Touched (16 page)

I laughed. “I bet every other girl in school would
please
him.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Ew.”

“Well, he totally wants you.”

She didn’t seem impressed, just played with her bracelet. “Duh, they all do.”

“Conceited much?”

“It’s not conceit. I told you. I told you that people like him are drawn to me.” She seemed really annoyed. I must have stared at her too long, confused, because she finally spelled it out for me in a whisper. “He’s Touched.”

I nearly choked on my own tongue. “Hell he is.”

“He is.”

“I’ve known Sphincter for years. We used to be best friends, back in the day.”

“He wasn’t Touched then. My grandmother did it for him last spring.” She stared at me. “If you don’t believe me, I can show you his signature in the book.”

“No, hey, I do,” I said. After all, it made total sense why he changed seemingly overnight. “What Touch did he get?”

“Physical perfection,” she answered, seeming bored. “Well, outwardly, he’s perfect. But as you know, a lot of those Touches have a catch. His has a really bad one.”

Suddenly the wind picked up, just as a thought caught in my brain. “Let me guess. He’s rotting from the inside.”

She nodded and smiled at me, but it was an empty smile. “It’s just sad. I want to warn him, but what do I say? ‘Hi, my grandmother made you perfect on the outside, but you’re also filled with a hundred tumors and won’t live to see Christmas.’ ”

“If I was him, I’d want to know. You have to tell him.”

She nodded and rubbed her temple with her free hand. “I know. I keep trying to. But it’s so terrible. Grandma tells me to stay away from the Touched, but I feel bad for him.”

Another group of tourists wandered by, and one, a girl of about thirteen or fourteen, looked at me and giggled. I realized my mouth was hanging open wide enough to probably spot my tonsils and clamped it shut. Wow. Evan Spitzer, my former-best friend. Dying. Hadn’t seen that one coming. Maybe if we still traveled in the same circles, I would have. Maybe I would have noticed something about him, something that would have hinted at the havoc being wreaked inside his flawless body. I thought of him racing down the boardwalk the other day, pumping his arms and legs, the picture of physical health. Of perfection.

Suddenly it seemed like we had a lot in common. We could have started our own Dead Before Next Year club. Except … “It was his choice,” I said.

“No. He chose something else. Not this.”

“So, you were trying to explain it to him?”

“Yeah, that and … well, you know how when I touch you, you said you feel normal? Well, I thought maybe I could touch him and heal his tumors.”

“Oh, sure you were,” I said. “So did it work?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea. I touched his cheek, like, pretending to wipe something off it, but I couldn’t feel anything. Anyway, he thought I was coming on to him. He was all over me. We didn’t even make it two blocks. I wanted to help him, not be his newest conquest. So I told him to pull over and let me out.”

“So, you do feel guilty. For things your grandmother did.”

“I guess I do. A little. Otherwise, why would I be hanging out with you?” She grinned.

“Funny.”

She motioned across the street. Some of the artists were already beginning to pack up their wares and leave. “What’s going on there?”

“Arts and crafts show.”

“Oh. Cool. Let’s go,” she said, tugging the sleeve of my T-shirt. She was already halfway across Central when I tossed the empty iced-tea bottle away and hurried to follow her. “Is this like an annual thing?”

“Yep. Every Labor Day weekend.”

“Oh, cool,” she repeated, then walked a few steps, wrinkling her nose. “You are right. People do paint that lighthouse a lot. Do you come to this thing every year?”

I shook my head. Actually, the last time I’d come, I begged Nan to get me a beanbag frog. It was the only thing there that a seven-year-old would want, the only thing that wasn’t a reproduction of that lighthouse. I loved that frog, took it everywhere with me. But a couple of weeks later there were weevils in my bed, and Nan inspected the frog and told me she had to throw it out. I begged her not to, but then she showed me a little black bug popping out of the seam. She wrapped the frog in two plastic bags and stuck it in the trash. Sometimes I wonder if that really happened, or if it was just part of a future that might have happened, but anyway, I never went to the festival again after that. It was just another reminder of how everything good in my life was always laced with bad.

Taryn said, “Oh, well, it’s cool. Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to … Listen.” She bit her lip and suddenly I knew what she was going to ask me. She was afraid to, but I would eventually pry it out of her. She wanted to ask me to meet her tonight. At the boardwalk. Yes!

Before she could answer, I found my lips spreading into “yes.”

Her surprise melted into a smile. “You mean it? You can?”

“Sure. What time?”

“Like, six?” She bit her lip again. “I can’t stop myself from shaking. I need to start now. I should have done the last one, but I bailed.”

I squinted at her. What? What had I just agreed to? “So you’re …”

“I don’t really think I’m ready, but I’ve put it off long enough. Too long. So you will?”

Wait … wait. Suddenly it all became clear, all of it. Everything I’d agreed to. And the answer was no. No thanks, never. By that time I felt too stupid to change my reply, to tell her I’d just agreed to it because she had the most amazing … the most amazing everything and it wasn’t possible for me to turn her down. “Sure.”

“Great. I’m a little nervous. Actually, really nervous.”

I nodded. I would be, too. She was going to perform her first Touch tonight. For whatever reason, she wanted me to be nearby for it. I didn’t know how I could do that. Be in the same room with someone as his life was ruined. As Taryn ruined his life. I opened my mouth to speak and a bunch of nonsensical syllables streamed out before I finally managed, “You, like, want me to wait outside?”

She nodded.

“Um. Why?”

“It’s not easy,” she whispered, and her eyes got all glassy. “Just … can you?”

I shrugged. “All right. I’ll wait in the arcade next door, and you come out when you’re—”

“Actually, I thought maybe you could hide in that place I showed you? That way you can watch it.”

“I don’t know how that will help. But okay,” I said, digging my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “But I won’t get … uh …” “Hurt” was the word I said in the You Wills, but I couldn’t push it past my lips. It made me sound like a gutless wonder.

“Oh, no way. You’ll be behind the curtain. And besides, you can’t be Touched twice.”

“Really?”

She flinched at my surprise. “Why, did you want to get another one?”

“Why would I want that? The good is always accompanied by bad.”

She shook her head. “Not always. Sometimes it’s all good. Bad things happen a lot. But sometimes it just does what people want.”

I snorted. Just my luck. “But now it makes sense why your grandmother isn’t too concerned with providing stellar customer service. No repeat customers.”

She wasn’t paying attention, though. She had wandered over to a display of little wire figurines, made to illustrate different professions. “Look,” she said, picking one up. “A fortune-teller. Looks just like my grandmother.”

I stared at the figure, hunched over the table with a deck of tarot cards in front of her. “No it doesn’t. She’s smiling.”

She turned it over, checking the price. “I think Grandma would get a kick out of this.”

I eyed it, doubtful. “She gets kicks out of things?”

She sighed and put the figurine down. “You’re right. So, um, today? At six? You’ll be there?”

I dug my hands deeper into my pockets, rubbing the grains of sand that always seemed permanently buried in the seams of all my clothing against my palms. “Yeah.”

“And you won’t blow me off again?” she asked, nudging me.

She came in so close I could smell the apples in her hair, and it made me wonder how I was ever Superman enough to find the will to blow her off the first time. “Promise,” I mumbled.

We followed the crowds of shoppers out of the green and she waved goodbye, then headed across Central Avenue, in the direction of her grandmother’s house. And as usual, the second she left, I missed her.

I didn’t want to go home again, but I did. I had a lot of time to kill before six, and after Taryn left me, I realized I looked like a slob. I wanted to brush my teeth, wash my face, and change out of my holey gym shorts and T-shirt so I could look halfway presentable. I opened and closed the screen door carefully, then quietly climbed the stairs and did all I needed to without my mother noticing. Well, maybe she did know I was there, since she could see the future and all, but if she did, she didn’t come out of her room or call to me, and I was glad for 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 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 beginning of time. We have to give people their deepest desires. We’re tied to this book. If we don’t perform these Touches, all of them, Grandma says we’ll die. There are only five Touches left in this book. Once we finish with them, we’re done. We’re free.”

“Why doesn’t your grandmother do them and leave you out of it?”

“Because she’s dying, that’s why,” Taryn said, her face reddening. “She has pancreatic cancer, and the doctors gave her fewer than three months to live. That was two months ago. She needs to train me so that I know what to do in case she dies before the Touches have been used. If I’m not properly trained to carry out the Touches by the time she dies, I won’t be able to do them, and I’ll die, too.”

I just stared at her. “Wow. How did you guys ever get so lucky?”

“It was over two hundred years ago. Back in Hungary. Basically one of my ancestors pissed off a Gypsy. Supposedly my ancestor was a charlatan, and a very gifted actress. She used to go from place to place and promise she could perform miracles, but she used cheap parlor tricks and stuff to make people believe in her. Even so, she thrived. She was very successful at fooling everyone, and it was majorly cutting into this other woman’s—the real Gypsy’s—business. To exact revenge and prove who the real mystic was, the Gypsy placed this curse on her. She would have to perform these spells on people—her very life depended on it. Her last grandchild inherited the book, and that grandchild’s last grandchild, and then Grandma, and now me. And here we are.” She turned back to the book. “I really hate this,” she whispered. “Don’t think I don’t.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe this will be a good one. Maybe this person will do amazing things with this Touch.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking, Not possible. It was too volatile. There was too much room for bad things to happen. After all, how often do people say things they don’t mean? “Do you know who is getting it?”

She shook her head and hunched over the book for a minute, quiet, and I watched her, her blond hair pooling on the pages.

“Do you have to memorize it?”

“Yeah. Well, I can always refer to the book, but it’s tricky because it’s in Hungarian. If I say one syllable wrong, the Touch won’t work and both the person receiving the Touch and I will …” She cringed. “I don’t want to think about that right now. But anyway, that’s why I want you there. If anything happens, I’d hate to be alone.”

She didn’t have to complete the sentence. I knew what she meant. If she didn’t do it, she’d die. If she didn’t do it right, she’d die. Death was a pretty big part of the whole thing. For some reason, the thought comforted me. Like maybe I’d finally found someone with a curse worse than mine. “Your grandmother—”

“Not the same,” she muttered. “She would probably just stand over me and curse my stupidity in Hungarian.”

She studied the page, her brow furrowing and her lips moving slowly. Every once in a while some strange syllable came out of her mouth. Then she exhaled heavily and took another bite of pizza. “I am so not cut out for this. You know when we moved to Maine, I had it in my head I was going to be a veterinarian.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. Explained why she liked seagulls so much.

She nodded. “But my parents just patted my head and said, ‘That’s cute.’ I guess because all kids under ten want to be veterinarians.”

“I never wanted to be one,” I pointed out. But then again, I never wanted to be anything. I never had any plans for the future. I just wanted to be … normal.

“Okay, so you’re the only one. But really, I still wish I could be one. I love animals. And I really think I could be good at it.” She looked at the book in front of her. “Not this. I never wanted this.”

“Who would?”

“Well … I get the feeling my grandmother doesn’t mind doing it.”

“She’s probably just been doing it so long, it doesn’t bother her.” I leaned forward. There were four more red tabs sticking out from other pages. “Are the tabs the Touches that haven’t been used yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Not that many.”

“I know. Only five. And when I was saying that I didn’t have any Touches my ‘friends’ would be interested in, it’s because there aren’t that many left. I’m sure they would have clawed each other to death to get ahold of Evan’s Touch, even if they knew it would cause them tumors. That’s how shallow those girls are. That’s another problem. I attract all these weak people. But I can’t help them all.” She snorted. “Help. I know. Hilarious, right?”