New Mom came over to me and felt my forehead. “That is the last time I let you stay out past eleven on a school night. You look wiped out. And you have the meet this weekend.”

A horn beeped outside. I just stood there, wondering how I could be expected at a meet when I clearly remembered falling and bleeding everywhere. I looked down. There was nothing on my knees, not even the slightest hint of a scab.

My mother—this alien that had invaded my mother’s body—pushed me toward the door. “Your ride?”

I moved to the door, wondering what else to expect. Part of me didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and yet at the same time I desperately wanted to figure this out. Nan. Nan would have the answers. “Wait. I have to talk to Nan.”

“Nan?” She looked as if she’d never heard the name.

“Yeah. My grandmother?” I prompted.

She stared at me, this horrified expression on her face. “Tommy’s right. Are you doing drugs?”

Tommy and the nameless brother—Timmy, I guessed—laughed and chortled, “Nicky’s on drugs! Nicky’s on drugs!”

“No, I—” A feeling of dread washed over me. Something had happened to Nan. “What’s wrong with her?”

My father spoke up. “Well, my mother lives in Texas. She’s an eccentric lady. You’ve never spoken to her before. Why this sudden interest?”

“No … your mother,” I said to my mom.

“Nicky, you’re scaring me.” I just stared at her, willing the information out of her. Finally, she sighed. “You never knew her. She’s been dead since before you were born.”

The sun beat down on me the second I stepped outside; just one of many things that seemed to be beating down on me. I squinted at the battered Ford in the driveway. Then a head poked out from the other side. It was a guy with shaggier hair than mine, wearing sunglasses. He didn’t look at all familiar. “You coming or what? I’ve been waiting out here forever.”

“Sorry,” I said, still trying to make out his face. Then I realized I was dragging along, so I quickly opened the passenger-side door and slid inside, gagging at the stench of cigarette smoke.

I stared at the guy again. He was wearing an old T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops. He took a drag on his cigarette and pulled the car into reverse. “Man, I hate getting up at crack of ass every morning. I can’t do it anymore. I’ll be happy when this year is over and we can do what we want.”

I nodded a little. I had nothing to add to the conversation because (a) I was still stunned over Nan, and (b) I had no freaking idea who this was.

“And we have to get up at five for the meet on Saturday. Five! On a Saturday. What. The. Hell, man,” he went on, taking another drag on his cigarette.

So he was a runner, too. Even if he was puffing on that cigarette like it was the source of his power. After a minute he looked over at me. I was vaguely aware I was staring at him in a way guys are not supposed to stare at their friends, so I looked away and coughed.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. “You look like you have to take a crap.”

That was the ultimate question. I wished someone would answer for me. “I … had a bad night’s sleep, I guess,” I answered. “Everything’s all messed up.”

“Yeah, after last night …,” he began. I guess he was thinking I’d complete the sentence. How come everyone remembered last night except me?

And Nan … what happened to her? She was supposed to go and get Flight of Song. She’d come home and told me it was done. She should not have been dead. Not only dead, but dead for seventeen years.

We got to school as the first warning bell was ringing and hightailed it into the music wing, which was closest to the senior parking lot and the bus drop-off. Except it wasn’t called the music wing. It was called the Edith Laubach Memorial Wing. “Who is Edith Laubach?” I mumbled as we went in the double doors. There were colorful murals painted on all the cinder-block walls, murals I swear were not there the day before. Murals of rainbows and people holding hands and hearts and flowers and crap like that.

Friend Guy shrugged. “What is up with you, man? You come through these doors every day for three years and now you ask who Edith Laubach is? Some crazy chick who did herself in a dozen years ago is all I know.”

Two other guys gave Friend Guy a one-finger salute and he told them to screw off. They said the same to me. I knew them, but I was never friends with them. They started talking to me like we were. “Yo, what did you and Spitz do last night?” a guy, who’d once painted the word “freak” on my locker in his girlfriend’s red nail polish, said to me.

Spitz. I look back at the guy who drove me to school. Hell, of course. It was Evan Spitzer. My once–best friend. Who for some reason, like the past nine years never happened, is acting like my always best friend.

That’s it.

It was like it never happened. Like my mom and I never even got the Touch.

And if we never got the Touch, maybe everything in my past never happened. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe Taryn was still …

Still what? Taryn’s grandmother said she’d given up performing Touches after she realized she’d given one to my mom, a pregnant lady, and passed it on to an innocent child. If we hadn’t gotten the Touch, her grandmother wouldn’t have given up performing Touches for all those years, and maybe she would have completed all the Touches in the book by now. And then Taryn would have been free. If she didn’t have to come down to New Jersey to take over performing Touches for her ailing grandmother, then maybe she was still living happily up in Maine. Maybe she was still alive. Alive … and completely unaware that Nick Cross existed.

Great.

Still, that was better than she was last night. Loads better.

I started wondering whether I could go up to Maine and find her. As a complete stranger, I probably wouldn’t be able to insert myself into her life, but I could at least check to make sure she was okay. I’d have to drive, something that after that night with Taryn I’d never wanted to do again. But that rainy night in her Jeep felt like nothing more than part of a dream, or a scene from a bad movie. I could barely feel the shower of glass on my face now. Had it even happened? Fingers snapped in my face. “Whoa. We’ve got a zoner,” one of the dudes said.

Sphincter, or Spitzer, or whatever he was these days, said, “Yeah, I think he got bitten by a zombie.” They walked down the hall and I followed, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Was physics my first class? Hell, I didn’t even know my locker combination.

Spitzer said something about how he was going to quit track, and all the guys nodded except me. All I could think of was The Sergeant, stalking back and forth at tryouts and pumping his fist in the air when his son made the new school record. I said, “Your dad’s really going to love that.”

He stopped midstride and stared me up and down, frowning. “Then I guess I should be glad he’s been in the ground for nine years.”

What? His dad wasn’t dead. If his dad had been in the ground for nine years, who was that at tryouts last week, giving Sphincter the thumbs-up and the New School Record shoulder rub? I felt the back of my neck burning as they all stared at me. His dad was The Sergeant, the guy who kept his son in line. He went to all the track meets and brought his own stopwatch and gave Sphincter and everyone crap for just about everything from the condition of the track to the shade of blue the sky was. I mean, I wasn’t part of Spitzer’s life for very long after the Disney Trip Debacle, but I had heard enough to know that …

The trip. The trip I’d tried to prevent. The one I’d successfully delayed by taking the air out of the Spitzers’ tires the night before. Or had I? “There was an … accident on 95?” I muttered. “In Richmond?”