Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,6

the world—the real world—had seen me arrive on the scene minutes too late and try to get her going, screaming “Breathe!” and pressing on her tiny little corpse chest over and over again, way past the time any normal dude would have given up. People in the crowd turned away, disgusted, but did I care? No. Instead, the EMTs who arrived with the ambulance five minutes later had to tear me away from the dead body.

You will hear the faraway screams of glee from the children on the Tilt-a-Whirl at Funtown Pier and you will think of the little girl in the pink bikini. Bill will turn at that moment and see the anguish in your face. “Tough day,” he will say.

The children’s shouts made me cringe. The dead girl was probably in kindergarten, at an age when kids love school. Her friends would probably wonder where she was on that first day in September and then they would learn the awful truth. It would be their first taste of death, of mortality. It would likely scar them for years, maybe forever. Way to make your mark on the world, Cross, I thought. A dozen kindergartners will wet their beds for years to come because of you.

Once, Nan had sat me down to watch her favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. I hated that movie, maybe because I envied the Jimmy Stewart character. He had such a positive impact on the world. Everything I did always turned to crap. I mean, lifeguarding? What was I thinking? Of course I couldn’t be a lifeguard, not when I could so easily go off script and have thousands of futures competing in my mind, destroying my concentration. It was like Betty Crocker running a weight-loss clinic.

“Tough day.”

You will nod but say nothing.

I pushed away the thought of five bright-eyed tots being reduced to tears in the back of the school bus when another kid let the news spill that the little girl was dead. That wasn’t real. After all, I assured myself, I couldn’t be on the school bus with them. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish my thoughts of the future from the spirals of my imagination. Still, I could clearly see that snot-nosed kid sputtering “—is dead.”

Hell, I didn’t even know the little girl’s name.

You will—

Sometimes I could think something so hard, I couldn’t see the script. I did that now, picturing instead my old standby, the green elephant. “What was her name?”

My mind began to shuffle before I could finish the sentence. But it wasn’t like the cycling had gone on a rampage, like before. It was only a small pang-pang-pang against my temple. I rested my elbow on the padded armrest and dug my fist into the side of my head to steady the throbbing.

Bill’s eyes were always soft. He was the good-natured, back-slapping, even type whose voice never rose beyond a whisper. He’d been readying the Good Kid speech, but his eyes narrowed. “Come on, Nick, let’s not go into—”

More shuffling. “Tell me.” But the truth was, I really didn’t need him. All the answers were already there in my head. I just needed to commit in my mind to travel far enough down a path to retrieve them. I could do it, if the answer could be found somewhere in the immediate future. I could find out anything if I wanted it badly enough. I just had to contend with the pain. I sat for a moment, imagining myself tracking down the answer, the pain escalating all the while. If I stopped right now and went back on course, followed the script like a good boy, the cycling would stop. But I couldn’t. I needed to know. Once I followed the path far enough in my head, the one where I lunged over the side of the desk and ripped the paper from Bill’s hands, receiving a punch from him that would make my lips bloody and swollen like raw sausages for weeks, I squeezed myself back in my chair, digging my fingers into the armrest to keep my body from actually doing it. Then I pressed my eyes closed and silently green-elephanted until only two words appeared in my mind.

Emma Reese

I opened my eyes. My mouth still smarted from the punch I’d never receive. “Emma? Emma Reese? Is that her name?”

Bill’s eyes flashed surprise for only a second before melting into acceptance, and I knew he was thinking of my mother. I really didn’t know what