Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,53

clear to me: I was going to die if I said yes. “No.” I tried to think of a fake name, but my mind whirred with You Wills, proving utterly useless once again. Suddenly something spat through. A name. Bryce. Bryce Reese. “Bryce Reese,” I breathed.

There was a pause, and I thought maybe he was going to go for it, pick me up, dust me off, apologize for the misunderstanding. Suddenly a screaming pain whizzed through the back of my head. “That’s my name, you idiot,” he said.

Oh, hell. Thanks, brain. Reese. Bryce Reese. As in, Emma Reese. Emma’s brother. Her mother had said they did “everything together.” She’d said he’d been devastated. Of course. The visions I’d had of someone blaming me for Emma’s death weren’t of her parents. Mrs. Reese didn’t blame me.

Bryce was the one who hated me.

He leaned over, his breath in my face. It smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes, making my stomach lurch. “I know who you are and what you did. Because of you, she’s dead. You killed Emma.”

I tried to take a breath but my lungs were being crushed by his weight. “I … tried—”

“You left that drunk SOB alone to watch the beach, didn’t you?”

I swallowed. So they did know. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, tasting grass. “I feel—”

He pushed me down, harder, into the dirt, then let go. “I hope you feel like dirt. You’re a murderer. You’ll get yours soon.”

Then, quiet. I lie there after the sound of him faded away, too scared even to turn around and watch him leave. It was a good thing Taryn had left when she did. Once I got up, the cemetery was empty, except for Emma’s casket, sitting there alone beside the burial site. The front of my suit was covered in dirt; I tried to wipe it off but smeared it in instead.

I walked back to the Buick, my cheek and all the teeth underneath aching from where Bryce’s fist had met them. I tried again to think ahead. I focused hard on graduation. I usually could remember that.

But there was nothing. Hell, I couldn’t even think of graduation. I don’t think I’d ever not been able to remember something about graduation. Sure, things would be different every time I called up the memory. Once, I’d tripped going up to the podium; another time I got a sloppy kiss from Norah Cracowiczki, who sat next to me and was so drunk she thought I was her boyfriend. But graduation was always there. Nan was always there, smiling at me from the bleachers.

My mom was right. I had plenty of time to change it, and I would. Somehow.

You’ll get yours. Soon. I thought about those words and how fitting they were. He was right. I would get mine. If everything continues the way it was going, I’ll get the same thing Emma got, I thought, turning back to her gravesite.

I swallowed and let out an uneasy breath. Bryce was standing there, head down, near the pile of freshly dug earth, holding some pink stuffed animal with floppy ears and weeping. Weeping so hard, his body shook with his every breath. I couldn’t look at him for more than a second. He didn’t have to punch me to make every part of me sting.

And maybe that was what I deserved.

I drove back home at a slug’s pace. It was the middle of the day on the Saturday before Labor Day, and though some of the rich folk with summerhouses had already packed up and gone to their winter residences, the tourist activity was in full swing. I kept imagining the Buick plowing into beachgoers with their brightly colored umbrellas and beach chairs, which always brought me back to Bryce, at graveside, weeping. Which brought me back to Emma. The day she died, something big had been set in motion. I couldn’t get it out of my head that whatever had started needed to happen, that it was right. That it was my punishment.

When I got home, the first thing I did was run up the stairs. I already had my tie and jacket off, but I starting ripping at the buttons of my shirt as soon as I got in the door. I was halfway up the stairs when my mom called to me. “What?” I snapped, still clawing at my chest.

“We were just wondering where you’ve been. We were worried,” she said, all innocent. It made me all the more angry because she