Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,26

eyes. “Duh. Able to see your future.”

I was too stunned to follow her. I just stood there, surrounded by my fishing gear, mouth hanging open.

I spent the rest of the time walking back and forth on the boardwalk, feeling like crap. This was useless. First of all, when I got out there, I realized the reason my nose had begun to sting in the sub shop. It would be fried by the time I got home, but I didn’t have enough money with me to buy sunblock. And every time I set out to cast a line, I saw the outcome of my expedition. No fish. It wasn’t that they weren’t biting. It was that my hands would be shaking too much to steadily reel in the line.

And Taryn somehow knew I could see the future.

All my life, I’d been hiding it from people, doing whatever I could to throw them off. I’d always wanted to have someone understand what was going on with me, but I knew that if I told, they’d never believe it. Or if I showed them what I could do, they’d be so freaked they’d run far away or summon men in white coats to take me to a laboratory for a lifetime of painful tests. But she believed it. She sought me out. And not only that, she acted like it made total sense.

Of course I always wondered why my mom and I were like this. There are pictures in the house of my mom when she was in high school. She was a cheerleader and on the debate team, and you could just tell that back then she was normal. She didn’t have the dark circles. She didn’t have the worry creases on her forehead. Nan said she “got it” around the same time I was born, whatever “it” was. I assumed it was me. Something about being pregnant with me. My mother would always say it had something to do with my dad, but she’d shut up whenever I tried to pry more out of her. I didn’t know who he was, but maybe he had something in his blood. Maybe he poisoned us.

But that was a long time ago. I’d never met my dad, never wanted to. And yeah, there was always something tugging at me, some hole begging to be filled. But he clearly couldn’t fill it. By the time I realized that he existed I was old enough to know that if he didn’t want to be in the picture, I didn’t want him there. I figured he probably saw me like everyone saw me. A freak.

That was my own father. So how could this girl I barely knew not see me that way?

“What is it like?” a voice said gently as I sat there, legs dangling over the side of the pier, staring at the ripples in the brown bay.

I knew she would be coming back, even after she found the fish in her “lunch.” I knew she would sit down next to me and her red toenails would glisten in the sun, against the backdrop of dark water. I knew her hair would smell like apples. “How was lunch?”

She wrinkled her nose. God, she was cute. “Great. Thanks.”

I didn’t apologize. The last time I did that, she told me to go away. I just sat there, feeling my nose baking and wondering if it was already stoplight-red. “Are you going to tell me how you knew?”

“Don’t you already know that? I mean, if you can see—”

I snorted. “You’d think.”

“So, like, do you know what’s going to happen right now?”

I shook my head. “No. Well, yeah. I knew you were going to ask that. But the further you go into the future, the more fuzzy things get. Because little things in the future change—you know, the butterfly effect. So I can see pieces of everything that could have happened, all the outcomes based on where I am at a certain moment. And at first, they all fight against each other, so I can’t tell which is real and which isn’t. After I stay on script for a while, it becomes clearer. I can figure out what’s real and what’s not. But it’s really hard to stay on script.”

She gasped. “On script? How do you—”

“You can remember best the things you just did, right? I can remember best things that are right about to happen. They’re more real to me. I call it my script. My You Wills. You