The rest of school was just as weird. People didn’t swerve to avoid me. Girls smiled at me. I ate lunch with the guys I’d hung out with earlier, and it was clear that I fit in. Or at least, I had, once before. They kept talking about things I’d done, or at least, they all seemed to think I’d done them. “Hey, Cross, remember in seventh grade when you went into the girls’ locker room and Spanner caught you and you said you were just looking for deodorant?” and “Hey, Cross, what store was it on South Street that you got those fake hamster pellets last year?” I just nodded or grinned or said “I don’t know” more times than I could count.

When the guy I spent too many brain cells trying to remember not to call by a certain part of the posterior anatomy and not to bring up his dad’s death, since he was my best friend and all, dropped me off at home, I walked into the backyard and got a little sad to see that Nan’s garden had been replaced by one of those sad, lopsided metal swing sets. As I stared at the spot by the garage, I walked face-first into the pole to a basketball net. After the resulting thrunk I cupped my hands over my face and checked for bleeding, wondering who in the family played basketball. I certainly never did. Organized sports were far from my thing.

“Hey, kid. Want to shoot a few?” a voice called. It was my father. He was lying back on a lounge chair that also wasn’t there the day before, wearing sunglasses and clicking on his phone. “I’ve got about ten before I have to pick the twins up at preschool.”

The answer was obvious. I wouldn’t know how to dribble if you held a gun to my head. But surprisingly, I had this urge to wrap my hands around the ball, to shoot. And I was even more surprised when I opened my mouth and “Sure” popped out instead of “No way in hell.”

We started to play. To my astonishment, when I dribbled the ball, it didn’t fly out of my hands. I didn’t fall to the driveway in a heap. And when I raised the ball to shoot it, it felt strangely comfortable. I made the first basket. And the second. In fact, I made them all. I was even able to do some pretty quick moves to get around my dad and yeah, so what, he’s an old dude, but I almost felt like I knew what I was doing. When I sunk another basket, I asked, “Am I on the basketball team?”

My father just laughed like I was an idiot. Understandable.

Okay. So if I’d played basketball before and I was this awesome athlete, shouldn’t I have remembered that?

After a few minutes, my dad started to double over, breathing heavy. I kept dribbling as he sat down and slurped a bottle of water. It was weird the things that I knew now. Before I never knew really what I’d be like in twenty years. But my dad was pretty okay-looking. He had all his hair. He wasn’t a hunchback. All of these things boded well for me. “Dad,” I said, still feeling really weird even speaking that word, “how did Nan die?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Nan. You mean, your mother’s mother? Why all this interest in a lady you never met?”

I shrugged, nonchalant. “We’re doing a genealogy project in school and it made me wonder. You met her, right?”

He nodded. “I did. She was very nice. But I didn’t know her well. I only met her twice before …” His voice trailed off. I could tell it was something he didn’t feel right discussing with me.

“Before what?” I prompted.

He said, “She’d been acting strangely that night. I was supposed to meet your mother for a late meal, but I got a call that something was wrong. By the time I got there, she was gone. Heart trouble, we were told.” He shrugged. “Simple as that.”

“B-but …,” I stuttered, “there’s got to be more than that. Were they talking about something? Is there a reason she had the heart attack?”

He thought for a minute. “Well, now that I think about it, there was something about missing money. Your mom’s entire summer’s savings disappeared that night. We were going to use that money for a wedding, but we ended up getting married at town hall.” He sighed. “As far as your grandmother, it could have been that she overexerted herself, helping your mom look for the money. They tore the house apart trying to find it. The place was a mess when I got there.”

I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t make any sense. The money disappeared because it went to Taryn’s grandmother so that Mom could get the Touch. Or did it? In this alternate version of reality, Mom didn’t have the Touch. Then what happened to the money? It made my head ache to think about it.

“Come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around my neck in a choke hold. “Let’s go get the little monsters.”

I smiled. Alternate reality or whatever, it did have its benefits.

My dad had a sweet brand-new Ford Explorer, I realized when he opened up the door to the three-car garage. There was also an older, but still awesome, Jeep Wrangler in the slot next to it. Maybe I should have been freaked out after what had happened in the last Jeep I’d been in, but I was surprised at how much it had faded from my memory over the past few hours, almost like it had never happened. Had it happened? And this was my Jeep. My totally sweet ride. In a ride like that, I might actually learn to like driving.

I didn’t get the chance to drool over it because at that moment, I turned around and saw Taryn standing in the garage entrance. She had a messenger bag slung over her shoulder and was fiddling with the pull on her hooded jacket, looking nervous. “Hi,” she said, giving me a half-wave.

“I’ll go pick up the twins on my own,” Dad said, climbing into the SUV. “Nice seeing you, Taryn.”

She stared at me as if she expected me to say something. I’d probably forgotten something big. Maybe we were supposed to hang out. Maybe she’d expected me over at her house. I felt like I needed to apologize, so I did.

“What are you sorry for?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It just felt like the right thing to say.”

“Can we go inside?” she asked when my dad had pulled out of the driveway and disappeared.

I nodded and led her inside. I offered her lemonade because that was what Nan always did on the rare occasions when we had a visitor, but then I realized I didn’t know if we had any lemonade. I was glad when Taryn declined. She reached up to swipe a short corkscrew from her face and I saw a picture painted on the back of her hand, a blond-haired, lopsidedly smiling girl. I grabbed it. “Cute. I didn’t know you were an artist.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, teasing. “I just came from babysitting Emma. She says hi.”

Emma. I swallowed. “You mean … Emma? Emma Reese?”

She nodded. I instinctively doubled over as if I’d just ran a marathon, trying desperately to suck air into my lungs. Emma Reese. Emma. The little girl.

Taryn moved beside me, put a hand on my back. “Hey, it’s okay. Having flashbacks to that day on the beach?”

Her words echoed in my head. “On … the … beach?” I managed to cough out.

“Yeah. When you pulled her out.”

Every part of me tingled, as if readying to spring to life for the first time. I thought about those cold blue lips, about how I’d tried, over and over, to bring her back to life. Somehow, I’d done it. Somehow everything I remembered—Emma’s death, Taryn’s death, all of it—was nothing but a dream. “I guess … I guess I keep thinking of what could have happened.”

“It could have been bad, yeah. But everything’s okay,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Now come on. I have something to show you.”

It was weird to see how comfortable she was in my house. She went right to the staircase, climbed the stairs, and entered my bedroom, where she threw her bag on my bed. “How did you know about it?” she asked.