Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,76
it was, though, I’d never been to Room 231, and it was in the middle of a very busy section of the building, where two hallways intersected. If I had kept my head down, I wouldn’t have seen Taryn walking down the other hallway, right toward me, holding hands with a guy wearing a black leather jacket, gloves, and a nose ring.
She looked up at him and gave him a smile, while I stared, too dumbstruck to look away. Not three days ago, that guy could have been me. And wasn’t she supposed to be concerned about dying? She’d really been devoting her time to finding someone to Touch, but in a totally different way than I had thought. All this time, I’d been worrying about her, and she … she didn’t give a crap about me.
At the last second before I made it to the classroom, her eyes brushed over me. She pulled away from the guy and whispered, “Nick!”, and the redness was already starting to pool in her cheeks. I could hear her trying to say something to me, but I didn’t care what it was. By then, I was so out of there. I went into the room and slammed the door in her face. The teacher, Mr. Baumgartner, started screaming at me immediately. Something about “This is not your personal office, Mister. What is your name?”, but I just shoved myself into a seat, the first seat I could find, and clenched my fists.
The door opened a second later, as the teacher was screaming, “Answer me!” Taryn walked in, her eyes wide. She was wearing cutoffs that made her legs look phenomenal, but the second I thought that I hated myself for thinking anything good about her. Her gaze shifted between me and the teacher, and she started to walk toward me, cautiously. Baumgartner’s eyes flashed to her, like he was trying to figure out what part she played in all this, but he didn’t say anything. I stood up, grabbed my schedule, and faked like I was coming toward her, then quickly skirted around another row of desks and out the door.
The crowds in the hallway were thinning. The bell was about to ring. Taryn’s Nose Ring Dude was still hanging out there, waiting for her with a stupid expression on his face, and I scowled as I passed, wanting to do a whole lot worse. I mean, what the hell? He wasn’t anything like her type. And he was just plain nasty-looking. There were a thousand things wrong with him, but I forced myself to remember that it didn’t matter what she did with him. We were over. That was the way it needed to be. She needed to get on with her life so that she could have one. A nice, long one, probably filled with many more dudes who weren’t me.
Baumgartner shrieked behind me, the noise echoing down the hall—“Stop right there! You! Listen to me! Mister!”—but I didn’t care. People were gawking at me, stepping aside to let me pass like I had some infectious disease, but it didn’t matter what they thought. In the future, the near future, I was dead. Nothing I did now mattered. Not teachers, or students, or cross-country, or even Taryn.
Only one obstacle dared to stay in my way. I heard him before I saw him. “What did you do now, Cross?” the voice said, sparkling with amusement.
Sphincter.
And I thought the morning couldn’t get any worse.
He didn’t have time to wipe the smile off his face. I blew into his broad shoulder with more force than I knew possible, knocking him back, so he stumbled a little before he recovered. I didn’t see who he was with, only caught a glimpse of a red mane. The air was perfumed with competing scents, a stew of flowers and chemicals that clawed at my nostrils, making it even harder to breathe. Sphincter laughed and turned to the red sea of hair. “Crazy Cross,” he said with the same affectionate tinge in his voice I’d come to know and hate.
I lost it.
I turned to him, my hands balling into fists. My first punch hit him squarely in the jaw, throwing him back against the locker. The second jab, from my other arm, drove him upward, so that his chin was thrust up, and the blood, which had begun to course down his face, pooled in the crease of his lips, which were pulled into a tight grimace. He