Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,56

the You Wills or doing the opposite of what they instructed, hoping to shake something up. But nothing had changed.

I’m not going in a car, I told myself.

Sometimes, all I needed to do to change the future was to convince myself I was going to change. When I saw the future of me at the dentist, getting all my teeth pulled because of too many butterscotch candies, I just told myself, “I will no longer eat them.” And the more I thought that, the more that memory of me at the dentist faded, became less real. So telling myself I would not drive a car should have worked. Instead, though, the memory seemed clearer. I could make out the pretty spiderweb pattern on the windshield, I could feel the zip of the seat belt on my chest, my fingers digging into the soft plastic seat.

But I am not going in a car. You got that? No car!

But there was no cycling. No new memories. Nothing to suggest that I’d changed the future. It was useless and crazy, arguing with my own mind. Like arguing with a girl. No matter what my position was, I could never win.

I changed my shorts and pulled an old surfing T-shirt over my head as I ran down the stairs. The You Wills whispered and I tried not to pay attention, but random things floated through my mind: unmentionables, lighthouse, fire-engine red. Something smelled like strawberries. When I reached the screen door, Nan was standing by the washing machine. “It’s laundry day,” she said, a tinge of defeat in her voice.

I realized why she was upset when I saw the cast on her arm and remembered her injury. Nan was one of those people who would keep chugging along even with every bone in her body broken. I rushed to her side, despite the fact that on the few occasions I’d helped with laundry in the past, I’d almost been scarred for life. Something about having to handle my mom’s and grandmother’s silky, giant underwear, knowing that Nan handled mine, hanging them up on the line outside for the whole world to see. I’d much rather believe they just dried and folded themselves and jumped into my drawer. But with one arm, Nan was pretty helpless. “Yeah, I can help.”

“Oh, perfect,” she said, to my dismay. She pointed to a big wicker basket of damp whites, all ready to go out on the line. Perfect. Her unmentionables, or at least, that’s what Nan called them.

“How is your arm feeling?” I asked, hoping she’d say it was miraculously cured and she could take off the cast. I wasn’t sure I could handle more than one week of laundry.

“Oh, fine,” she answered through gritted teeth. She waved me out the door.

I walked outside and grabbed the bucket of clothespins, then started with my socks. The easy thing. Unfortunately since I’d only gone running once this week, I only had one pair in the laundry. I moved on to my boxers, hoping that by the time I got to the more serious stuff, a rainstorm would come or the world would implode or something. I was just clipping the last pair to the line when the world did implode. Because she started coming up the pathway. Taryn. And here I was, surrounded by my underwear, all flapping happily in the breeze.

Okay, maybe a real man wouldn’t have felt weird about it. It was completely third grade to be embarrassed. But I was. Like I said, I didn’t have much real experience with girls. And it was embarrassing enough as it was, being accosted in my ugly backyard, which was all overgrown and filled with rusting, peeling patio furniture. There were faded green aliens and army men (you really couldn’t tell the difference) painted on the clamshells that surrounded the cracked walk. I’d made a bird feeder out of Popsicle sticks and that was there, too, lopsided and pathetic, by Nan’s garden. Nan saved every weird creative endeavor from my youth; they were valued trophies to her. The garbage cans were nearby, and they still reeked from the fish from a few nights before. All my surroundings reeked too much of me, of things I didn’t want Taryn knowing about.

She approached cautiously. She was wearing sunglasses and her hair was up in a bun, making her look older and even more out of my league. “Are you better now?” she asked. “I just came to check on you.”

Could she