She saw that loft bedroom as her sanctuary. I saw it as a coffin.

I’d even told her that, once, a year or two ago. “It just became too much,” she’d told me. As if I hadn’t seen her and Nan and so many others die over and over again. As if I hadn’t lost enough. I didn’t care. No way was I becoming a hermit. Not if I could help it.

Just then, Nan turned to me, still bleary-eyed. “Oh, honey bunny. What happened to you?”

“Nan, the weirdest thing happened to me after tryouts,” I said, ignoring her question. “My mind … stopped.…”

“And so why do you look like you just took a beating?”

I’d totally forgotten, but the second she mentioned it my wounds began to sting. “I fell.…” I tried to explain, but as I stared at Nan, my mind went into overdrive, forcing the script to the background. It revved for a second, and in that second I stopped talking, the memory popped into my head. A memory of the future.

Of Nan. With that halo of clownish orange hair. Lying in fetal position at the bottom of the loft staircase, surrounded by broken plates and what was likely the remainder of Mom’s breakfast.

Her head was perfectly encircled by a large pool of blood.

“Nan!” I shouted instinctively, as if the danger was only seconds away.

She startled and kicked up the recliner. Her eyes ran over my body, probably looking for bleeding wounds.

I slunk backward, feeling guilty. She had diabetes and high cholesterol and all the other things that went along with enjoying food too much; I could have given her a heart attack. And for what reason? The vision could have been of tomorrow, the next day … who knew? I knew it would be soon, because in that vision, her hair was still the wrong color, that neon orange she’d accidentally dyed it. But it wasn’t going to happen right now. “Uh, nothing. Uh. Have anything for dessert?”

Her eyes narrowed for a second, then softened. She’d long since given up on trying to figure me out. “There’s a new half gallon of Turkey Hill ice cream in the freezer.”

I opened the freezer door and took the ice cream out.

“That fish was plain awful, wasn’t it?” she called into the kitchen. “I don’t think I’ve ever fouled up so bad in all my life.”

“It was okay,” I muttered, thinking, Just wait.…

I trudged upstairs intending to take a shower but stopped as I was gathering my towel and things and threw them against the shower curtain. My toothbrush made a little chip in the ceramic on the tub, almost a perfect square. I sat there for the rest of the night staring at it, resisting the script, which kept telling me to get myself clean. It hurt like hell, but I’d fight everything that was in the script, with every ounce of strength that I had. That useless, piece-of-crap script that was leading Nan to an early death.

I awoke the next day, knowing I wouldn’t follow whatever the script had laid out for me. It had me hanging around the house, moping about Emma and feeling guilty. But that could wait. Now, more than ever, I needed to try to throw the future off course.

The clues from my memory told me that Nan had fallen down the stairs while bringing—or taking away—my mother’s breakfast tray. So I decided that I would have to do it. But I met my mom at the top of the stairs. For the first time in I don’t know how long, she was out of bed. She was wearing slippers and a flannel robe despite the early-morning temperature being at least eighty.

“I’ll eat downstairs,” she said, brushing past me.

“Wha?” The shock made me lose my vocal capacity.

“What?” she asked, turning and staring at me like I was the one who’d suddenly decided to make an appearance on the lower level of our house after years of seclusion in my bedroom. “This is my house, too.”

Sure it was, but I could count on one hand the number of times she’d come downstairs in my lifetime. I think the last time, the house was on fire. “You know about Nan,” I said as I set the tray down on the kitchen table.

She took a bite of her toast. “Yes.”

“If you eat downstairs, that ought to fix it.”

She shrugged. “Fix one thing, another breaks. I’m so tired of this.”

“I know, but we can’t let this go.”

She nodded slowly. “So did that change things?”

I tried to think of Nan’s death. There she was, lying at the bottom of the stairs. “No.”

My mother squeezed her eyes closed. “How could it not? I said I was going to eat all my meals downstairs, so—”

I concentrated on the picture in my mind. Then I noticed that the remains of my mother’s meal were no longer surrounding Nan’s crumpled, fragile body. So she would still fall, just not carrying the tray. Great. My mother must have noticed that at the same time I began to say, “It doesn’t matter. She still—”

“Still what?” Nan appeared in the kitchen. She took one look at the burnt eggs and toast I’d made for my mom and smiled. “To what do we owe the pleasure of you cooking, honey bunny? And why are you downstairs, Moira?”

“How could you tell it was my cooking?” I asked, but I knew the answer the second I asked. I burn everything.

“You burn everything.”

It was true. I never cooked because every time I got the urge to, I’d think forward to the vile end result and give up. Nothing about being able to see my future could stop me from sucking at cooking. Actually, it didn’t stop me from sucking at a lot of things.

Mom and I looked at each other. She nodded. She understood the plan.

That was the cool thing about us both being able to see our futures. Sometimes we could have whole conversations without them ever taking place. In my head, I saw Mom pulling me into the living room, telling me, Well, we need to change things up as much as possible. Go off script. And I said to her, I have been, but it’s not helping. She said, Well, we just need to change the right thing. It could be something really small. She grabbed her head just then, so I said, But how will you take it? Because I know her headaches are way worse than mine when the cycling starts. At least, her moaning and carrying on is way worse. And she said, I don’t know. I have to try.

I nodded back. But the flipping had already started and my head was beginning to ache. This was going to be a long day.

I burst outside into the humid air and gulped it in like a fish. It was already late morning; my lifeguarding job would have had me on the stand at the Seventh Avenue beach for a full hour by now. I didn’t miss it. I wasn’t cut out for lifeguarding, and at least now, any more Emma Reese incidents wouldn’t be my fault.

Holding my head to stop the cycling, the You Wills that were compelling me to turn back and go straight to bed, I headed toward the Heights. I tried to convince myself I was wandering aimlessly once I got up there. But I wasn’t. In truth, I was looking for platinum corkscrews. I scanned each car in every driveway for Maine license plates.

Crazy, right? After all, I needed my gift, my power, or whatever you call it, more than ever now. I needed to figure out how to stop Nan’s death. I shouldn’t have been trying to seek out a girl who, whenever I touched her, made all the visions go away.

But for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself. All night long, instead of green-elephanting, I’d thought of her instead. Even the thought of her quieted things. She was my green elephant.

As I rounded the block onto Lafayette Avenue, I stopped.

Almost like an oasis, she was sitting there, on the porch of a little bungalow even smaller than Nan’s, staring at her feet as if engaged in some serious thinking. Somewhere between the You Wills sputtering through my mind ran the thought that I should turn around, leave, go anywhere away from her. But I was only half listening to the You Wills. I ran across the street, remembering too late about traffic. A VW Bug screeched to a halt and a brunette in sunglasses gave me a deadly glare, then lay on her horn with a sneer. Taryn looked up, and I realized she wasn’t in the midst of contemplating the meaning of life. She had a bottle of red polish next to her and was carefully applying paint to each of her toenails.