Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,18

up.

I expected her to run like hell in the other direction. But again, she didn’t. Instead, she plopped down in the sand and motioned me over with her chin. She wanted me to sit next to her. When I walked over, the sun reflected off her eyes; they were almost the color of the sky, so light blue they were almost white. I didn’t say anything as I sat. I was afraid of saying something else about her I shouldn’t have known. I swallowed, thinking of her in that little sailboat.

She filled in the silence. “My dad lost his job at the semiconductor factory, and we had to move in with my grandmother.” She wrinkled her nose. “Gram’s a little whacked.”

She had no idea what whacked could look like.

She was quiet for a moment, sifting sand through her fingers. “I heard what happened here today.”

I reached over, snatched a handful of black witch’s-hair seaweed, and started yanking it apart. “Yeah, it was a bad day.”

“I saw the ambulances. The Reeses are Gram’s neighbors. They live next door to us. She used to sit for …” She trailed off when she saw my body tense. “You probably don’t want to hear this.”

I let out a short laugh. “Bingo.”

She shrugged. “Fair enough. But it’s no wonder you fell. You’re obviously upset. Why did you …?”

“I just wanted to do the normal thing, I guess.”

She snorted. “The normal thing would have been to go home and sleep it off. At least, that’s what I would have done.” I cringed as she said that. Of course I didn’t know what was normal. I couldn’t even pretend to know. “Anyway, it’s not your fault.”

“I know,” I lied, not wanting to talk about it anymore. To her, it wasn’t my fault, but she didn’t know I’d knowingly left an unfit guard in my place.

More awkward silence. I put out my hand, lamely, wondering all the while if that was the way casual introductions were supposed to go, or if I would look too formal, like a bank teller extending her a loan. “I’m Nick.”

She looked at my hand and contemplated it for what seemed like a lifetime. Then she sighed and took only my fingertips in her hand. Her hand was soft, surprisingly cool. Mine felt all sweaty next to hers, and probably not just from the run. “Taryn,” she said, but I knew that already. That she was Taryn was as obvious as a house being called a house or a bird being a bird.

Before I could search for another slick thing to say, something happened. Something big.

My mind went quiet.

No cycling. No You Wills …

Everything. All the future memories. Just gone.

I was too busy trying to figure out what had happened to notice that her smile had disappeared. Her hand trembled, and she wrenched it away from me. It was almost like … could she feel it? No, that was crazy. Her blond corkscrew curls whipped in her face in the ocean breeze, but I could have sworn she mouthed the words “Oh, God.”

Damn. I knew my palms were sweaty, but they weren’t that bad.

“She told me I could feel it when I touched them,” she whispered to herself, looking out onto the horizon. “I didn’t believe … Oh, God.”

I squinted at her. Now who was acting crazy?

As if she’d heard my thoughts, she shook her head, scrambled to her feet, and edged back from me, as if she was afraid. Of me. She said something dismissive like “I’ll see you around” and then turned away.

As I watched her hurry up the beach, toward the boardwalk, my mind began to rev again, whirring until it felt like the bones of my skull would shatter.

You will stand and make your way back to the boardwalk, slowly.

And so it began again.

My life was pretty depressing as a whole, but watching Taryn walk away was probably the most depressing thing I’d ever really experienced. My stomach started to churn and then there was this pain—this squeezing pain in my chest. I had an overwhelming desire to run after her, to beg her to stay. In fact, as she walked down the ramp toward Ocean Avenue, I took a few steps after her, stopping in my tracks when I realized I couldn’t do that. She would have thought I was a lunatic. We were practically strangers.

At least, to her, we were.

You always hear those stories. Two people meet, get married, live for decades and decades together. When one