Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,51

going to die in a horrific car crash.”

I thought about the glass shards spraying in my face. It scared me, too. Another thing we had in common.

“Anyway,” she continued, “my parents wanted me to drive because they’re too busy to cart me around everywhere I need to go. So I got my license a couple of weeks ago. I’m sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

“Really? For some reason I thought you were a freshman.”

Now it was her turn to shrink back. Her face turned red. “I am. Well, I was born on the cusp and so my parents kept me back. And then I had to stay back because of … well, forget it. Long story.”

“That’s cool,” I said, dropping it. I figured it had something to do with that wild past she’d spoken of. I knew she was trying to escape that, because really, it wasn’t her. She was a good girl. A good girl with a bad curse. Probably as bad a curse as mine.

“So you want to see my ride?” she asked, motioning Devon along. “My dad bought it for me as an early birthday present.”

“Sure,” I said after a while. I didn’t want to because I had to get going, and because I wondered if it would be a better ride than mine. Then I realized that any ride was better than mine. Some Schwinns were better than mine.

We walked toward the parking area, and she and Devon talked about how sad the funeral was. Well, Taryn talked about that; Devon obviously wanted to get away from me, like most every girl in the world, because she kept saying under her breath, “We really should go.” I kept looking at the headstones, wondering how the people in the ground had died. One stone said MOMMY’S LITTLE ANGEL and from the years engraved into it, I realized the kid was only five. Like Emma. Soon, she would be in the ground, and I would be

Headlights flashing car horn blaring No no Tar watch ou

“Isn’t that crazy?” a voice said. I turned my head. Taryn had said something and now she was waiting for a response.

“Oh. Yeah,” I fudged.

“I thought that it was, but then, like, why was I waking up in the middle of the night?” she said with a sigh, which made me really want to know what the hell she was talking about. Instead I started thinking of kissing her. I could taste her lips. I knew I was turning red, so I muttered an “I don’t know,” which didn’t fit into the conversation at all.

She looked at me curiously for a second, and then said, “Anyway. Here it is. I call her Beauty.”

It was an old, and I mean old, dusty blue Jeep Cherokee. Nothing about this ride could be considered beautiful, since it was coated in dirt. It was also on a lift and looked too tough to be a Tarynmobile. As I moved around it, I saw a sticker on the back: BAD GIRLS LIKE BAD TOYS.

“Bad girls like bad toys, huh?”

She shrugged. “It was there when my dad bought it. Haven’t had time to remove it yet.”

I laughed. “Sure. You like your toys bad.” I studied the other bumper stickers. FAT PEOPLE ARE HARDER TO KIDNAP. And NICE TRUCK. SORRY ABOUT YOUR PENIS. Wow. If you put me in a room with a thousand cars and asked me to pick which one belonged to Taryn, this would be my last pick. I was just about to point that out when I peeked into the driver’s seat and my blood ran cold.

Dark seats. A center console brown with spilled Coke or coffee. A dream catcher dangling from the rearview mirror. In that instant I was transported to a rainy night, to headlights swirling around me, to the low, grating blare of a truck horn. To small, pale feet with pretty painted toenails pressing against the dashboard, and blond ringlets thrown forward over her face as she screamed and screamed. Suddenly her words played in my head like a recording at too slow a speed: I always have this feeling I am going to die in a horrific car crash.

This was it.

This was the car I would die in.

And worse yet, Taryn would be there, too.

“No.”

I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it must have broken through my lips. My numb lips, useless as the rest of me. Because Taryn, who’d been talking about how her father had picked up the car from some