Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,4

since it was the only nice thing I could find about the moment. “Excuse me?”

I clenched my teeth. “Green elephant, green elephant. Green elephant.”

I figured that if anything could send her away, me muttering nonsensical phrases would be it. The phrase “green elephant” didn’t mean anything to her, but I’d invented it when I was nine or ten, and it meant everything to me.

“Do you want some water or something?”

Why did she have to be so damn nice? I pulled my head up and stared into her eyes, blue and endless, and

Blood on the staircase

I knew right then I was going to be sick. “Look.” I tried to keep my voice even, but it came out as more of a growl. “I don’t want anything from you, so just get the hell away from me.”

I was surprised by two things. First, at how I could bring myself to sound like a total jerkwad, which was what I probably was, but I’d always been too absorbed in my future to dwell on it. And second, at how she just nodded, as if it all made sense. She hurried up the ramp and jogged off, fastening the headphones over her ears as if we’d been chatting about the weather.

I sat alone for a moment, eyes closed, green-elephanting until the pain subsided and my mind slowed to a peaceful lull. A thousand new memories of the future bubbled under the surface of my eyes. On the bad side, there was something about blood on the staircase, and I had this strange ache in my chest. On the good side, there was kissing that girl. The rest I would have to sort out later. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds of a heavyweight title match. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the cycling or because the new memories would prove too horrifying to bear. I could change them. I could change the bad things, sometimes, by going off script.

The problem was, changing the bad things usually took away the good things, too. And there always seemed to be more bad things to replace the ones I managed to escape. The future I’d given up was a one-in-a-thousand future. I went to college, married Sue, who understood me as well as anyone could, had children and grandchildren. It wasn’t anything awesome, but it was normal, and that was all I wanted. The other hundreds of futures were like episodes of some bad television show. High drama, all the time. Once, I’d choked to death in my teens. Once, I’d accidentally caused a fire while making bacon in the kitchen and ended up homeless. Once, I’d wound up addicted to crack, in a loveless marriage to a Vegas stripper, and murdered in a drug deal in my early twenties. I’d done it all. In my head, at least.

And sometimes … sometimes, try as I might, I couldn’t change things. It was like certain past events sealed that certain future events would occur, and they couldn’t be changed, or it wasn’t clear how to change them. Once, when I was ten, I was trying so hard to follow the script that I tripped and broke my wrist. After that, I had this strong feeling I was going to get a huge bump on my head, but I couldn’t tell how. I tried not following the script, hoping to avoid that bump. But it didn’t work, because I didn’t know what in the script to change. Turned out that I had to give up skateboarding until my wrist healed, so I put my skateboard on the top shelf of my closet. I opened it one day and the skateboard fell out and whacked me on the head. So sometimes bad things were just impossible to avoid.

You will climb up to the boardwalk and smile at Jocelyn. She will eye you up and down, and a couple of children and a man with a Boogie board will step aside to let you pass.

Crazy Cross. That was what they called me at school, and as I felt the eyes of all the beachgoers on me, I knew it wouldn’t be too long until they thought the same. I knew they’d run home and tell their friends what they’d seen, and I’d be the talk of the town again, and not in a good way. As I climbed up the ramp, quickly, trying my best to ignore the stares, that same sinking feeling resurfaced. For three months, I’d