Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,11

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