Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,30

you find true love or whatever. It doesn’t work that way. It sucks.” My muscles were so tense and my body so hot that I had the momentary compulsion to bolt out of there, leaving her, the fishing equipment, everything far behind. But then I took a breath, counted to ten. Exhaled. Felt better. My voice was calmer when I spoke next. “Look. I’d rather people not know. I just want to be normal.”

The confusion wasn’t leaving her face. And that’s when she said it. Well, she didn’t say it, because she didn’t have to. I heard her next words, clear as day in my head, before she even thought them. My grandmother did this. They were crazy. Absolutely insane. I interrupted her as she opened her mouth to speak. “That’s not possible.”

She stopped, her jaw slowly falling.

“How can your grandmother have anything to do with this?” I muttered, getting more and more disgusted by the minute. What the hell did she think this was? Some nifty little parlor trick? Our seeing the future was more than a living nightmare. It was constant, unstoppable, and wholly devastating. Something so terrible could only be explained as an act of God. It couldn’t be something that one being, one human created. That would make it seem so trivial, so silly, so small. And it was big. Big enough to ruin my life a thousand times over.

Taryn swallowed. She didn’t have to say it, but I let her words come out anyway, because maybe if they were outside of my head, that would make them more believable. And so she said it, exactly as I had imagined. But when the words were out there, hanging in the humid summer air, it didn’t help.

“Say that again,” I murmured.

Her face was serious. There was a hint of remorse in her eyes. “Nick. It’s true. My grandmother made you this way.”

I needed to get away from Taryn. Taryn, who was just as crazy as her grandmother, her all-powerful grandmother who somehow made me this way. Yeah, right. Once I scurried across Bayview Avenue and past Charlie’s ice cream shop, the cycling became a little steadier and I could make out some of the visions passing through my head. I could see my grandmother lying in that now familiar position at the bottom of the stairs, almost as if it had just happened. Somewhat more faded was the image of sunlight glimmering on the deep mahogany cover of a closed casket.

The sun was still hot enough to roast my shoulders and create a haze on the streets as I climbed the decaying concrete steps at the front of the house, flung open the screen door, and let it slam behind me. My mom had retreated to her bedroom, of course. I didn’t think she could stand being outside her tomb for longer than a few minutes. I climbed the stairs two at a time and they creaked as if the house was going to fall down. When I burst into her room, I realized I was sweating, out of breath, and still holding my fishing gear. Salt water sloshed from the bucket onto my feet and the hardwood floor. I knew Nan would scream bloody murder if she saw.

My mom looked up from the latest issue of People. I didn’t know how she could read that trash, but she had piles of celebrity tabloids in her room, littering the chairs, floor, and the tops of the dresser and night table. Who seriously cared what celebrities did in their effed-up lives? Most of them had everything going for them and still couldn’t manage to hold it together. But hey, I guess anything that worked to keep her mind off the future. She stared me up and down. “You got sunburned.”

I looked cross-eyed and saw that my nose was the exact color I’d seen in my vision. I wiggled it a little and it stung. Perfect. “Mom. Why is some fortune-teller on the boardwalk claiming that she’s responsible for making us the way we are?”

Her eyes went back to her magazine. “No idea,” she murmured.

I used my index finger to push the magazine down to her knees so that she’d look at me. “This girl knows I can see the future. I never told her. She just knew.”

“Is that so?” she asked, clucking her tongue. She shrugged and went into the same speech she used to give me when I was a kid and wanted to show off my