Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,78
she’d ridden all the way here in Sphincter’s convertible, and who knew? Considering his weakness, maybe she had. But her eyes looked heavy and her skin had a sickly green tinge to it. She cleared her throat and it looked like she was swallowing marbles. “I cut out. I need to explain.”
“You don’t have to explain to me. You and I are … nothing,” I said, almost choking on the word. “You should be in school.”
“No, this is important.”
“School is important. I shouldn’t be.”
“No,” she said, closing the door tightly behind her. “You seem to know I have trouble saying no. But I do know how to say no when it matters. So I’m not going anywhere.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, shrugging in an “it’s a free country” kind of way. But it wasn’t possible to ignore her when we were the only two people in a nine-by-nine-foot room. I knew I should kick her out, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.
“What did you get?”
“Suspension. One week.”
She nodded. “Brutal. But not entirely unjustified. You nearly killed him! Considering how sick he is. Where did you get those Ali moves?”
Great. First she gets cozy with Nose Ring Dude, and then she pours sympathy on Sphincter. Not what I wanted to hear right now. “I did him a favor,” I muttered. “Now he’ll go to the doctor and find out what’s wrong with him. Maybe it won’t be too late.”
“It’s already too late. The tumors are spreading. They won’t be able to stop it,” she said softly. She dropped her bag and sat down on the edge of my bed. She must have noticed the dump trucks and airplanes on the sheets because she smiled a little but didn’t say anything. Then she looked around, probably trying to find out what other things I had in my room that the normal four-year-old would go crazy over.
“I have glow-in-the-dark planet stickers on the ceiling,” I offered. “But you can’t see them since it’s daytime.”
“I have them, too!” she said brightly, then started to cough. It was a horrible, wracking cough, like that of someone with TB, and it went on long enough that I wondered if I should get her some water or smack her on the back. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and said, her voice weak, “Well, I had them at my old house, in Maine.”
She stared up at the ceiling for a long time, and finally I said, “You were about to explain something? Something about why you were getting with that guy in the hallway? What was his name?”
She blushed. “His name’s Kent. Kent Something. And we were not with each other!” she said, slapping me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Well, Kent Something looks charming. I can totally tell why you’d get with him.”
“Stop being so smug. You know he’s far from charming. And if you say I was getting with him one more time, I will smack you. It’s all perfectly innocent.”
I stared at her. “Don’t tell me he’s your brother. That excuse has been pretty much done to death.”
“No. He is not my brother,” she whispered. “And he’s gross. Seriously.”
“You were the one getting with him,” I said, emphasizing the words she didn’t want to hear. Just because.
“Clearly, you’re an idiot,” she mumbled, smacking me again on the shoulder, which was starting to hurt. “I needed skin-to-skin contact to see what was going on with him.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You mean, he’s … Touched?”
“No, but he wants to be. He’d been following me around ever since yesterday. He really has a need. It’s so strong. And I was trying to figure out what it is, if maybe I have the Touch he’d want.”
“Do you?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to process it. It happened so fast. I saw you and I felt so terrible.” She sighed, but then ended up coughing the last bit of air. “I am really sorry if I made you feel bad in front of Bryce and his friend. Is that why you ran away?”
I shrugged. “It’s not that. It’s … you’re right. I want to protect you. The vision—the bad one.”
Her eyes widened. “It’s still there? But we changed—”
“I know. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s going haywire because that’s what my Touch does around you. Maybe I’m seeing things in my head that aren’t real. I have no idea. But to be safe, I think we have to stay away from each other.”
She threw up her hands, exasperated. “What? Why?