardrums rattle. “Why is she so melodramatic? It doesn’t hurt that bad anymore.”
Nan clucked her tongue and turned down the radio. The band, her favorite, was singing something about holding on to a dream. When I was younger, she used to sing the song to me before I went to sleep. She leaned in as if telling me a secret. “You know how your mom thinks. Why just react when you can overreact?”
She said that all the time. Usually it got a laugh out of me, but now I looked at the ground. “Nan, I screwed up something big. A girl died. I killed her.”
She drew in a breath and crossed herself. Her voice was gentle. “Oh, dear. How?”
“I got sidetracked. It looked like someone was in danger, and by the time I finished with her, the girl I was supposed to save had drowned.”
She exhaled. “You didn’t kill her. You just didn’t save her. There’s a difference.”
“I was supposed to be at my post. And Pedro was—”
“You are always too hard on yourself.”
Her words didn’t comfort me. Because I knew the truth. I gnashed my teeth and dug my fingers into my sides just thinking about it. And then there was the words—You killed our Emma—that echoed in my brain. Her parents, I guessed. “Her parents think I killed her.”
Nan’s eyes narrowed. “They told you that?”
I shook my head. “They will. I’m not sure if they know now, but they will. I saw it in my vision.”
“Your vision? Are you sure? It could have been your imagination. Remember Ginger?”
I nodded. Ginger was the puppy I’d been convinced I was going to get when I was ten. I took him everywhere, and I really loved him … but I never got him. He wasn’t real. Sometimes I would think so much about something, want it so badly, I convinced myself that it was in my future. But those were only things I wanted, and I definitely did not want Emma’s parents hating me.
“Don’t let that bother you, honey bunny. I know you did the best you could.” She whipped my thigh with the dish towel. “Get yourself on course. Give her time to breathe.”
She turned back to the stove and started to season the fish. I realized at that moment that the fish would be too salty, but I didn’t tell her. She didn’t want to know the future, and would usually stop me midsentence whenever I tried to explain anything. Plus, Nan’s life was hard enough, since she constantly had to care for us, so I always tried to tread lightly around her. And I’d like to think I was more sensitive to the living because I could taste the grief that would linger after their deaths. My mother and I both knew Nan would die in just over three years. Despite the many cycles we went through day after day, that was constant. Really, there were only two constants in my life: Mom would never leave her bedroom, and Nan would die in her recliner. She would pass away peacefully, of old age, while watching her soaps. Neither of us had told her that, though, because telling her could change the outcome. And my mother and I figured if there was any nice way to die, that would be it.
Another moan. I looked up the staircase.
Nan, wait—
It wasn’t even a fragment of a vision that popped into my mind that moment. It was just those words, and an overwhelming feeling that racked my entire body with chills. I grabbed the edge of the counter for support, nearly knocking over a milk jug. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the dusty, faded mural that had been under the cabinets ever since I could remember. It said, Heaven’s a little closer in a house by the sea.
Yeah, right.
Your past makes you who you are. You might not remember all of it, but even the things you forget can leave a mark. My future did the same to me. Things I hadn’t experienced yet weighed on my brain like bricks. At any one time, those images of my future would lie in wait somewhere in my brain, waiting for something to happen, something that would call them up. A lot of times, they were just pieces. But because I hadn’t experienced them yet, I couldn’t put them in context. They didn’t make sense. Like the one I saw as I began to loosen my grip on the counter.
The image I saw was me, standing in the dark hallway, looking down the steps, screaming No! In that vision, I couldn’t catch my breath. I’d never felt that pain before. Like everything inside me was being sucked out with a straw.
Definitely not good.
After the pain subsided, I let out a string of curses. I threw the jug to the ground, and milk splattered everywhere. Then I tore at my hair until I heard it ripping at the roots, scraped at the skin on my face until it felt red and raw. I hated myself.
It was stupid to think I could hold on to one future for longer than a few months. But I’d liked that future. I’d liked the way I died in it. I couldn’t remember much after playing in the sand with my grandson; I’d just gone back to the beach house, collapsed into my favorite rocking chair, and drifted off. That memory was like a dream now. Who knew what kind of death I’d have?
I’d screwed everything up.
Nan stared at me, her eyes warm with understanding, though she really didn’t have any idea. She came over and wrapped her arms around me, squeezed me, but I didn’t squeeze back because her bones felt small, breakable, like twigs. The top of her head barely reached my chest, so she had to bend her neck all the way back to look into my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” I answered. Really, it was everything, but my head was still cycling dully, which made even talking hurt.
The lucky and the brave, Bruce Willis, rotting inside.
I helped Nan clean up the stupid mess I’d made. She tried to swat me on the backside with the towel again, but this time I anticipated it and skirted away. I climbed the stairs, which were covered in worn green shag carpet. Since all she had was a measly monthly social security check, Nan hadn’t brought anything new into the house in decades, save for a bunch of crucifixes and worthless statues of saints, which she put on every available surface or wall. All the furniture was from when she was growing up here in the sixties, Formica, with shapes that looked like germs under a microscope everywhere. My sheets had dump trucks and airplanes on them, and the matching curtains were so worn, they did little to block out the morning light. Not that I cared. I didn’t have friends who’d see my room, and I never slept much, anyway.
When I reached her door, there was silence. I stood outside it longer than I had to. Going in there was never fun. I knocked and whispered, “Mom?”, then went inside.
The room was hot and dark and stank of incense and sweat. Mom was lying on her stomach on the bed in boxers and a tank. She’s young as far as moms go. I think she’d be considered a MILF if there weren’t thick dark rings around her eyes that matched the color of her waist-length hair, which was pulled up in a messy loop on top of her head. When I looked at her, I could almost see her resemblance to Nan. They have the same deep-set, fathomless eyes, the same soft, even voice. They laugh the same, boldly, though my mother’s laugh is always tinged with bitterness and irony. They have the same thin lips and I suppose they might even have the same smile, but I didn’t know my mother’s smile. I’d never seen it. I’d always wondered what else she would have in common with my grandmother, had things been different. Would she make great pancakes? Find pleasure in things like gardening and weeding? Go to church every Sunday?
Would she smile?
I kissed the top of her head as she picked up the remote beside her and turned down the volume on the ancient TV set. I looked over at it. Die Hard One or Two, I couldn’t tell which. She was a slave to action movies—they helped take the edge off her cycling.
“Bad day,” I sighed.
Her eyes drooped. “So I felt.”
“Sorry.”
“I know about the girl.”
“Well,” I muttered, “you can see the future, so that doesn’t make you Einstein.”
She sighed. “Do you feel it, too? Like things are going bad?”
I snorted. A girl was dead because of me. It was hard to imagine life going to a worse place than we were at right then, but yeah, I knew what she meant. It was an odd feeling, as if two totally different sensations were competing within me: hunger with queasiness, anticipation with fear. “But what?” Maybe she’d had time to think about it.
She reached down to the foot of her bed and picked up a copy of Star magazine. “My horoscope says this is a terrible day to make changes to the status quo. So you picked one hell of a day to—”
“Sorry.” I snatched the paper from her hands. My mom loves—no, worships—all things unseen. Good-luck charms, horoscopes, superstitions, all that crap. I think that if our seeing the future wasn’t so complicated, like if we could just see one version of the future, and it could never be altered, maybe she would have given it a rest. But as it was, she was constantly consulting the occult.
I turned and surveyed her lunch tray. She’d downed an entire carafe of coffee, as usual, but only taken nibbles of her sandwich. It sometimes pissed me off how well Nan took care of her, and how useless she was in return. Nan shouldn’t have had to deal with that. In the mirror, I could see her settling into her pillow, watching Bruce Willis tiptoeing down a hallway in bare feet and a wifebeater. There were little slips of fortune-cookie fortunes stuck in the edge of the mirror, hundreds of them. Mom didn’t like to toss them away. The one I saw said, Love is for the lucky and the brave.
I shook my head. Luck and bravery were two things that didn’t exactly flow through this house. I thought of the day I learned I had something that made me different. I was four. Nan was making me lunch and I was sitting at the table. I could see the can of grape juice concentrate rolling down the counter and splattering over the linoleum, so I stood there to catch it. If Nan was worried about me, which she must have been, she hid it well. She just smiled and called me her hero. I used to be proud of it. I used to call it my superpower.
“Something with the staircase,” Mom said. “Right?”
I nodded. I’d seen that, and something with blood. But I didn’t want to say it. “But what?”
“I don’t know. I need time to sort it out. Are you on script?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s strong. A strong, bad feeling.”
I agreed. Blood was rarely a good thing to see in a vision. “Do you want me to go off?”
“Maybe. You have track tryouts tonight?”
“I wasn’t going to go. I don’t think I’m going to make the team. And too much has happened.” I knew what she was thinking even without consulting the script. “You think I should go?”
“Well, it might help change things.”
“All right.”
She took the magazine in her hands and began to page through it. “What’s for dinner?”
It was a running joke between us, asking each other questions we already knew the answer to. When I was a kid I used to spend hours trying to come up with really disgusting answers to the “What’s for dinner?” question, like sautéed horse guts and fried iguana feet, but now I barely smirked. It had been a long time since I’d found it funny.
Sometimes I wish I lived in the Heights. A guy like me could get lost there.
Though it’s just to the south of the Heights, my town, Seaside Park, is like the less popular, more boring twin of Seaside Heights. Both towns are on the barrier islands of New Jersey, a small strip of land surrounded by water. But that’s where the similarities end. Nan calls the Heights the Devil’s Playground. There are bars and amusements and all kinds of riffraff hanging around the Heights. MTV loves the place. People drink and party and go wild there. Freaks are welcome there. They prosper there. A guy who could see his future would not, by any means, be the weirdest thing that town has ever seen.
The Park is a complete one-eighty. It likes the quiet, and prefers to be called family-friendly. The people who planned the town of Seaside Park had very little imagination. For example, it’s split down the center by Central Avenue. One block to the west, you have the Bay, barely a mile wide, and across that, you can see mainland New Jersey. One block to the east, you have the Atlantic Ocean. There is a road that stretches down the bay side called Bayview Avenue, and a road that runs along the ocean called—big shocker—Ocean Avenue. And all the cross streets are either numbered or lettered, so it’s pretty hard to get lost here. Unfortunately. It’s a vacation town, so during the summer, the hotels and apartments fill up and the roads swell with people, but starting in October, the place empties out and tumbleweeds blow through. Then it’s just us regulars, and everyone knows everybody else, and everybody else’s business. Unfortunately.
My high school is on the mainland, in Toms River. But Coach Garner, who has been in the position for forty years, lives on the island, and is about as athletic as a bar of soap, can’t be bothered to go the nine miles inland to the high school to hold tryouts, so every year he holds them on the boardwalk. There are mile markers, but running on boards can be challenging. Still, the view is nice, so people don’t complain.
When I got to Fourteenth Avenue, at the southern terminus of the boardwalk, people I recognized from school were milling about in their singlets and shorts, stretching against the pilings and fence, looking serious. The You Wills told me to go home, to go anywhere but here, but I ignored them and the dull ache they were causing in my head.
The first person I saw when I climbed the ramp was Evan Sphincter. His real name was Evan Spitzer, but when he opened his mouth you knew a bunch of foul crap was going to come out, so I used the other. Not to his face, though.
It took me a minute to recognize him because he looked different, and not in a way that I’d have liked. Maybe it was the tan. No, it was more than that. He’d never been ugly, but he’d never been a movie star, either. His face had always been kind of round, but now his jaw was chiseled. Once upon a time, he’d been kind of thick around the middle, with doughy arms and legs. Now he had muscles. More than muscles. He looked like the spokesperson for home gym equipment. Unreal.
“Hey, Crazy Cross,” he said, reaching down like he was going to help hoist me up onto the boardwalk. But it was all an act. The second I’d reach for his hand, he would pull his away and run it coolly through his highlighted hair. I didn’t have to pay attention to the You Wills to know that. And—highlights? What kind of dude got platinum highlights?
I just said, “Hey,” and pretended I didn’t see him wiggling his fingers at me. His forearm muscles were bigger than my biceps. When the hell had that happened? He’d been a jerkwad since fourth grade, but now he was a built jerkwad. Fantastic.
Sphincter jogged across the boards to his dad, who had a terminally serious face. The guy never smiled. He was holding a stopwatch and looking at it like he wanted to kill it.
Runners will make a path for you as you walk to the other side of the boardwalk.
Yep, they parted like the Red Sea. When I turned back toward Sphincter, he was already surrounded by a bunch of hot girls. They swarmed around him like flies. Just completing his journey toward being a total one-eighty from me, I guess. Not that I was jealous or anything. Okay, yeah, I was.
Some guys I recognized from school stretched along the fence, refusing to make eye contact with me and instead checking out the fresh meat. There were a few cute girls, ones I’d never seen before, who might not yet have been aware of Crazy Cross protocol. I was wondering how long it would be before they kept their distance, too, when another memory bubbled through.
You will stretch your quads and hamstrings and then you will hear …
I was just starting to relax and stretch my muscles when a tiny redhead’s words floated over on the breeze. “Hear about the little girl who died on Seventh today?”
A guy was with her. He said something about an ambulance.
Then she said, “One of the lifeguards went completely nuts. They had to drag him away in a straitjacket.”
I wanted to slither between the boardwalk planks. “Hey, wait,” the girl said. I turned away but from the corner of my eye saw her pointing in my direction. Whispers were exchanged. “Him?” the guy asked. Then they both laughed. The guy said something that sounded like “Figures.”
Great. At this rate, I’d be lucky to make it out of high school without the words “Crazy Cross” printed under my yearbook picture.
I turned back toward Sphincter and saw him breaking away from the throngs of girls. He strutted right on over to … Oh, perfect. The angel was here. Had she seen the rest of the runners avoiding me like the plague? She was wearing the same thing she’d had on when I saw her earlier today—shorts, a tight tank, and running shoes. Duh, of course she was here, she was a runner. Did she go to my school? How had I never seen her before?
I watched Sphincter put the moves on her. He said something—a joke, probably, by the way he raised his eyebrows and laughed like he was the wittiest scumbag on the planet—and she looked at him and smiled, but politely, not like she wanted him or anything. I was impressed. Most girls would have taken one look at those muscles and jumped in his arms. He said something else and she just kind of shook her head, still smiling graciously, then walked away and started to stretch against the chain-link fence.
No goal, Sphinctie.
Two seconds later I realized I was staring at her with this admiring grin on my face and wiped it off. Had to concentrate on my running.
Concentrate. Right.
A few minutes later the tryouts began. Sphincter’s group went first. He bopped and hopped at the starting line on the boardwalk, cracking his neck, all ego, Mr. Showman. Every part of his body screamed, Watch me, watch me. His dad was standing behind the fence, on the beach, in prime position to see every move. They gave each other a thumbs-up, which looked so fake, like the final scene from some cheesy sports movie. I couldn’t believe we’d ever had anything in common. Then, as he lined up among the other runners doing the 100 meter, something came to me.
He’s rotting from the inside.
It was a bit of a conversation, but it was so strong I knew it couldn’t be my imagination. I’d never heard it before, so it had to be in the future. And whenever I looked at Sphincter, I felt it so strongly that it had to have been about him. Rotting from the inside? He was the poster child for healthy living. The starting gun went off and he pulled to an easy lead right away, pumping his long legs and smirking the whole while. Rotting from the inside. Yeah.
But then I heard the voice again.
You shouldn’t be jealous of that. There’s more to him than you know.
The voice was familiar. It was one I hadn’t heard much of, and yet it was easily recognizable.
The angel. So we’d talk again? She’d want to talk to me after what happened today?
I turned toward her. She was sitting on a bench, not watching the race like everyone else. She was more interested in her fingernails. She inspected her thumbnail, then brought it to her mouth and ripped the top of it off in a sort of savage way. Somehow she made that look cute.
There’s more to him than you know.
Well, I knew Sphincter’s life wasn’t a picture postcard. For one, everyone in school talked about his dad. Yeah, it was nice that the guy came to support his son during tryouts, but he was entirely too serious about everything. In most circles, Mr. Spitzer was known as The Sergeant. I don’t think he’d ever been in the armed forces, but it was well circulated how he’d show up at all the meets and give Sphincter hell if he came in second. He’d bring along his stopwatch and argue with the officials and all that good stuff. I’m sure he was just as hard on Sphincter as he was with everything else in his life. So yeah, I wasn’t jealous of that.
Just then, the angel looked up and her eyes found mine. She quickly lowered her hand and the remains of her ragged fingernail, blushing, as I tried to look like I was checking out something behind her. There was nothing but a pile of sand beyond her, though, so as you can imagine, it came off really smooth.
The race ended and Sphincter set a new school record. I was sure he’d done The Sergeant proud. But he’s rotting from the inside, I told myself.
Didn’t really help make me feel better.