Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,17

silently congratulating myself for that accomplishment when she said, “You know, you are really brave. I’d be crying.”

I smirked. Actually, she’d taken the edge off the pain, made it tolerable. I realized I wouldn’t be able to shake her; she was planning on coming in with me and watching the lifeguard bandage me up. This girl was harder to avoid than the flu. And there was something about her. Something that just seemed … right. It was all adding up to one thrilling and terrifying realization:

I had a chance with this girl.

Geoff, a lifeguard, ushered me into his seat on the stand when he saw me. He didn’t have the gentle, female nurse’s touch my hormones would have really liked, so when he started to swab up my knee, I winced.

And this girl, this angel, stayed with me the whole time.

I knew I would eventually fall madly in love with her. But I’d had no idea it would start right then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoa.

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