Touched (23 page)

The sun beat down on me the second I stepped outside; just one of many things that seemed to be beating down on me. I squinted at the battered Ford in the driveway. Then a head poked out from the other side. It was a guy with shaggier hair than mine, wearing sunglasses. He didn’t look at all familiar. “You coming or what? I’ve been waiting out here forever.”

“Sorry,” I said, still trying to make out his face. Then I realized I was dragging along, so I quickly opened the passenger-side door and slid inside, gagging at the stench of cigarette smoke.

I stared at the guy again. He was wearing an old T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops. He took a drag on his cigarette and pulled the car into reverse. “Man, I hate getting up at crack of ass every morning. I can’t do it anymore. I’ll be happy when this year is over and we can do what we want.”

I nodded a little. I had nothing to add to the conversation because (a) I was still stunned over Nan, and (b) I had no freaking idea who this was.

“And we have to get up at five for the meet on Saturday. Five! On a Saturday. What. The. Hell, man,” he went on, taking another drag on his cigarette.

So he was a runner, too. Even if he was puffing on that cigarette like it was the source of his power. After a minute he looked over at me. I was vaguely aware I was staring at him in a way guys are not supposed to stare at their friends, so I looked away and coughed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. “You look like you have to take a crap.”

That was the ultimate question. I wished someone would answer for me. “I … had a bad night’s sleep, I guess,” I answered. “Everything’s all messed up.”

“Yeah, after last night …,” he began. I guess he was thinking I’d complete the sentence. How come everyone remembered last night except me?

And Nan … what happened to her? She was supposed to go and get Flight of Song. She’d come home and told me it was done. She should not have been dead. Not only dead, but
dead for seventeen years
.

We got to school as the first warning bell was ringing and hightailed it into the music wing, which was closest to the senior parking lot and the bus drop-off. Except it wasn’t called the music wing. It was called the Edith Laubach Memorial Wing. “Who is Edith Laubach?” I mumbled as we went in the double doors. There were colorful murals painted on all the cinder-block walls, murals I swear were not there the day before. Murals of rainbows and people holding hands and hearts and flowers and crap like that.

Friend Guy shrugged. “What is up with you, man? You come through these doors every day for three years and
now
you ask who Edith Laubach is? Some crazy chick who did herself in a dozen years ago is all I know.”

Two other guys gave Friend Guy a one-finger salute and he told them to screw off. They said the same to me. I knew them, but I was never friends with them. They started talking to me like we were. “Yo, what did you and Spitz do last night?” a guy, who’d once painted the word “freak” on my locker in his girlfriend’s red nail polish, said to me.

Spitz. I look back at the guy who drove me to school. Hell, of course. It was Evan Spitzer. My once–best friend. Who for some reason, like the past nine years never happened, is acting like my
always
best friend.

That’s it.

It was like it never happened. Like my mom and I never even got the Touch.

And if we never got the Touch, maybe everything in my past never happened. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe Taryn was still …

Still what? Taryn’s grandmother said she’d given up performing Touches after she realized she’d given one to my mom, a pregnant lady, and passed it on to an innocent child. If we hadn’t gotten the Touch, her grandmother wouldn’t have given up performing Touches for all those years, and maybe she would have completed all the Touches in the book by now. And then Taryn would have been free. If she didn’t have to come down to New Jersey to take over performing Touches for her ailing grandmother, then maybe she was still living happily up in Maine. Maybe she was still alive. Alive … and completely unaware that Nick Cross existed.

Great.

Still, that was better than she was last night. Loads better.

I started wondering whether I could go up to Maine and find her. As a complete stranger, I probably wouldn’t be able to insert myself into her life, but I could at least check to make sure she was okay. I’d have to drive, something that after that night with Taryn I’d never wanted to do again. But that rainy night in her Jeep felt like nothing more than part of a dream, or a scene from a bad movie. I could barely feel the shower of glass on my face now. Had it even happened? Fingers snapped in my face. “Whoa. We’ve got a zoner,” one of the dudes said.

Sphincter, or Spitzer, or whatever he was these days, said, “Yeah, I think he got bitten by a zombie.” They walked down the hall and I followed, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Was physics my first class? Hell, I didn’t even know my locker combination.

Spitzer said something about how he was going to quit track, and all the guys nodded except me. All I could think of was The Sergeant, stalking back and forth at tryouts and pumping his fist in the air when his son made the new school record. I said, “Your dad’s really going to love that.”

He stopped midstride and stared me up and down, frowning. “Then I guess I should be glad he’s been in the ground for nine years.”

What? His dad wasn’t dead. If his dad had been in the ground for nine years, who was that at tryouts last week, giving Sphincter the thumbs-up and the New School Record shoulder rub? I felt the back of my neck burning as they all stared at me. His dad was The Sergeant, the guy who kept his son in line. He went to all the track meets and brought his own stopwatch and gave Sphincter and everyone crap for just about everything from the condition of the track to the shade of blue the sky was. I mean, I wasn’t part of Spitzer’s life for very long after the Disney Trip Debacle, but I had heard enough to know that …

The trip. The trip I’d tried to prevent. The one I’d successfully delayed by taking the air out of the Spitzers’ tires the night before. Or had I? “There was an … accident on 95?” I muttered. “In Richmond?”

Spitzer glanced at the group and waved them on, then turned to me and pushed me up against the locker. Not hard, but he got in my face. “What the hell is up with you, man?” he hissed. “Do you want me to relive it? You know damn well what happened. Or did you forget coming to the hospital to visit me every day for three months when I was in la-la land?”

I swallowed, realizing I was about three minutes away from making him Sphincter the Non-Friend again. “No. Sorry, man.”

After that I walked aimlessly and silently down the hall alone, feeling like a zombie. Of course, if Sphincter’s Army sergeant of a dad had died long before, he wouldn’t feel pressured to be on the track team. He wouldn’t have to clip his hair and stop smoking and whatever it was his father valued. And he probably wouldn’t have felt the need to get the Touch of physical perfection that would grow tumors in his body that would kill him by the end of the year.

I was so deep in thought that when I felt someone brush up behind me and tickle the back of my neck, I turned, thinking, What now? At this point, anything seemed possible.

I was right. I almost broke down right there. My knees felt loose and wobbly, like twigs.

Because standing in front of me, smiling with angelic innocence, different yet wonderfully, miraculously, marvelously the same, was Taryn.

“Hey, you,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

I just stared at her, stiff. I couldn’t move. She was alive. Alive, and not only that, she knew me? Could it be that even though so much had changed, our relationship hadn’t?

“Why are you staring at me like I have two heads?” she asked. She wiped her mouth. “Is my lip gloss on my chin?”

“No, you’re … you’re fine. You’re here,” I said. And I reached out to touch her, slowly, like testing a fence to see if it’s electrified. Yes, real. The skin of her wrist was warm and smooth.

She studied me. “You don’t look so good.”

I might not have looked so good, but I felt great. “I love you,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. My eyes got all wet and bleary, and I rubbed the tears away to look at her again. I never wanted to stop looking at her.

Her eyes widened. She touched my cheek. “I love you, too. Hey, are you okay? You’re worrying me.”

I just grabbed her and pulled her to me, so close that I could feel her heartbeat and she giggled in my ear. “Yeah. I’m perfect.” We stayed that way for a long time, until the final bell rang overhead.

“We’re late!” she said, pulling away from me. “Baumgartner is going to maim us.”

Baumgartner. The physics teacher. I 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 was a grouchy old lady. But yes, she did tell fortunes at the Heights or something. Before she died.”

I nodded. “And did she use a book?”

She exhaled slowly and flitted her eyes away. “I told you, I have no clue about the book. You’re freaking me out and I have to get to pre-calc.” She started to walk down the hall, and I just followed her. Then she turned, planted her hand on my chest, and gave me another kiss on the cheek. “You have to go to gym. Remember?”

I shrugged. I didn’t.

She had to pry her hand out of mine. She looked kind of weirded out when she said, “Don’t worry. I’ll see you for third. English. Room 116.” It was actually kind of a comfortable feeling. I’d spent all my life weirding people out, even if now I was doing it for another reason entirely.

“Okay,” I said, but it didn’t make things easier. I stood there in the hallway, watching her walk away until the crowds swallowed her up and she was gone. I didn’t want to let her go again, not even for a forty-five-minute period.