I sat beside her. “Will you still think that when one craps on your head?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said indignantly, “one already did, on my knee. Anyway, this stuff is pure grease. It will probably kill them.”

I stared at her knee. She was probably the only girl in the world who wasn’t bothered by seagull crap. “Nothing can kill them. They’re like cockroaches.”

She turned and held the plate out to me. “Want some?”

I grinned. “Are you trying to kill me?”

She stood up and let the skirt fall over her knees. She caught me looking and said, “Grandma says people expect us to wear this stuff. It makes us seem more authentic, more dark and mysterious. But”—she lowered her voice—“I feel like a total idiot.” She tossed the plate in a trash can, then licked the powdered sugar off her fingers. Thunder boomed in the distance, and a jagged edge of lightning slit the sky beyond the bridge. “We’d better get inside. It’s going to pour.”

I noticed as I followed her toward the tent that she was wearing rainbow-colored flip-flops with smiley faces on them. So much for dark and mysterious. She stopped. “Wait. I’m hungry. Want to get a slice of pizza with me?”

“Didn’t you just have funnel cake?”

She shook her head. “That was left over from the Mugsy’s stand. It fell on the ground. So I fed it to the seagulls.”

“Wait. You offered me food that fell on the ground?”

She blushed. “I didn’t think you’d accept.”

“What time do you have to do the Touch?”

She looked at her cell-phone display. “Five. Plenty of time.”

I was hungry, too. We’d started to walk to the Sawmill when she stopped short. I followed her gaze down the boardwalk. Devon and a couple of other cute girls were coming our way. Her friends. I thought she’d wave or go up to them, but instead she started looking around the stands nearby. It wasn’t crowded, so I know they saw us. Finally Taryn grabbed my wrist and pulled me into a surf shop. She pretended to inspect the hemp necklaces on the wall, but kept peeking out the door every two seconds. She gasped and hid behind me, then drew me even farther into the store, to the very back. The shop was so crowded with stuff that I rammed various body parts into three racks of T-shirts and smacked my forehead into a fake parrot hanging overhead before the trek was over. “Hey,” I said, as she stood on her tippy-toes, peering out the opening. “Inspector Clouseau. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I just can’t take them anymore.”

Her friends? What girl didn’t want to hang out with her friends? As I stared at her, the answer came to me. “What? You don’t want your friends to see you with me?”

She snapped her eyes to mine. “No, that’s not it at all. They’re not my friends, anyway.”

Okay, now I was confused. “Did you get into a fight with them? Devon—”

“She’s okay, I guess. But all the rest of them drive me bonkers. I guess I can understand why you’d think I was friends with them, because they’re constantly following me around. Didn’t I tell you before? I attract them. They’re drawn to me, but they don’t know why. They all want something from me. After the great friends I had in Maine, I don’t want any more.”

“You mean, they want something, like a Touch?”

She laughed bitterly. “Yeah. ‘Taryn, can I get you this?’ ‘Taryn, you look so pretty today.’ ‘Taryn, can I rub your feet?’ It gets old really fast. But the problem is, I don’t have any Touches they’d want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s a limited number. There’s only a few left now.” She glanced quickly outside. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

We got slices at Five Brothers, the next pizza place on the strip, which was a little more private. We sat down in a booth that wasn’t splashed with too much pizza sauce or swarming with too many black flies. She folded her slice up and took a bite, letting a long string of cheese hang down to the plate, then scooped it up with her finger and piled it into her mouth. “Yum. Jersey pizza is the best. I missed it like crazy. In Maine, it’s like raw dough. Gross. So the night I came back here, I ate an entire pie by myself.” Then she shivered visibly. “I am so nervous.”

“Yeah.” I laughed as she took another huge bite. “I can see. You can hardly eat a thing.”

She blushed. “I eat when I’m nervous.” Then she reached into her flowery backpack and started to pull something out. I thought it would be her phone again, but it was old and dusty and completely conspicuous … great. The Book of Touch. She’d actually taken it with her.

“Why do you have that?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“Well, I need to practice. Duh.” She took the key and opened the lock. For some reason, I’d thought that the book was this big secret, that the only people who could lay eyes upon it were people like her. That she’d entrusted me when she let me look at it. I didn’t know that she could whip it out at any pizza place on the strip and not have to endure the wrath of her grandmother. In the bright light I could see the book much better. There were a few small red tabs sticking out from some of the pages. She flipped through the pages until she came to one of the red tabs. I could tell that it was a Touch that hadn’t been performed because there were more words inscribed on the page, and the signature line was blank. “This is the one I have to do.”

I stared at it. It was all nonsense to me. “What is it?”

“Flight of Song. The ability to make people do what you tell them to.”

“Like … you mean, anything?”

She nodded.

“Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe how nonchalant she was being about the whole thing.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because, that’s dangerous. Right? I mean, whoever gets that Touch could just say, ‘Go jump off a cliff,’ and you would have to do it. Right?”

She thought for a moment. “I guess.”

“Then, how can you just go ahead and—”

She bit her tongue and threw the pizza down on the plate. “You think I want to do this? I have to! This book has been our curse since the beginning of time. We have to give people their deepest desires. We’re tied to this book. If we don’t perform these Touches, all of them, Grandma says we’ll die. There are only five Touches left in this book. Once we finish with them, we’re done. We’re free.”

“Why doesn’t your grandmother do them and leave you out of it?”

“Because she’s dying, that’s why,” Taryn said, her face reddening. “She has pancreatic cancer, and the doctors gave her fewer than three months to live. That was two months ago. She needs to train me so that I know what to do in case she dies before the Touches have been used. If I’m not properly trained to carry out the Touches by the time she dies, I won’t be able to do them, and I’ll die, too.”

I just stared at her. “Wow. How did you guys ever get so lucky?”

“It was over two hundred years ago. Back in Hungary. Basically one of my ancestors pissed off a Gypsy. Supposedly my ancestor was a charlatan, and a very gifted actress. She used to go from place to place and promise she could perform miracles, but she used cheap parlor tricks and stuff to make people believe in her. Even so, she thrived. She was very successful at fooling everyone, and it was majorly cutting into this other woman’s—the real Gypsy’s—business. To exact revenge and prove who the real mystic was, the Gypsy placed this curse on her. She would have to perform these spells on people—her very life depended on it. Her last grandchild inherited the book, and that grandchild’s last grandchild, and then Grandma, and now me. And here we are.” She turned back to the book. “I really hate this,” she whispered. “Don’t think I don’t.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe this will be a good one. Maybe this person will do amazing things with this Touch.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking, Not possible. It was too volatile. There was too much room for bad things to happen. After all, how often do people say things they don’t mean? “Do you know who is getting it?”