“Fine. We’re all doing good,” she said.

Both girls looked away, bored or annoyed or a little of both. One fed herself a long string of sticky blue cotton candy; the other inspected her nails. I suddenly had the feeling I was listening in on a private conversation. Like maybe Taryn knew Sphincter. Like, really knew him.

They talked a little more about school starting next week and doesn’t-it-suck-that-summer’s-almost-over? Even though it was a really generic, safe topic, the more they talked, the more my stomach churned. Sphincter moved in really close, probably just to piss me off. It was working. How did they know each other? I stared at the lame “his” slap bracelet on my wrist and silently wished Sphincter would crawl back into whatever hole he came out of. When they parted, Taryn just said, “Let’s go on this Rock n’ Roll thing. I have more tickets.”

I shrugged and we walked to the ride. I heard him mumble something about “Crazy Cross,” and the girls tittered. They headed off toward the haunted house. While Taryn reached in her bag for tickets, I turned and caught Sphincter staring.

I thought maybe I could get her to admit what they had going on. “He totally wants you,” I said as we settled into the car.

She shrugged, not impressed. “I’m sure he does.” She shifted in her seat. “They always do.”

I thought she meant guys, but I couldn’t remember when she’d last been so full of herself. So I just let out an amused “Oh, yeah?”

She nodded, biting her lip. “Yeah.” The ride started to pick up speed then, so I couldn’t be positive, but I was pretty sure there were tears in her eyes.

Meeting Sphincter was like throwing a bucket of water on whatever fire was going between us. Taryn still held my hand, which would have been a good sign if it hadn’t grown cold, stiff. I thought about asking her what was wrong, but I really didn’t want to know the answer. What about Sphincter had gotten her crying? I don’t think I could have looked at her the same if she and Sphincter had … well, if she and Sphincter had anything.

We got off the ride without a sound and stopped at the rack to get our bikes. Taryn had to let go of my hand to unlock her bike, and when she did, the You Wills began immediately. She saw the look of pain on my face and offered to hold my hand again, but it didn’t matter. I was going to have to deal with it sooner or later anyway. So we walked our bikes all the way back to her street, not talking much. By then I was feeling a little better. Still woozy, but the stabbing pain between my eyes was gone.

“So,” she said when we got to her driveway, tipping her head in the direction of the Reeses’ house. “Funeral’s tomorrow. Are you going?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I mumbled as my head pounded away. I felt that pain in my stomach again. Of course I would be there.

She narrowed her eyes. “I know it was probably traumatic for you. Are you blaming yourself?”

I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to talk about it at all, but I nodded. “I saw the other future. The one where I saved her.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. You did everything you could.”

I shook my head, shook her hand away. A You Will popped through immediately, wanting me to get home. Instead, I looked at my feet. “I knew Pedro was not fit to be on watch. But I did nothing. I should have said something. But I didn’t, because I wanted to stay on script. You see? It was my fault.”

Her hand found its way back to mine. The cycling stopped again. A wave of exhaustion swept over me, as if my mind was sick of starting and stopping again and again. She whispered, “It’s Pedro’s fault. Not yours.”

I nodded. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She just held my hand for a while. Then I said, “I’d better go.”

She nodded, and I dropped her hand and started to walk away. Immediately these things found their way into my head: beauty, harder to kidnap, Saint Christopher. That was when she called after me. “Have you ever been to one?”

I swallowed and, for some reason, tasted grass. I could feel the blades of grass and earth on my tongue. I brought my hand to my mouth and licked it, expecting my hand to be black, but it wasn’t. Instead, my eye began to pulsate with pain. I moved the muscle in my cheek up and down. Yeah. It felt like I’d been punched there. What the hell? When I turned back to her, she was staring at me with an expression I’d come to know so well: horrified confusion. I tried my best to cover it up. “I, um, had a hair in my mouth. Been to one of what?”

She let it slide. “A funeral.”

I started to say yes and then shrugged. I’d been to dozens, in the future. Lucky for me, none of them had worked its way into my past. The real thing was probably a lot more unpleasant than the memory. “No,” I finally said.

She laughed. “Which is it?”

“Long story,” I said, not able to say more. My head was aching so much, I felt it down to my jaw. Probably my mom was having the same feeling. Good. For the first time, I was glad. This time, I wanted her to hurt.

“Okay. You can tell me later. So want to go together?”

My heart thumped. She wanted to see me again. Yes! I hadn’t screwed everything up yet. And whatever history she had with Sphincter, it didn’t matter. But then I thought about Nan’s boat of a car, sitting in our dusty driveway. I thought of the way my hands shook on the steering wheel, of how I had trouble most times meeting the speed limit, even on residential streets. I started to sweat. “I, um, don’t … I mean, I guess I could pick you up.… Ten-thirty okay?”

“Oh, great!”

We spent another long moment standing there, outside her house. I counted four anthills in her driveway.

Here was the point when a normal guy would have gone in for the kill. Instead, I froze up. Sure, Taryn came off as innocent and angelic. But I found myself wondering what trouble she’d actually gotten into in Maine. Most likely she was a lot more experienced than me. Didn’t take much to be that way, but still. The opportunity to majorly screw up that future I’d seen of her, of us together, was right here. Right now.

And so I blew it. “See you,” I tossed over my shoulder, as if I’d been talking to just anyone. I cringed almost immediately after I pulled my bike away from the curb.

And then I went back to face the future memories that had been flapping around in my mind like wounded birds.

Nan had this 1976 Buick that was the color of calcified dog crap. It was built like a tank, all square edges, and had one of those bench seats that took a team of oxen to move into position. The Buick turned more heads than a car accident when it came down the road. It was so god-awful, people would crane their necks to see the unfortunate owner. Not like they could see little Nan behind the massive steering wheel, which was the size of a monster truck’s tire. The Buick wouldn’t fit in a regular garage, but that was fine with Nan because, as she would proudly tell you, we had the only three-car garage in town. Our garage was bigger than our house, so the car was very comfortable among Nan’s strange collections of things, like the scoops from coffee cans and used pop-up turkey timers. It only had twenty-three thousand miles on it, “a classic!”, as Nan would say. She only used it to go to the A&P and church every Sunday. She walked everyplace else.

As the sun began to melt orange against the horizon, I got Nan into the passenger’s seat and slid behind the massive wheel, where Saint Christopher stared at me from a placard on the dashboard. I gripped the wheel and inched out of the garage like an old man.