Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,19

of them dies from old age, the other one, though perfectly healthy, falls ill and dies a month later. There’s always some medical explanation, but at the funeral, most people would nod knowingly and whisper that the real cause was a broken heart.

After Taryn left, all the glee I’d felt from finally being able to say more than three sentences to a girl without completely freaking her out deteriorated into this horrible feeling of emptiness. The squeezing pain inside got worse, like my heart was being stepped on. I spent my walk home rubbing my chest and cursing myself for the stupid thing I’d done to drive her away.

Whatever that was. I’d been running, so maybe I stank. I picked up my T-shirt and sniffed. Not so bad. The salt in the air kind of overpowered any other smell. She’d bolted right after shaking my hand, so maybe my palms were sweaty. Maybe she hated calluses. I looked at my palms, then rubbed them against my shorts. Bits of hardened skin caught on the nylon.

Yeah, that was probably it. Driven to a heart attack at seventeen because of my chapped hands. Fitting end to my life.

By that time, I was sick of the constant headache that came with not doing what I was told, so I followed the script home. Two leather-skinned older women in bikinis glared at me from the porch of their stately mansion as I passed them. Though Nan had lived here decades longer than those ladies, they still treated us more like dirt than like neighbors. The only person on our street who talked to us was the cat lady, but that was because with more than a hundred cats, she had her own issues. Our house was the only tiny bungalow on the block, and surrounded by megamansions, so it was dark and overshadowed most of the day. Sunshine never made the mistake of leaking through our windows. When Nan was growing up, all the houses had looked like ours: tiny and cramped, with rotting black shingles. I’d seen pictures. But now it was common practice to tear down the bungalows and build up to the sky to get that priceless ocean view. These monstrosities either had yards filled with millions of perfect smooth white pebbles, or even worse, lawns with grass so green and unnatural it looked spray-painted. To me, those lush lawns were just plain wrong. They didn’t belong here. But I guess from the way those old ladies looked at us, they felt the same way about me.

If people knew we could see the future, they’d probably think we could have had our own mansion. That we could have had a lot of things, if we wanted them. One night, I was sitting in front of the television watching the Pick-6, and I said every number two seconds before the ball shot out of the popcorn popper. Of course that gave me an idea. I thought I could stretch it, so that I saw the Pick-6 numbers early enough for Nan to buy a ticket. But the thing was, I couldn’t. Things like Pick-6 numbers were short-term memory. The numbers only occurred to me a few seconds before they were drawn. Before that, they were lost in the muddle of outcomes competing in my head. Besides, Nan was dead against using our power for profit. Every time I thought of a way, she’d just roll her eyes. “We’re perfectly comfortable,” she’d say, looking out the kitchen window, past the plump red tomatoes ripening on the sill. “Besides, money is the root of all evil.” Nan was like a brick wall when it came to certain things, and this was one of them. Eventually, I stopped asking, though she would never get me to believe that only evil stemmed from money. Some good came out of it, too. Like a new iPod. Or running shoes with treads that hadn’t been worn so smooth that running sometimes felt like ice-skating.

My muscles and head hurt as I climbed the steps, and once again I couldn’t tell if the pain was from the fall on the boardwalk or some horrible future memories swirling in my head, waiting to be unleashed from my subconscious. The thing clearest in my mind, besides the unraveling of the script, was Taryn. Somehow, everything I knew about the future disappeared when I’d touched her hand. Somehow, she already meant so much to me that my chest ached for her, even though