Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,65
grabbed my wrist and pulled me into a surf shop. She pretended to inspect the hemp necklaces on the wall, but kept peeking out the door every two seconds. She gasped and hid behind me, then drew me even farther into the store, to the very back. The shop was so crowded with stuff that I rammed various body parts into three racks of T-shirts and smacked my forehead into a fake parrot hanging overhead before the trek was over. “Hey,” I said, as she stood on her tippy-toes, peering out the opening. “Inspector Clouseau. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I just can’t take them anymore.”
Her friends? What girl didn’t want to hang out with her friends? As I stared at her, the answer came to me. “What? You don’t want your friends to see you with me?”
She snapped her eyes to mine. “No, that’s not it at all. They’re not my friends, anyway.”
Okay, now I was confused. “Did you get into a fight with them? Devon—”
“She’s okay, I guess. But all the rest of them drive me bonkers. I guess I can understand why you’d think I was friends with them, because they’re constantly following me around. Didn’t I tell you before? I attract them. They’re drawn to me, but they don’t know why. They all want something from me. After the great friends I had in Maine, I don’t want any more.”
“You mean, they want something, like a Touch?”
She laughed bitterly. “Yeah. ‘Taryn, can I get you this?’ ‘Taryn, you look so pretty today.’ ‘Taryn, can I rub your feet?’ It gets old really fast. But the problem is, I don’t have any Touches they’d want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a limited number. There’s only a few left now.” She glanced quickly outside. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
We got slices at Five Brothers, the next pizza place on the strip, which was a little more private. We sat down in a booth that wasn’t splashed with too much pizza sauce or swarming with too many black flies. She folded her slice up and took a bite, letting a long string of cheese hang down to the plate, then scooped it up with her finger and piled it into her mouth. “Yum. Jersey pizza is the best. I missed it like crazy. In Maine, it’s like raw dough. Gross. So the night I came back here, I ate an entire pie by myself.” Then she shivered visibly. “I am so nervous.”
“Yeah.” I laughed as she took another huge bite. “I can see. You can hardly eat a thing.”
She blushed. “I eat when I’m nervous.” Then she reached into her flowery backpack and started to pull something out. I thought it would be her phone again, but it was old and dusty and completely conspicuous … great. The Book of Touch. She’d actually taken it with her.
“Why do you have that?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Well, I need to practice. Duh.” She took the key and opened the lock. For some reason, I’d thought that the book was this big secret, that the only people who could lay eyes upon it were people like her. That she’d entrusted me when she let me look at it. I didn’t know that she could whip it out at any pizza place on the strip and not have to endure the wrath of her grandmother. In the bright light I could see the book much better. There were a few small red tabs sticking out from some of the pages. She flipped through the pages until she came to one of the red tabs. I could tell that it was a Touch that hadn’t been performed because there were more words inscribed on the page, and the signature line was blank. “This is the one I have to do.”
I stared at it. It was all nonsense to me. “What is it?”
“Flight of Song. The ability to make people do what you tell them to.”
“Like … you mean, anything?”
She nodded.
“Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe how nonchalant she was being about the whole thing.
“Yes. Why?”
“Because, that’s dangerous. Right? I mean, whoever gets that Touch could just say, ‘Go jump off a cliff,’ and you would have to do it. Right?”
She thought for a moment. “I guess.”
“Then, how can you just go ahead and—”
She bit her tongue and threw the pizza down on the plate. “You think I want to do this? I have to! This book has been our curse since the