Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,96

followed behind her. “You’re … you’re in my class?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Duh. What, did you already forget whose notes you copied yesterday? Your ass would fail if it wasn’t for me!”

When we got to class, Baumgartner did the furthest thing from maiming us. The stodgy old guy beamed at Taryn like she was his own child. So she’s the teacher’s pet, I observed as she waved at him. I wondered if she still wanted to be a veterinarian. I took the seat next to her at the lab station and as she opened her notebook, a huge red A+ Great Work! caught my eye. She was the star student. And it made sense. All that stuff about her falling in with the wrong crowd in Maine never happened. She was no longer a year behind. She was a year ahead.

She patted my hand and whispered, “Don’t worry. It was just the first quiz. You have plenty of time to erase that F.”

I looked at her, at those beautiful eyes, that beautiful everything that I never thought I’d see again. Like I cared that I got an F and in this life I was an intellectual amoeba. There were so many other things out there.

I spent most—well, pretty much all—of the rest of the period, sitting back on the stool, staring at my girlfriend. She was wearing this cute blue schoolgirl miniskirt that showed off her smooth, pale runner’s legs. Every so often she looked back at me and gave me a smile, especially when Baumgartner asked me a question. I slowly became aware everyone was staring at me. He’d asked me a question, after all.

Crap. He’d asked me a question.

“Um,” I said. I would have done the signature thing and flipped through the pages of my physics book to pretend I was trying to find the answer. That is, if I had remembered my physics book. If I had remembered anything at all. I didn’t really even know what the question was.

Baumgartner tapped on the side of his desk. Taryn pretended to cough and cover her lips from him, then secretly mouthed the word to me.

“Velocity,” I mumbled.

“Ah. It takes a village,” Baumgartner said, as if he thought he was the funniest dude on the planet, giving Taryn a wink. “By the way, Cross, what happened to your textbooks?”

I shrugged. “I forgot them.” At least, I thought I had. In the world I remembered, I got suspended before I could pick up any books on the first day of school. After the accident, things were a blur. Did I have books in that neat, plush room I woke up in this morning? The place was so spotless, you’d think I would have noticed a stack of books there. But the last book I could recall getting my hands on, much less opening, was …

Of course.

I didn’t want to incur Baumgartner’s wrath, so I waited for the bell to ring, making it pretty much the longest class period of my life. I think I successfully bored a hole into the linoleum with all the fidgeting I was doing with my foot. Before Taryn could pack up her stack of books, I said, “Where’s the book?”

She slid the physics book across to me. “You want to borrow it? Okay.”

“No. The book. The Book of Touch. I need to see it.”

“What is the Book of Touch?” she asked.

Right. The world was upside down. Of course this wasn’t going to be easy. “You know. Your grandmother’s book. The book she used up at her tent, on the boardwalk.”

She’d been packing her stuff up, but suddenly she just stopped, grabbed the rest of her books in her arms, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and walked away from me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she muttered.

“You have to. Your grandmother. She has the book, right?”

She stopped and stared at me. “Nick, what’s going on? You’re acting really … intense. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I just need to … understand things. I need to see that book.”

She hitched her shoulders, exasperated. “What book? I have no clue what you’re talking about!”

I sighed. “Your grandmother. She tells fortunes at the Heights, right?”

“No,” she said as I followed her out into the hall, “she’s dead. She died earlier this year. That’s why we moved here. We inherited her house. You know all this. Why are you acting so weird?”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “You know I barely knew her. She