Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,47

massive steering wheel, which was the size of a monster truck’s tire. The Buick wouldn’t fit in a regular garage, but that was fine with Nan because, as she would proudly tell you, we had the only three-car garage in town. Our garage was bigger than our house, so the car was very comfortable among Nan’s strange collections of things, like the scoops from coffee cans and used pop-up turkey timers. It only had twenty-three thousand miles on it, “a classic!”, as Nan would say. She only used it to go to the A&P and church every Sunday. She walked everyplace else.

As the sun began to melt orange against the horizon, I got Nan into the passenger’s seat and slid behind the massive wheel, where Saint Christopher stared at me from a placard on the dashboard. I gripped the wheel and inched out of the garage like an old man.

Wow. I really needed the practice. Taryn would be wanting me like crazy after this ride.

It went without saying that I didn’t like driving. Before that day I hadn’t driven since I passed my driver’s test at the beginning of the summer. Something about seeing all the accidents I could cause rubbed me the wrong way. Once, when I had my learner’s permit, I thought about flipping on the radio but saw a ten-car pileup. There were just too many opportunities to cause bad things to happen on the road. But today Nan was drugged on something that had her snoring between sentences, not to mention she was down an arm, so it looked like I wouldn’t be able to avoid driving. She’d cornered me the second I got home and told me I had to take her to the pharmacy on the mainland, because she’d realized this afternoon she’d run out of heart pills. She’d called Ocean Pharmacy on the island for a delivery, but they didn’t have the kind she needed, and she was desperate.

But that was okay, I told myself. Normally I would have been a wreck. Despite the weird way it had ended, the afternoon with Taryn had me feeling good. Like maybe I could live a seminormal life, with someone who finally understood what I was going through. Getting there, I was fine. I joked with Nan about how she looked like she had been in a prizefight and how she could tell everyone “the other guy looks worse.” I turned up the modern-rock station on the radio and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music. I thought about how soft and small Taryn’s hand felt against mine.

On the way back, though, I lost it. It wasn’t simply the act of driving, of pressing on the gas pedal, that freaked me out. I made it over the bridge from Toms River (can’t tell you how many times I envisioned the Buick careering over the railing and into the bay) and all the way down Central, carefully following the You Wills right down to the letter. But when I was navigating around town hall, not half a mile from Nan’s cottage, it hit me.

Glass shards spraying in my face icy water droplets the smell of peanut butter

What the …?

Instinctively I squeezed my eyes shut, and doing so, I slammed on the brakes. Nan grabbed the armrest. A car horn blared behind me and a red pickup swerved around me. The driver gave me the finger.

It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be my future. First of all, I hated peanut butter. The smell made me so sick that I couldn’t stand it. And the car was all wrong. It wasn’t the easily recognizable Buick, with the tan pleather inside and St. Christopher staring from the dashboard. Nothing about it was vaguely familiar. It could have been something that would happen fifty years in the future, or maybe it wasn’t real at all. Maybe it was just me getting all worked up about driving, as usual. I needed to stay away from Skippy, which was no problem since just thinking about it made my stomach churn, and stick to my bicycle; again, no problem because I hated driving anyway.

I looked over at Nan. For someone who’d missed her last heart pill, this was probably not the best experience to have. She started to say something to comfort me and then began snoring again.

I clenched my jaw. No matter how good things were with Taryn, nothing could protect me. This curse always found ways to