She nodded, then shrugged.

I laughed bitterly. Her grandmother was totally whacked. Letting a little girl see people curse themselves was the perfect playdate, right up there with Chuck E. Cheese’s. Taryn let the curtains fall behind us. From where we stood, I could look up and see neon lights from the arcade next door. The bells and chatter of the electronic games were loud enough to make me realize they were probably right on the other side of the wall. It only went up seven or eight feet. I could probably hoist myself up and escape that way. As I was looking for a way out, Taryn cursed. Really loudly.

“Shhh,” I said. “What?”

“Forget it. Grandma’s practically deaf,” she explained, and not in a whisper. She held out the key to the book.

I stared at it. “You forgot to …”

“I was in a hurry. It’s no big deal. She probably won’t perform any Touches tonight, anyway. I’ll just put it back tomorrow.” Then she put her hand on my knee, steadying it. I hadn’t realized it, but I was fidgeting, something I did all the time. “You are a jumpy one, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, not really thinking. “Sue always says I’m so jumpy I make kangaroos jealous.”

“Sue?”

Oh, hell. Usually I was good about keeping my future under wraps, especially with complete strangers. But like I said, she put me at ease. Why else would I be bringing up my no-longer-wife-of-thirty-years? Sue, who was probably now going to marry some other guy and have a lot better future than she would have had with me. “Forget it,” I mumbled.

I watched as her grandmother lumbered into the tent, breathing heavily. She was nothing like Nan, who was barely sixty. This lady looked ancient. “How old is your grandmother?”

Taryn studied her from the slit in the curtain. “I have no idea. But I’m her twenty-ninth grandchild. Her last grandchild.” She exhaled slowly. “Lucky for me.”

“What does that mean?”

She motioned to the wall with her chin. “I’ll tell you later. Let’s go.”

We walked through to the rear of the arcade, looking for a door. If we could get out onto Ocean Avenue, we could get around the booth and to the bicycle rack without any possibility of Old Scary Lady seeing us. “So, who is Sue?” Taryn asked.

And I’d thought maybe she’d forget. I cleared my throat. “No one. Really.” Which was the truth. Now she was no one to me.

“Old girlfriend? Current girlfriend?”

I just mumbled, “My wife. In a different lifetime.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean, different lifetime?”

“Like I said, every time I do something off script, I can throw things off. And once, before I met you, I had this future where I was going to marry a girl named Sue.” I had a momentary reflection back to that feeling, that feeling of safety and happiness I’d only had in that life, and cringed at the thought of losing it. Could I ever get that back? “It was a good future. A perfect one.”

“And the one you’re going to have now?”

I shrugged. It was hard to explain. That last future, I’d had time to settle into. It took a while, but eventually I learned all the ins and outs, and the more I learned, the more perfect I realized it was. I knew this new one didn’t feel right, but it was too soon to tell. All new futures felt that way. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. Maybe I would fly, maybe I would fall. It always took a few days or weeks to fully understand it. “I don’t know. I need time to sort it out.”

“It could be even more perfect. You don’t know.”

“I guess.” I didn’t bother to tell her I had had hundreds of futures set in my mind before. None of them was as good as the one I’d just lost. Sure, there had been okay futures, but in a good majority of them, I ended up alone. I understood that; I’d been alone most of my life so far. Nobody got me. Nobody could stand me for too long. Sue had been a miracle, even though I hadn’t met her. And Taryn … Taryn was another miracle, with a difference. She was here, in the flesh.

I looked at Taryn, filled in that moment with the urge to grab her and hold her against me and never let her go. Suddenly, she stopped and looked at me. “You look like you’re going to throw up.”

My throat was desert dry. I shook my head and started to say something to blow it off when she caught sight of something beyond me. “Oh, Skee-Ball! Let’s do just a couple of games.”

I agreed, even though I hadn’t done Skee-Ball since I was, like, five. Taryn fed all the quarters she could find in her bag into the machine and the balls fell down the chute. I did the same and then realized I was playing next to a master. One after another, she popped those suckers into the little circle in the center marked 50. I kept hitting the gutter. The You Wills kept repeating the same thing to me, like a record skipping:

You will hit the gutter, you will hit the gutter, you will hit the …

“So you’ve seen people get Touched, huh? What’s that like?” I thought maybe conversation would take the focus off my sucktastic abilities.

She straightened and threw her first gutter ball, then swallowed. “It’s … horrible. I don’t want to think about it.”

I stared at her as my brain quieted from the You Wills. “Then why would your grandmother make you watch from behind the curtain?”

She threw another ball. “Because I am the last grandchild. And in the lore, the last grandchild inherits the power.”

“Power?”

“The power to use the book. And … other things.” She looked away. “Not nice things.” She blushed a little. “I am afraid if I tell you this, you’ll think I’m a freak.”

I grinned, surprised. “Look who you’re talking to.”

“Well, I also attract certain people. People with a certain wanting or void in their lives. And people like that aren’t usually the best people to hang out with.”

“Like me?”

She finished throwing her last ball and shook her head. “You’re different. You didn’t ask for this. But I kind of lied to you about why we left Maine.”

“Your father wasn’t laid off?”

“Oh, no, he was. But it was because of me.” She bit her bottom lip. “I’m an only child and my mom and dad wanted me to be a doctor. They weren’t too keen on me growing up to be a fortune-teller.”

“Understandably.”

“Right. So when I was six, Grandma started taking me to see the Touches performed. And as I said, they were horrible. Then the nightmares started. When my parents found out what I was going through, there was a huge fight. My grandmother told them I’d never be able to escape my destiny, but they thought she was crazy. They dropped everything and moved me to Maine. And everything was okay for a while. My dad started doing really good. He was one of the top executives at the factory. Everything was great. I think my parents thought we’d escaped it. But like I said, I have these powers. The power to attract certain people. I had friends up there, or at least, I thought they were friends before I came here and realized they were just being drawn by the Touch. And you know how I am about saying no.”

“So you were a troublemaker, huh?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously?” I asked. She just didn’t seem the type.

“I was! I was terrible. It started when I was thirteen or fourteen. My friends and I would stay up all night, doing things. Mostly little, stupid things that bored kids do when they have nothing better to do. Breaking into houses. Destroying property. Stuff like that. I refused to listen to my parents, and no matter what they did, I found a way around it. They barred my windows, for God’s sake. And I knew it was stupid but—”

“You couldn’t say no.”

“Right. And I couldn’t shake them. Just as they were attracted to me, I fell for them, too. They kept following me around, worshipping me, and I never realized that it was because they were attracted to what I could do for them. The Touch. I kept running away from home and my dad took all this time from work to go looking for me or deal with the trouble I’d gotten myself into. So he was fired. And we were forced to move here. The funny thing was, all those great friends I had back in Maine never emailed me, called, texted … not even once. They didn’t want me, they just wanted to be Touched.”