Forever Freaky by Tom Upton Page A

He settled down right next to me, his shoulder
bumping mine.
    “Hey, don’t touch me, seriously,” I warned
him.
    “It was an accident.”
    “Then be careful. It’s not a good thing to
touch me.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” I said, trying to be patient,
“physical contact with anybody causes me to see things about
them.”
    “I don’t mind,” he said dully.
    “I know you don’t mind. You ever think that
maybe I do mind?” I thought I sounded a bit harsh, so I lighted me
tone and said, “Look, touching is bad for me. I can block out
people to a certain extent. Actually, I’m getting quite good at
that— I have a fair degree of control. But if I have physical
contact with another person, I have no control at all. I’m, like,
forced to see things about them. Sometimes, it actually hurts.”
    “Hurts? You mean you feel pain?”
    “Not physical pain. That wouldn’t be so
bad—that I could handle.”
    “So you can never touch anybody?” he asked,
and I thought he finally might be realizing that having paranormal
abilities wasn’t such a great thing.
    “No, never,” I said.
    “That doesn’t seem fair.”
    “I’m used to the idea. I’ve known for some
time that I’ll never get married or have kids or any of the things
other people take for granted.”
    “No kids? You serious?”
    “Yeah, totally. I’m horrified at what happens
if somebody brushes against me in a store. Sex?—my head would
probably explode. So, no, no kids in my future.”
    Jack was quiet for a while, probably trying
to process what I had told him.
    “Well…” he said. “Exactly what happens?”
    To me, this was a highly personal question. I
should have been offended, but, really, this was just Jack, right?
It seemed all right for him to ask, and for me to answer. “Nothing
good,” I said. “I pick up on peoples’ memories mostly, their most
intense memories, which are usually traumatic. I feel extreme grief
or sorrow or fear. One time I was walking down the street and I
bumped into this woman. She wasn’t watching where she was going.
Just that one brief contact… The woman’s four-year-old son got hit
by a car and killed a week earlier. I couldn’t stop feeling the
agony she felt. It wouldn’t go away. I didn’t know how to stop it.
I almost…”
    “Almost what?”
    “Never mind,” I said. “Just be careful not to
touch me.”
    “What if somebody didn’t have terrible
memories?” Jack asked.
    “Everybody has terrible memories.”
    “I don’t.”
    “Believe me, you do—buried somewhere. What
time is it, by the way?”
    There was a flash of green light as he
checked his wristwatch.
    “Ten-fifteen.”
    “That’s all.”
    “Yeah,” he said, and was quiet for a long
moment, before asking, “I was wondering…”
    “Go ahead,” I said. I wasn’t reading his
mind, and yet I knew what he was about to say. You couldn’t explain
something to him: you had to show him.
    “What?”
    “Take my hand,” I said impatiently, “before I
change my mind.”
    I held my hand out toward him, and he groped
around in the dark until he found it.
    “Are your hands always this cold?” he
asked.
    “I’m like walking death. Haven’t you noticed?
Now shut up,” I said. His memories were already flashing through my
mind. They seemed pretty harmless. Falling and skinning his knee…
followed by crying. Six stitches on the inside of his upper right
arm, after he’d tripped and put his arm through the window of his
basement door. “I see that you’ve always been a klutz,” I
commented, and the images kept coming. His parents fighting over
something, which caused him a moderate degree of anxiety, which I
could now feel. “You stole money out of your mom’s purse to buy a
CD?”
    “It was the new Avril,” he said. “I had to
have it.”
    “Hmmm. You weren’t even that guilty.”
    “It was Avril,” he said, as though that
justified stealing.
    “Okay, here we go—who is Caroline?”
    “Freshman crush,” he