Would she smile?

I kissed the top of her head as she picked up the remote beside her and turned down the volume on the ancient TV set. I looked over at it. Die Hard One or Two, I couldn’t tell which. She was a slave to action movies—they helped take the edge off her cycling.

“Bad day,” I sighed.

Her eyes drooped. “So I felt.”

“Sorry.”

“I know about the girl.”

“Well,” I muttered, “you can see the future, so that doesn’t make you Einstein.”

She sighed. “Do you feel it, too? Like things are going bad?”

I snorted. A girl was dead because of me. It was hard to imagine life going to a worse place than we were at right then, but yeah, I knew what she meant. It was an odd feeling, as if two totally different sensations were competing within me: hunger with queasiness, anticipation with fear. “But what?” Maybe she’d had time to think about it.

She reached down to the foot of her bed and picked up a copy of Star magazine. “My horoscope says this is a terrible day to make changes to the status quo. So you picked one hell of a day to—”

“Sorry.” I snatched the paper from her hands. My mom loves—no, worships—all things unseen. Good-luck charms, horoscopes, superstitions, all that crap. I think that if our seeing the future wasn’t so complicated, like if we could just see one version of the future, and it could never be altered, maybe she would have given it a rest. But as it was, she was constantly consulting the occult.

I turned and surveyed her lunch tray. She’d downed an entire carafe of coffee, as usual, but only taken nibbles of her sandwich. It sometimes pissed me off how well Nan took care of her, and how useless she was in return. Nan shouldn’t have had to deal with that. In the mirror, I could see her settling into her pillow, watching Bruce Willis tiptoeing down a hallway in bare feet and a wifebeater. There were little slips of fortune-cookie fortunes stuck in the edge of the mirror, hundreds of them. Mom didn’t like to toss them away. The one I saw said, Love is for the lucky and the brave.

I shook my head. Luck and bravery were two things that didn’t exactly flow through this house. I thought of the day I learned I had something that made me different. I was four. Nan was making me lunch and I was sitting at the table. I could see the can of grape juice concentrate rolling down the counter and splattering over the linoleum, so I stood there to catch it. If Nan was worried about me, which she must have been, she hid it well. She just smiled and called me her hero. I used to be proud of it. I used to call it my superpower.

“Something with the staircase,” Mom said. “Right?”

I nodded. I’d seen that, and something with blood. But I didn’t want to say it. “But what?”

“I don’t know. I need time to sort it out. Are you on script?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s strong. A strong, bad feeling.”

I agreed. Blood was rarely a good thing to see in a vision. “Do you want me to go off?”

“Maybe. You have track tryouts tonight?”

“I wasn’t going to go. I don’t think I’m going to make the team. And too much has happened.” I knew what she was thinking even without consulting the script. “You think I should go?”

“Well, it might help change things.”

“All right.”

She took the magazine in her hands and began to page through it. “What’s for dinner?”

It was a running joke between us, asking each other questions we already knew the answer to. When I was a kid I used to spend hours trying to come up with really disgusting answers to the “What’s for dinner?” question, like sautéed horse guts and fried iguana feet, but now I barely smirked. It had been a long time since I’d found it funny.

Sometimes I wish I lived in the Heights. A guy like me could get lost there.

Though it’s just to the south of the Heights, my town, Seaside Park, is like the less popular, more boring twin of Seaside Heights. Both towns are on the barrier islands of New Jersey, a small strip of land surrounded by water. But that’s where the similarities end. Nan calls the Heights the Devil’s Playground. There are bars and amusements and all kinds of riffraff hanging around the Heights. MTV loves the place. People drink and party and go wild there. Freaks are welcome there. They prosper there. A guy who could see his future would not, by any means, be the weirdest thing that town has ever seen.

The Park is a complete one-eighty. It likes the quiet, and prefers to be called family-friendly. The people who planned the town of Seaside Park had very little imagination. For example, it’s split down the center by Central Avenue. One block to the west, you have the Bay, barely a mile wide, and across that, you can see mainland New Jersey. One block to the east, you have the Atlantic Ocean. There is a road that stretches down the bay side called Bayview Avenue, and a road that runs along the ocean called—big shocker—Ocean Avenue. And all the cross streets are either numbered or lettered, so it’s pretty hard to get lost here. Unfortunately. It’s a vacation town, so during the summer, the hotels and apartments fill up and the roads swell with people, but starting in October, the place empties out and tumbleweeds blow through. Then it’s just us regulars, and everyone knows everybody else, and everybody else’s business. Unfortunately.

My high school is on the mainland, in Toms River. But Coach Garner, who has been in the position for forty years, lives on the island, and is about as athletic as a bar of soap, can’t be bothered to go the nine miles inland to the high school to hold tryouts, so every year he holds them on the boardwalk. There are mile markers, but running on boards can be challenging. Still, the view is nice, so people don’t complain.

When I got to Fourteenth Avenue, at the southern terminus of the boardwalk, people I recognized from school were milling about in their singlets and shorts, stretching against the pilings and fence, looking serious. The You Wills told me to go home, to go anywhere but here, but I ignored them and the dull ache they were causing in my head.

The first person I saw when I climbed the ramp was Evan Sphincter. His real name was Evan Spitzer, but when he opened his mouth you knew a bunch of foul crap was going to come out, so I used the other. Not to his face, though.

It took me a minute to recognize him because he looked different, and not in a way that I’d have liked. Maybe it was the tan. No, it was more than that. He’d never been ugly, but he’d never been a movie star, either. His face had always been kind of round, but now his jaw was chiseled. Once upon a time, he’d been kind of thick around the middle, with doughy arms and legs. Now he had muscles. More than muscles. He looked like the spokesperson for home gym equipment. Unreal.

“Hey, Crazy Cross,” he said, reaching down like he was going to help hoist me up onto the boardwalk. But it was all an act. The second I’d reach for his hand, he would pull his away and run it coolly through his highlighted hair. I didn’t have to pay attention to the You Wills to know that. And—highlights? What kind of dude got platinum highlights?

I just said, “Hey,” and pretended I didn’t see him wiggling his fingers at me. His forearm muscles were bigger than my biceps. When the hell had that happened? He’d been a jerkwad since fourth grade, but now he was a built jerkwad. Fantastic.

Sphincter jogged across the boards to his dad, who had a terminally serious face. The guy never smiled. He was holding a stopwatch and looking at it like he wanted to kill it.

Runners will make a path for you as you walk to the other side of the boardwalk.

Yep, they parted like the Red Sea. When I turned back toward Sphincter, he was already surrounded by a bunch of hot girls. They swarmed around him like flies. Just completing his journey toward being a total one-eighty from me, I guess. Not that I was jealous or anything. Okay, yeah, I was.