Touched (22 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night, I became aware I was back in my own room. It could have been night or early morning, but I felt as if days had passed. I saw the headlights on the wall. I heard the staircase creaking under her footsteps. The door opened and I felt the mattress dip. “It’s done,” my grandmother whispered, placing her hand on my forehead. It was cold. She smelled like butterscotch.

She didn’t say any more after that. She simply left and closed the door. For the first time in months, I lapsed into a deep and dreamless sleep.

What’s the first thing you notice when you wake up? Sounds, right? Sensations? Well, for me, always, the first thing was a You Will, telling me what I’d feel when I first came into complete consciousness, what I’d see when my eyes finally flickered open.

But there was nothing. My mind was silent as a graveyard. The only explanation I could think of for that was because I was in a graveyard, or destined for one. I was dead.

But then I managed to push open my eyes. I was lying on my side, so the first thing I saw was my bedsheet. I ran my hand over it. It was smooth, not threadbare and pilled. I tossed and turned a couple of times, then pulled the pillow over my face. The pillowcase felt different, too. Sleek. New.

I was just lapsing back into sleep when I got the feeling that someone was in the room with me. Something creaked, and soft footfalls made their way toward the edge of the bed. Someone was standing over me. “Nan, go away,” I muttered, trying to swat her out of the room, but then suddenly everything, once a million miles from my consciousness, came flooding back to me. Taryn. Peanut butter. The Touch. The accident. Mom. Freak.

I skyrocketed upright, ready to defend myself. I lunged forward, flailing my arms awkwardly, and toppled out of bed. Right on two feet. Two very tiny feet.

“Ha ha! Did I scare you, Nicky?” an impish voice said. “Huh, Nicky? You surprised? You jumped a mile high!”

It was a kid. Just a kid, maybe like six or seven. He was bouncing up and down, giving me whiplash. What the hell? Was this what death looked like? A little kid with red hair and freckles and a Spider-Man T-shirt? “Who are you?”

He didn’t answer, just did this Muhammad Ali dance in front of me, and I thought about how weird it all was and that’s when I realized something else. I was thinking. Not seeing the future. Not cycling. Not suppressing visions. All that was gone. Taryn was dead, and yet … I could think. Maybe my brain was having trouble waking up. I thwacked the side of my head to get it going again, but nothing. My mind was silent.

The kid jumped on me, tackling me so that I fell backward. I braced myself for the impact on the rickety old night table, but instead I descended against a plush white carpet. What the hell? When did Nan have that installed? Where was my night table with the toy truck lamp? I jumped back onto the bed, trying to escape the hands of the little booger who seemed to think I was his live punching bag. “Nicky! Nicky! Nicky!” he shouted, careering onto the bed. I began to lift my hands to defend myself when I noticed that the dump trucks and planes were gone from my sheets. They were plain white. Nice, clean, plain white. The kid’s fist smashed into my cheek, making my teeth rattle in my mouth. For a tiny thing, he had power.

The kid lunged at me again, but this time I managed to get the scrawny little devil into a headlock. I looked around. “Ow! Nicky!” he shouted, but I didn’t let go because I was momentarily stunned. It was my bedroom, but not. Somebody had to have been playing a cruel trick on me. Everything was modern, dark blue. There was a desk in the corner with a brand-new MacBook on it, and above that, a shelf with at least a dozen trophies. Running trophies, from the looks of them. It looked like a furniture store showroom, made up like someone could live there, but way too clean and perfect for any actual, living teen.

I rubbed my head and the back of my neck with my free hand. No weird lacerations or bumps or anything of the kind that would have me hallucinating. Because that had to be what this was. A hallucination. A really vivid one. After a minute I realized the imp was just kind of lying like a dead fish in my hands. I quickly let him go. He massaged his neck. “Ow, Nicky,” he said, pouting.

“Sorry,” I said, running a cautious eye over the rest of the room. Ninety percent of it was foreign. The only things that I recognized were my Phillies cap, dangling from the mirror, and my backpack. “Who are you?”

He narrowed his eyes at me and then plodded out of the room. A second later I heard him shuffling down the stairs, calling, “Ma! Nicky’s on something.”

Not only was there a weird kid living in my house, but he thought his mom lived there, too. Great. I sat up and ran my toes through the cushy white carpeting that was not there when I went to bed. Then I got up, went to the drawers and rifled through them. All the T-shirts were folded into neat little squares. But they must have belonged to someone else because none of them looked familiar. I couldn’t find my favorite
DON’T BOTHER ME
T-shirt anywhere. It was definitely not on the floor, because there was nothing on the floor. For once, I could see every inch of it, that showroom carpeting in all its glory. It had vacuum tracks running through it. What the hell had Nan been up to? Didn’t she have a broken arm? Did she hire a maid? A maid with a little kid?

I looked up. And where the hell did those trophies come from? I inspected the little gold plaque on the base of each of them. First place. Mile. Nicholas Cross. When had I done that? They had the years engraved in them. Last year. The year before. Freshman year.

It was like a broken record, constantly playing the same three words over and over again in my head, but each time, the words got louder. Now they were practically screaming in my ears. What. The. Hell.

I grabbed the first tee I could find, some lame
Steamboat Willie
shirt that I swear I never owned before, and a pair of jeans. When I pulled the shirt over my head, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I ran a hand through my hair. I hadn’t gotten a haircut since the beginning of summer, so it had been getting shaggy. Nan had given me crap about cutting it before school started, but I didn’t. Now, it was cut short, almost a buzz cut, except the top was long. I stared at it. Wow, I looked lame. It was so bad I thought it very plausible I could have given it to myself last night, while I was sleeping.

In the hallway I stopped outside my mom’s room. Her door was closed and I listened there for a minute but heard nothing. I didn’t stay long because I had other things on my mind. I thought of Nan, going off to get the Touch the night before. She told me it was done. She’d gotten Flight of Song and told Bryce to leave us alone. And that had worked, right? I was alive. In fact, I was better than alive, I realized as I descended into the living room.

I was cured.

And not only that, the living room was better, too. There was a new, leather sofa and a big-screen television. Nan’s old recliner was still there, but everything else was posh and expensive-looking. I could hear that kid giggling and smell eggs frying in the kitchen, so I went in, expecting to see Nan at the stove.

Instead, there was a party going on. I don’t think I’d ever seen that many people in my house at once. My mouth gaped. Some lady—the new maid?—stood in front of the stove, scraping a pan and holding a gurgling infant on her hip. The Spider-Man imp and another kid chased each other around a nice kitchen table. Some older guy sat in the midst of it all, reading the newspaper and sipping coffee.

Okay. So the maid came to clean and brought her entire family? Where was Nan? She definitely wouldn’t be putting up with this if she were here. I cleared my throat, and the lady turned around. Before I could say something to put her in her place, she said, “Oh, Nicky! Sit down. You’re late. You’ve got to get off to school soon.”

But I wasn’t listening. I was staring at her. Her hair was short. Her eyes weren’t dark-circled. And then there was the necklace, on a fraying cord. The green elephant, with its trunk up. It was her.

It was my mom.

I swallowed. Again and again.

She tried to hand me a plate of eggs, but I couldn’t think clearly enough to take it, so she jabbed me in the chest with it. “Why are you just standing there? Eat. What’s wrong with your hands?”

Hands? I looked down. They were shaking. I almost couldn’t stand. I almost couldn’t breathe anymore. Finally I took the eggs and said, “Mom?”

She wiped a little drool from the baby’s mouth. “Yeah? What?” She studied me. I studied her back. Trying to see what was there from before. What was new. What about her I still remembered. “Why are you staring?”

“Because you’re … beautiful,” I finally said.

“Aw, honey,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. Then her face hardened. She inspected me closely, as I did the same to her. “I think your brother’s right. Are you on something?”

“My … brother?” I spat out.

She pointed at the food. “Sit. Eat.”

I sat down, but eating was the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I watched the kids run around the table. There were new, sparkling white appliances everywhere. Nan’s tomatoes were gone. In fact, if Nan’s
Heaven’s a little closer in a house by the sea
mural wasn’t hanging under the cabinets, I would have definitely thought I was in the wrong house. I tried to shovel a forkful of eggs into my mouth to make New Mom happy, but then I stopped halfway when my eyes caught on the guy across the table, reading the paper. If these kids were my brothers, then was he …? He munched an English muffin like this was any ordinary day, like he’d eaten with me a million times before, and said, “Hey, Nicky. Fun night last night?”

I stared at him, completely disregarding the question. Maybe it was the way he fidgeted his long legs under the table the way I did, or that he had very familiar dark hair that kind of went every which way, or that he had the same eyebrows that arched in a point in the center. He was a stranger; I was positive I’d never seen him before, but something about him was like déjà vu. I opened my mouth and the only word that I could find came out, strangled and weak: “Dad?”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Uh-huh?” Then he studied me like Mom had—like there was something wrong with me. Like everything about them was completely normal. “Is everything okay, kid?”

The eggs tumbled off my fork. I dropped it on the plate, and the clatter was so loud that the kids stopped giggling, the baby stopped gurgling, and everyone stared at me.

I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I looked around. At the kids. My siblings. At my dad again. At my mom, bouncing that baby on her hip. My family. Why couldn’t I remember them?

Just then the baby giggled and my mom smiled. She
smiled
. It was an expression I’d never seen on her. An expression I never thought I would see. And wow, her face just lit up. She had a smile that could take over the world. It was amazing.

And so I nodded. “Everything’s okay,” I said, scooping the eggs back onto my fork. “Yeah.”

Mom was instructing the man who was my dad about her having to take Izzy and the twins for their flu shots. “So you’ll have to open the shop, okay?”

“Yes, dear,” he answered. “Poopsie. Love of my life.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she teased, swatting him with her dish towel, the way Nan used to do to me. New Mom checked the clock and pointed at me. “You’re going to be late! Get moving!”

I didn’t know how to explain it to New Mom. It was easier to break it to the other version of my mom, the broken one, the one who was used to bad news. “I can’t. I was suspended.”

Her eyes widened. “What? What did you do?”

I shook my head. “Maybe I wasn’t,” I said, knowing how stupid I looked. I realized that version of the past seemed like a dream. That everything before last night seemed like something I made up. Even Taryn seemed so far away, like one of those perfect dreams that made you wish you never had to wake up.

New Mom came over to me and felt my forehead. “That is the last time I let you stay out past eleven on a school night. You look wiped out. And you have the meet this weekend.”

A horn beeped outside. I just stood there, wondering how I could be expected at a meet when I clearly remembered falling and bleeding everywhere. I looked down. There was nothing on my knees, not even the slightest hint of a scab.

My mother—this alien that had invaded my mother’s body—pushed me toward the door. “Your ride?”

I moved to the door, wondering what else to expect. Part of me didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and yet at the same time I desperately wanted to figure this out. Nan. Nan would have the answers. “Wait. I have to talk to Nan.”

“Nan?” She looked as if she’d never heard the name.

“Yeah. My grandmother?” I prompted.

She stared at me, this horrified expression on her face. “Tommy’s right. Are you doing drugs?”

Tommy and the nameless brother—Timmy, I guessed—laughed and chortled, “Nicky’s on drugs! Nicky’s on drugs!”

“No, I—” A feeling of dread washed over me. Something had happened to Nan. “What’s wrong with her?”

My father spoke up. “Well, my mother lives in Texas. She’s an eccentric lady. You’ve never spoken to her before. Why this sudden interest?”

“No … 
your
mother,” I said to my mom.

“Nicky, you’re scaring me.” I just stared at her, willing the information out of her. Finally, she sighed. “You never knew her. She’s been dead since before you were born.”