Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,64

that. Quickly, I threw on some cargo shorts and one of the few clean plaid button-downs I had lying around, and was still buttoning it when I ran into Nan downstairs. “Don’t hold dinner for me,” I said.

“Oh, it’s that girl, isn’t it?” she said, beaming. “A date?”

“Not exactly,” I said, nerves tweaking as I thought about what it was. “But we’re … hanging out.”

“Not exactly,” she repeated, mimicking my voice, then swatting my backside with a dish towel. “Dating, hanging out. It’s the same thing. You kids and your funny expressions.”

“Whatever,” I said with a smile, then went out the door, this time not caring if my mom heard the slamming. When I straddled my bicycle, in my mind I saw these things: pizza, smiley face, strings of disgusting peppermint. I was halfway down the street in a matter of minutes, heading toward the Heights, when I passed the badge-checking station at the Seventh Avenue beach. A thought of Jocelyn, my old babysitter, popped into my mind. I figured it was probably because that booth was where she worked, but I’d passed it a hundred times before and never thought of her once. I shook the thought away, stood on the pedals and pushed harder, past the piles of sand on Ocean.

It was a weird night. The wind was blowing steadily from the east and thick clouds, like a pile of charcoal, were hovering over the mainland. I could see the white outlines of the seagulls against them. Somewhere, far away, thunder rumbled. That meant a nasty summer downpour, the kind that raged for a few minutes and then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving a rosy sunset and a rainbow as a parting gift. I crossed my fingers and hoped I wouldn’t be drenched by the time I made it to the stand on the boardwalk.

I didn’t have to worry. When I got there, the storm was still rumbling in the distance. Taryn was sitting on one of the green benches overlooking the beach, her backside on top of the backrest and her feet planted on the seat. There were seagulls swarming around her. As I got closer, I noticed she had the fabric of a long skirt bunched up around her knees and a scarf over her shoulders. Hoop earrings and a tambourine would have completed the picture so nicely. She was feeding the birds funnel cake. She shrugged as she saw me. “I know, rats of the seashore and all, but we’re all God’s creatures.”

I sat beside her. “Will you still think that when one craps on your head?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said indignantly, “one already did, on my knee. Anyway, this stuff is pure grease. It will probably kill them.”

I stared at her knee. She was probably the only girl in the world who wasn’t bothered by seagull crap. “Nothing can kill them. They’re like cockroaches.”

She turned and held the plate out to me. “Want some?”

I grinned. “Are you trying to kill me?”

She stood up and let the skirt fall over her knees. She caught me looking and said, “Grandma says people expect us to wear this stuff. It makes us seem more authentic, more dark and mysterious. But”—she lowered her voice—“I feel like a total idiot.” She tossed the plate in a trash can, then licked the powdered sugar off her fingers. Thunder boomed in the distance, and a jagged edge of lightning slit the sky beyond the bridge. “We’d better get inside. It’s going to pour.”

I noticed as I followed her toward the tent that she was wearing rainbow-colored flip-flops with smiley faces on them. So much for dark and mysterious. She stopped. “Wait. I’m hungry. Want to get a slice of pizza with me?”

“Didn’t you just have funnel cake?”

She shook her head. “That was left over from the Mugsy’s stand. It fell on the ground. So I fed it to the seagulls.”

“Wait. You offered me food that fell on the ground?”

She blushed. “I didn’t think you’d accept.”

“What time do you have to do the Touch?”

She looked at her cell-phone display. “Five. Plenty of time.”

I was hungry, too. We’d started to walk to the Sawmill when she stopped short. I followed her gaze down the boardwalk. Devon and a couple of other cute girls were coming our way. Her friends. I thought she’d wave or go up to them, but instead she started looking around the stands nearby. It wasn’t crowded, so I know they saw us. Finally Taryn