Touched by Cyn Balog

Nick.”
    She looked at my hand and contemplated it for what seemed like a lifetime. Then she sighed and took only my fingertips in her hand. Her hand was soft, surprisingly cool. Mine felt all sweaty next to hers, and probably not just from the run. “Taryn,” she said, but I knew that already. That she was Taryn was as obvious as a house being called a house or a bird being a bird.
    Before I could search for another slick thing to say, something happened. Something big.
    My mind went quiet.
    No cycling. No You Wills …
    Everything. All the future memories. Just gone.
    I was too busy trying to figure out what had happened to notice that her smile had disappeared. Her hand trembled, and she wrenched it away from me. It was almost like … could she feel it? No, that was crazy. Her blond corkscrew curls whipped in her face in the ocean breeze, but I could have sworn she mouthed the words “Oh, God.”
    Damn. I knew my palms were sweaty, but they weren’t that bad.
    “She told me I could feel it when I touched them,” she whispered to herself, looking out onto the horizon. “I didn’t believe … Oh, God.”
    I squinted at her. Now who was acting crazy?
    As if she’d heard my thoughts, she shook her head, scrambled to her feet, and edged back from me, as if she was afraid. Of me. She said something dismissive like “I’ll see you around” and then turned away.
    As I watched her hurry up the beach, toward the boardwalk, my mind began to rev again, whirring until it felt like the bones of my skull would shatter.
You will stand and make your way back to the boardwalk, slowly .
    And so it began again.

My life was pretty depressing as a whole, but watching Taryn walk away was probably the most depressing thing I’d ever really experienced. My stomach started to churn and then there was this pain—this squeezing pain in my chest. I had an overwhelming desire to run after her, to beg her to stay. In fact, as she walked down the ramp toward Ocean Avenue, I took a few steps after her, stopping in my tracks when I realized I couldn’t do that. She would have thought I was a lunatic. We were practically strangers.
    At least, to her, we were.
    You always hear those stories. Two people meet, get married, live for decades and decades together. When one of them dies from old age, the other one, though perfectly healthy, falls ill and dies a month later. There’s always some medical explanation, but at the funeral, most people would nod knowingly and whisper that the real cause was a broken heart.
    After Taryn left, all the glee I’d felt from finally being able to say more than three sentences to a girl without completely freaking her out deteriorated into this horrible feeling of emptiness. The squeezing pain inside got worse, like my heart was being stepped on. I spent my walk home rubbing my chest and cursing myself for the stupid thing I’d done to drive her away.
    Whatever that was. I’d been running, so maybe I stank. I picked up my T-shirt and sniffed. Not so bad. The salt in the air kind of overpowered any other smell. She’d bolted right after shaking my hand, so maybe my palms were sweaty. Maybe she hated calluses. I looked at my palms, then rubbed them against my shorts. Bits of hardened skin caught on the nylon.
    Yeah, that was probably it. Driven to a heart attack at seventeen because of my chapped hands. Fitting end to my life.
    By that time, I was sick of the constant headache that came with not doing what I was told, so I followed the script home. Two leather-skinned older women in bikinis glared at me from the porch of their stately mansion as I passed them. Though Nan had lived here decades longer than those ladies, they still treated us more like dirt than like neighbors. The only person on our street who talked to us was the cat lady, but that was because with more than a hundred cats, she had her own issues. Our house was the only tiny bungalow on the block, and surrounded by megamansions, so it