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 was dark and overshadowed most of the day. Sunshine never made the mistake of leaking through our windows. When Nan was growing up, all the houses had looked like ours: tiny and cramped, with rotting black shingles. I’d seen pictures. But now it was common practice to tear down the bungalows and build up to the sky to get that priceless ocean view. These monstrosities either had yards filled with millions of perfect smooth white pebbles, or even worse, lawns with grass so green and unnatural it looked spray-painted. To me, those lush lawns were just plain wrong. They didn’t belong here. But I guess from the way those old ladies looked at us, they felt the same way about me.

If people knew we could see the future, they’d probably think we could have had our own mansion. That we could have had a lot of things, if we wanted them. One night, I was sitting in front of the television watching the Pick-6, and I said every number two seconds before the ball shot out of the popcorn popper. Of course that gave me an idea. I thought I could stretch it, so that I saw the Pick-6 numbers early enough for Nan to buy a ticket. But the thing was, I couldn’t. Things like Pick-6 numbers were short-term memory. The numbers only occurred to me a few seconds before they were drawn. Before that, they were lost in the muddle of outcomes competing in my head. Besides, Nan was dead against using our power for profit. Every time I thought of a way, she’d just roll her eyes. “We’re perfectly comfortable,” she’d say, looking out the kitchen window, past the plump red tomatoes ripening on the sill. “Besides, money is the root of all evil.” Nan was like a brick wall when it came to certain things, and this was one of them. Eventually, I stopped asking, though she would never get me to believe that only evil stemmed from money. Some good came out of it, too. Like a new iPod. Or running shoes with treads that hadn’t been worn so smooth that running sometimes felt like ice-skating.

My muscles and head hurt as I climbed the steps, and once again I couldn’t tell if the pain was from the fall on the boardwalk or some horrible future memories swirling in my head, waiting to be unleashed from my subconscious. The thing clearest in my mind, besides the unraveling of the script, was Taryn. Somehow, everything I knew about the future disappeared when I’d touched her hand. Somehow, she already meant so much to me that my chest ached for her, even though we’d only met a few hours ago. As I opened the screen door, one clear thought stood out from all the others rattling around in my head: there was something different about her, and I had to find out what.

Nan lay in her silver-blue pleather recliner. It had a combo of red plaid dish towels and packing tape over the arms to hide the rips there. She kept the packing tape on the card table nearby since a new rip sprang up every time she sat in the chair. It was the same recliner she’d pass away in. She was watching Wheel of Fortune. Okay, not really watching. Snoring and staring at Pat Sajak with one glazed eye. Behind her, on the kitchen table, was a plate covered with foil.

The fish.

I pulled off the wrapping and, not finding a fork nearby, tore off a ragged piece of whitefish and popped it in my mouth. The salt stung my tongue. Gagging, I found a Coke in the fridge and downed most of it in one swallow. Funny how my knowledge of the future never seemed to protect me from things like that.

Then I heard my mother upstairs, the creaking of her mattress springs. She couldn’t understand why I tried to live a normal life. She thought that in order to truly control her own destiny, she had to remove herself from everything. And I guess it worked, somewhat. It never really mattered what she did in her room; because she always did the same things, like clockwork, it very rarely affected me in such a way that I would cycle. If she did go off script, say, choosing to watch Die Hard instead of Gladiator, it didn’t change her or my future a heck of a lot. But she had learned that even confinement didn’t make her immune to pain. If it was up to her, she’d isolate all of us. I could still remember being four years old, and my mom holding me to her chest. Sobbing. Just stay here, Nicholas. Stay with me. It’s the only safe place.