The confusion wasn’t leaving her face. And that’s when she said it. Well, she didn’t say it, because she didn’t have to. I heard her next words, clear as day in my head, before she even thought them. My grandmother did this. They were crazy. Absolutely insane. I interrupted her as she opened her mouth to speak. “That’s not possible.”

She stopped, her jaw slowly falling.

“How can your grandmother have anything to do with this?” I muttered, getting more and more disgusted by the minute. What the hell did she think this was? Some nifty little parlor trick? Our seeing the future was more than a living nightmare. It was constant, unstoppable, and wholly devastating. Something so terrible could only be explained as an act of God. It couldn’t be something that one being, one human created. That would make it seem so trivial, so silly, so small. And it was big. Big enough to ruin my life a thousand times over.

Taryn swallowed. She didn’t have to say it, but I let her words come out anyway, because maybe if they were outside of my head, that would make them more believable. And so she said it, exactly as I had imagined. But when the words were out there, hanging in the humid summer air, it didn’t help.

“Say that again,” I murmured.

Her face was serious. There was a hint of remorse in her eyes. “Nick. It’s true. My grandmother made you this way.”

I needed to get away from Taryn. Taryn, who was just as crazy as her grandmother, her all-powerful grandmother who somehow made me this way. Yeah, right. Once I scurried across Bayview Avenue and past Charlie’s ice cream shop, the cycling became a little steadier and I could make out some of the visions passing through my head. I could see my grandmother lying in that now familiar position at the bottom of the stairs, almost as if it had just happened. Somewhat more faded was the image of sunlight glimmering on the deep mahogany cover of a closed casket.

The sun was still hot enough to roast my shoulders and create a haze on the streets as I climbed the decaying concrete steps at the front of the house, flung open the screen door, and let it slam behind me. My mom had retreated to her bedroom, of course. I didn’t think she could stand being outside her tomb for longer than a few minutes. I climbed the stairs two at a time and they creaked as if the house was going to fall down. When I burst into her room, I realized I was sweating, out of breath, and still holding my fishing gear. Salt water sloshed from the bucket onto my feet and the hardwood floor. I knew Nan would scream bloody murder if she saw.

My mom looked up from the latest issue of People. I didn’t know how she could read that trash, but she had piles of celebrity tabloids in her room, littering the chairs, floor, and the tops of the dresser and night table. Who seriously cared what celebrities did in their effed-up lives? Most of them had everything going for them and still couldn’t manage to hold it together. But hey, I guess anything that worked to keep her mind off the future. She stared me up and down. “You got sunburned.”

I looked cross-eyed and saw that my nose was the exact color I’d seen in my vision. I wiggled it a little and it stung. Perfect. “Mom. Why is some fortune-teller on the boardwalk claiming that she’s responsible for making us the way we are?”

Her eyes went back to her magazine. “No idea,” she murmured.

I used my index finger to push the magazine down to her knees so that she’d look at me. “This girl knows I can see the future. I never told her. She just knew.”

“Is that so?” she asked, clucking her tongue. She shrugged and went into the same speech she used to give me when I was a kid and wanted to show off my abilities at show-and-tell. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would stay away from her. You know what could happen if you say too much. If you trust too much.”

“But she knows. I didn’t have to say a word. She just knows.”

“Oh, Nick. She doesn’t know. She suspects. That’s dangerous. The curious ones are always dangerous. Maybe she’s just perceptive. Some people are. Bill Runyon was. I still think that he might know. But they don’t have any way of proving it. And it’s not like this is of any use to anyone. If you keep your distance, she’ll leave us alone. We don’t want people coming around, asking questions. Believe me.”

“I got the feeling that she really understood it, though,” I said, sitting on the edge of bed. “And Mom, if she knew what started it, she might be able to tell us how to stop it.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t possible.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t you think I already tried everything possible?”

Actually, I didn’t think that at all. From my earliest memory, she’d been confined to this bed, hopeless. She’d never once talked to me about finding a way to stop the visions. “Did you?”

She sighed. “Do you really think I wanted you growing up like this? I did everything I could before you were born. And then I just prayed that it wouldn’t be passed on to you. But of course, I knew it would be. When I was pregnant with you, I went to fortune-tellers and gypsies and all those charlatans, hoping one of them could help me reverse the curse. But none of them could.”

“Curse?” I stared hard at her. It was the first time I’d ever heard it referred to as a curse. Usually it was just “the thing.” The thing I got, somehow, when she was pregnant with me. “But why did you say that Dad—”

She looked away. “We’ve been over this before. I don’t know what it is. I did a lot of stupid things, though, before I knew I was going to have you. One of those things was being involved with your father. You know it started around the same time I met him. Maybe … I don’t know. But I do know that there’s a good side to it, too.”

“Good?” She always insisted this, and yeah, she was right. Sometimes, every once in a while, we could juggle our futures and prevent bad things from happening. But ninety-nine percent of it sucked. That cool one percent never seemed worth it.

“Look, I’m tired. Can you please—”

“But what could Dad have done? And why does this girl know about it? What if she knows how to fix—”

“She doesn’t.” My mother cut me off, fuming. She leaned back in her bed. “And I said I’m tired.”

That was one problem with us communicating. We could have whole conversations without them ever taking place, but so many topics were completely closed to discussion. My dad was one of them. Nan was better about it, but every time I asked her how Mom and I ended up this way, I got the same story. My mom was normal until she was my age. She was pregnant and planning to marry my dad that summer. And then, something changed. Something intervened. This illness, this curse, whatever it was. It tore everything apart. By the end of the summer, my dad was gone and my mother, six months pregnant with me, had locked herself in her bedroom.

Nan opened the door to Mom’s bedroom then. Her eyes focused on the net and dripping bucket before anything else. She gasped at the water puddling on the hardwood. “This is not a bait shop!” she said to me, disappointed, and suddenly I had that feeling. The prickling feeling on the back of my neck, whenever something big was about to happen. I whirled around and Mom must have felt it, too, because her eyes were wider than silver dollars and her face paler than its normal pale.

My grandmother stepped toward the staircase, muttering something about how I needed to be more responsible and how she was always cleaning up after me like I was some three-year-old, and the entire scene flashed before my eyes.

You will hear her muffled groans as she slips on a puddle of salt water and falls down the stairwell. You will rush to the top of the stairs and slip once yourself on the water you spilled. She will be dead before you get there. You will see the pool of blood already—