There was a pause, and I thought maybe he was going to go for it, pick me up, dust me off, apologize for the misunderstanding. Suddenly a screaming pain whizzed through the back of my head. “That’s my name, you idiot,” he said.

Oh, hell. Thanks, brain. Reese. Bryce Reese. As in, Emma Reese. Emma’s brother. Her mother had said they did “everything together.” She’d said he’d been devastated. Of course. The visions I’d had of someone blaming me for Emma’s death weren’t of her parents. Mrs. Reese didn’t blame me.

Bryce was the one who hated me.

He leaned over, his breath in my face. It smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes, making my stomach lurch. “I know who you are and what you did. Because of you, she’s dead. You killed Emma.”

I tried to take a breath but my lungs were being crushed by his weight. “I … tried—”

“You left that drunk SOB alone to watch the beach, didn’t you?”

I swallowed. So they did know. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, tasting grass. “I feel—”

He pushed me down, harder, into the dirt, then let go. “I hope you feel like dirt. You’re a murderer. You’ll get yours soon.”

Then, quiet. I lie there after the sound of him faded away, too scared even to turn around and watch him leave. It was a good thing Taryn had left when she did. Once I got up, the cemetery was empty, except for Emma’s casket, sitting there alone beside the burial site. The front of my suit was covered in dirt; I tried to wipe it off but smeared it in instead.

I walked back to the Buick, my cheek and all the teeth underneath aching from where Bryce’s fist had met them. I tried again to think ahead. I focused hard on graduation. I usually could remember that.

But there was nothing. Hell, I couldn’t even think of graduation. I don’t think I’d ever not been able to remember something about graduation. Sure, things would be different every time I called up the memory. Once, I’d tripped going up to the podium; another time I got a sloppy kiss from Norah Cracowiczki, who sat next to me and was so drunk she thought I was her boyfriend. But graduation was always there. Nan was always there, smiling at me from the bleachers.

My mom was right. I had plenty of time to change it, and I would. Somehow.

You’ll get yours. Soon. I thought about those words and how fitting they were. He was right. I would get mine. If everything continues the way it was going, I’ll get the same thing Emma got, I thought, turning back to her gravesite.

I swallowed and let out an uneasy breath. Bryce was standing there, head down, near the pile of freshly dug earth, holding some pink stuffed animal with floppy ears and weeping. Weeping so hard, his body shook with his every breath. I couldn’t look at him for more than a second. He didn’t have to punch me to make every part of me sting.

And maybe that was what I deserved.

I drove back home at a slug’s pace. It was the middle of the day on the Saturday before Labor Day, and though some of the rich folk with summerhouses had already packed up and gone to their winter residences, the tourist activity was in full swing. I kept imagining the Buick plowing into beachgoers with their brightly colored umbrellas and beach chairs, which always brought me back to Bryce, at graveside, weeping. Which brought me back to Emma. The day she died, something big had been set in motion. I couldn’t get it out of my head that whatever had started needed to happen, that it was right. That it was my punishment.

When I got home, the first thing I did was run up the stairs. I already had my tie and jacket off, but I starting ripping at the buttons of my shirt as soon as I got in the door. I was halfway up the stairs when my mom called to me. “What?” I snapped, still clawing at my chest.

“We were just wondering where you’ve been. We were worried,” she said, all innocent. It made me all the more angry because she knew very well where I’d been. Whenever she was even the least bit worried about anything, she’d just think into the future and find out the answer she was looking for. She couldn’t not look.

“You know,” I muttered, slamming my bedroom door behind me. At that moment, I hated her. Hated her for having to meddle with everything instead of just taking things as they came.

I threw my sweaty, dirty clothes in a heap by my hamper and lay on my dump-truck sheets in my gym shorts, staring up at the cottage-cheese ceiling. With the door closed, the room felt like an oven, but I didn’t care.

I thought that getting away from Taryn would do it. She’d never want to talk to me again after that, right? But no, as I lay there, I could still see my future with her, so clearly it had to be real. I knew so much about her, and could feel that she was the peg in my life that held all the pieces together, and without her there, everything seemed to be loosening. I hadn’t really even cycled much. But though I knew her as if I’d spent a lifetime with her, for some reason, I still couldn’t see anything more than a few weeks into the future.

As I was contemplating what it all meant and what I could do, the door opened, blowing an ocean breeze into the room that dropped the temperature twenty degrees, making me shiver. Nan walked in. “Honey bunny?”

“Yeah?” I snapped. I was so angry at Mom, it was carrying over to Nan, even though she’d done nothing wrong.

“How was the funeral?” she asked, sitting down on the side of my bed.

It was a stupid question. Coming from anyone else I would have told them that. Instead I just rolled over and answered her. “Like a funeral.”

Then she saw my face. I hadn’t looked in a mirror, but my check still felt raw from where I’d been punched and smashed into the ground. She reached out her hand, but I flinched. “Who did that to you?”

I laughed bitterly. “Okay. It was like a funeral … with a gang fight thrown in for added excitement.”

“What is going—”

“Mom didn’t tell you? I found out why we’re like this. There’s a stand on the boardwalk where a freaky lady sells spells called Touches. Mom spent a crapload of money to be given a Touch that would make her able to see the future,” I said, watching with satisfaction as Nan’s face stiffened.

“Who told you this?”

“A girl named Taryn. Her grandmother gave Mom the Touch.” I exhaled.

Her face didn’t change. “Is this the fortune-teller you were talking about yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“That still doesn’t explain why your face looks like it was—”

“She effed up my life. I hate her.”

“Who?”

“Mom! Who else?” I clutched handfuls of the sheet and threw them back down. “She knew it was her fault. She knew all this time and she never told me. ‘Hate’ is too nice a word.”

“Oh, you don’t mean—”

“Yeah, I do. I really do.” I sat up and touched my face, thinking about how she was even responsible for that. For everything bad in my life. “All this time, I thought Dad was the bad guy. That he was somehow responsible for our messed-up lives. Now I totally get it. He’s normal. I don’t blame him. Hell, I would have left, too.”

She shook her head. “No. Well, I don’t know what went on between your mom and dad. But I do know that when your mom became pregnant with you, she changed. She was usually so crazy—she’d go on crash diets and drink and smoke and, oh, just about everything I’d tell her not to do. But when she found out about you, she quit smoking and drinking and made sure she ate well. She worked on the boardwalk and she used to bring a container of fruit and a bottle of water with her so she wouldn’t have to eat the greasy food up there.” She smiled. “You were—you are everything to her. Whatever she did to you by getting this—this Touch, as you call it, she didn’t mean it.”

I studied her. I knew what she was doing. Trying to keep the peace. She wouldn’t let me think my dad was the bad guy, and she’d do anything to keep me from thinking my mom was a villain, too. “But my dad—I mean, you met him, right? What’s he like?”