Phoebe stood up, lifting her tray. “Let’s go,” she said to Nathan.
He chuckled and rose to follow her, pausing to quietly say, “I think I’m going to remember that one.”
It was lonely sitting by myself, but it was good Phoebe left when she did. At some point when she had been blocking my view of Andrew’s table, Nadine joined it, sitting across from him.
I waited for jealousy to blossom, or even anger, but instead I felt nothing. If they started dating I wouldn’t be happy, but I wouldn’t be upset either. I was indifferent to the idea and I was pretty sure that wasn’t normal. Even Nadine had said it felt weird when she saw Owen and Bianca hanging out.
Nadine glanced my way and our eyes met. I could see the indecision on her face and it felt good to know that even as our friendship was faded, she hesitated to do something that would hurt me.
I smiled and gave her a small wave. Then I gathered my things and carried my tray to the trash. It may not have bothered me to see them together, but I wasn’t going to sit around and watch either.
My physics class hadn’t started yet, but since Mr. Williams had a break before our class, the room was open and empty. I sat at my lab table and pulled out my iPad.
For a few minutes, I managed to lose myself in the fictional world, but peace doesn’t last long in school. First bell rang and people began wandering in. I slipped my iPad back into my bag and took out my notebook.
I watched a few of my classmates laughing and talking. They seemed so unaware of any potential future where they may not exist, or where their dreams never came to be. They were only concerned with the present before them. I had always wanted to do that, but my gift kept it from me.
Nanna told me that if I kept focusing on the future, I’d miss the present. I believed her for a few days, and then realized if I didn’t check my future I wouldn’t know what my sisters and I would be getting for Christmas. The idea of teasing Phoebe with the knowledge of what was under the tree for her was too great of a temptation. And once the idea was gone, it vanished completely. Why would I want to suffer through each day, fearful of what was to come, when all I needed to do was let the future come to me?
Now, the future seemed to be gone. Even my own wouldn’t come through. Only Bastian’s remained and that was more terrifying than the prospect of nothing.
I watched him take a seat beside me. Despite all of my mechanisms, we’d somehow ended up as lab partners. I was still getting used to his weirdness, and he more often than not annoyed me by the end of class, but we were at least getting along for part of the time. His knowledge of physics was enough to encourage me to stick with him as a partner.
It also helped that he seemed to have relaxed a bit more. Oh, he still said strange and nerdy things, but he wasn’t the Bastian I remembered meeting a few months ago. I could almost say I liked this Bastian.
“Are you doing it?” he asked, his hand pushing through the dark hair now bordering on floppy.
“Doing what?”
“Checking my future.”
I rolled my eyes. Although he said it differently each time, it was essentially the same question he asked every time I got quiet.
“No, I’m not.”
“Are you sure? Yesterday I asked and Phoebe called you a liar.”
“Fine, I lied yesterday, but I’m not lying today.”
“All right, I have elected to believe you,” he said after staring at me through narrowed eyes for a few moments. Then he gave a mischievous smile and lifted his smartphone to flash the timer at me. “I think we should conduct an experiment.”
“And what did you have in mind?”
“We should track how long you stay in a vision and document observations of anything you do remember or say during the visions. If we record the data over the course of the next few weeks, we may establish a pattern for why you’re not actually seeing, or remembering the visions you’re having for others.”
I knew it had been a mistake to tell him about my blurry and empty visions.
“I believe I told you before. I’m not interested in being a lab rat.”
“No, but I assumed you wanted your ability to go back to normal?”
I thought about it and realized he was right. I kept checking his future, yet I never did anything different. “All right, but we can’t do it at school.”
“This is the most logical place to conduct the experiment. It’s the only place we consistently see each other.”
I thought of how Phoebe had teased me about hanging around Bastian. The last thing I needed was a bunch of rumors going around about us. Rumors I was sure Phoebe would instigate.
“We can do it over Spring Break next week.”
I’d hoped he would forget about it, but that wasn’t the kind of luck that ever found me. Instead, after class Bastian followed at my locker, his iPhone out ready to schedule our experimentation times.
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” I asked as I emptied out my book bag.
“I never joke about science.” He cocked his head to the side. “Unless of course it’s science fiction. I have been known to crack a joke about Dr. Who once in a while.”
“Awesome.”
Chapter 22
Awesome wasn’t how I felt when Bastian arrived at half past eight in the morning on Saturday.
“Didn’t we agree on nine?” I asked, slipping my arms through the sleeves of my cardigan.
“Yes.”
“So, you’re thirty minutes early.”
“You should have anticipated I would arrive prior to the experiment. If we are beginning at nine, we need time to prepare.”
“Of course not, what ever was I thinking?” I spun on my heel and stomped toward the living room aware of him following only a step behind me.
“Perhaps you subconsciously wanted me to arrive in time to see you in a state of undress with the intention of attracting my attention.”
That had me glaring at him over my shoulder. All seriousness disappeared from his face and he struggled to hold back his laugh. It had taken me a while, but I was beginning to realize Bastian’s serious, nerdy act was exactly that - an act.
“You should be careful. I might start thinking you’re just another dirty-minded high school boy.”
He placed his hand over his chest. “Oh, how your words have pierced my steel plated heart.”
“Let’s get this over with.” I sat on the couch. “You’re gonna have to be closer than that.”
He glanced hesitantly at the empty space beside me as I gestured to it awkwardly. Sitting down, he rubbed his hands briskly along the top of his thighs.
“So, how do we do this?” I asked.
“You’re asking me? You’re the one who can see the future.”
“I meant how are we going to record data?”
“Paper,” he said, clearing his throat. “We need paper and a pen to write down everything you say or remember.”
He pulled a pad and pencil from his backpack, flipped to a blank page and then placed it on the coffee table in front of us. It felt amazingly weird to be sitting there with him alone. Usually there was someone around providing some kind of a buffer. Without it, I was overly aware of the way his shoulders rose with every breath he took and the shampoo scent of his slightly damp hair.
“I’m ready when you are,” he said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Don’t do anything, or rather stay still. Actual physical contact can make it harder for me to control the depth of time I go to.” I cleared my throat, cracking my neck as I tipped my head from one side to the other.
His future was a pale gray, and wisped around him like fog pushed by a breeze. I focused on where his knee angled out toward me and let my hand drop down until my fingers were only an inch away.
My eyes drifted shut and I relaxed my mind enough to let the smallest amount in. Images flashed rapidly and I pulled back, struggling to keep the pictures I saw clear of everything else.
“The beach. A woman with brown hair. She’s older. You’re reading in a car.” The words flowed. I didn’t try to make sense of them.
I went back in, slowly slipping further in for a few moments before coming out again. I rattled off the details. “It’s black, but something is in there. A hand with a ring. Wrinkled skin. Puddles of blood under them. You. You’re standing, then falling. Or running. No, not you. I fall. The man. Grass.”
When I couldn’t recall any more images, I opened my eyes to look at him. His face was white, and his hand holding the pencil trembled.
“Did I look that weird?” I asked. “Bianca says it looks a little freaky so I closed my eyes.”
“You’re eyes weren’t closed and I’d rate the whole experience at a seven on the strange-ometer.”
“Oh, well I guess now I know why it she keeps saying it’s freaky, right?” I gave a nervous laugh. I took a sip from my water bottle. “Did anything sound familiar?”
“The first part did.”
He lifted the pad of paper, turning until he found the page he was looking for and turned it toward me. There was a portrait of an older woman with short dark hair.
“That’s her. The woman from my vision,” I said. I took the pad from him and stared at her. The longer I stared the more familiar her features became until the resemblance to Bastian was unmistakable.
“She’s your mother.”
“We’re going to the beach tomorrow. She drives and I read. Standard routine.”
“What about the rest? Did anything else make sense?”
“No,” he said and motioned for me to pass him the pad.
“Wait, if you have other drawings, maybe they’ll look familiar to me.”
He tried grabbing it, but I twisted away, holding it out so he couldn’t reach. I flipped through the pictures, recognizing them as bits and pieces of his life. Some were only bare sketches, others had such awesome detail I would have sworn they were photographs.
“These are amazing,” I said. I knew he drew the picture of me for art class, but it hadn’t registered that he drew for something other than an assignment. “How come you never mentioned you’re an artist?”
“Because I’m not. This is science and math. It’s all angles and perspective and light.”
I held up one of a baby in the arms of his mother. “This is art.”
“It’s science,” he reiterated, as I turned the page. “Observational data.”
That’s when I saw the first drawing of me. I was staring off to the side, a slight smile on my face. On the next page was another of me. This time I was looking straight ahead and from the exasperated expression on my face, I suspected he did it from memory after one of our conversations.
There must have been five or six more drawings of me, each intricately done. That’s when Owen’s claim about Bastian having a thing for me floated through my mind. I hadn’t considered it a realistic assumption, particularly since Bastian was always being so annoying. But why else would a guy draw multiple pictures of you if he didn’t have some kind of interest?
This time when he tried to take the pad, I let it slip through my fingers without protest.
“It’s observational data. All good scientists use some form of this technique to record their findings.” His words would have seemed truer if his face weren’t turning pink.
“Should I be concerned that I am obviously under observation? You realize how creepy that sounds, right?”
“Ah, so I am finally providing evidence for your claims that I am stalking you.”
“It is a pretty creepy reason, especially when I don’t know what this observation data collection is for.”
He coughed and his eyes darted to the left. “As I said it’s purely scientific. The drawings document the moments prior to your visions.”
“Oh, well I guess that makes sense.” And it did, except the drawing outside the art room and some of those in his pad showed me with my hair before I cut four inches off over Christmas break. Before Bastian knew about my gift.
Pressing for an honest answer was hard to resist, but in the back of my mind, I kept asking myself if I really wanted to hear it. If I was ready to hear it. We were just starting to get to a point in our relationship where things weren’t totally weird all the time. Digging into this would be the equivalent of opening our friendship’s Pandora’s Box.
“I’m gonna get some more water. Do want a drink?”
“Sure. Do you have any soda? I could use some caffeine,” he said as he followed me to the kitchen.
“It’s not even ten and you want soda? Don’t you know how bad that stuff is for you? It’ll rot you from the inside out.”
“I am aware of the various health related issues linked to soda. However, as I am in need of caffeine and I find the taste of coffee revolting, I will settle for a Coke.”
I grabbed a soda from the fridge and passed it to him, careful to keep myself in the present. “You and Phoebe have more in common than I thought.”
He cracked the can open and took a long sip, tipping his head back and exposing his throat. I watched in fascination, before looking away in embarrassment. How the heck could a neck be attractive? How could Bastian’s neck?
“In my understanding, some friends do share common preferences,” he said as he set the can on the kitchen table.
“Only some?”
“Well, you and I don’t have anything in common other than our friendships with other people.”
The implication that we were friends was obvious and I wondered if we were. Did I want to be friends with Bastian? Or did I want more? I choked on my water. Where had that thought come from?
The guy annoyed the hell out of me and he was right, we didn’t have anything in common. Okay, so I didn’t mind when he was around. Sometimes I even liked hanging out with him. It was almost fun to go back and forth with him about almost everything.
Yet something between us was different than with my other male friends. When I thought of Micah or Nathan or even Owen, there existed a level of comfortableness that came with knowing where you stood with them. There was no question about the line between us and what we expected of each other. With them, I could talk and laugh, I could even look at them and find them attractive, but they didn’t make me feel like Bastian did.
I thought of how things had been with Andrew. When I’d looked at him, I felt excited and in charge. I knew what our relationship was and what we wanted. The ups and downs had been all me. I was always the decision maker and he was simply along for the ride. I had loved him, a part of me still did, but I wasn’t in love with him. I wasn’t even in like with him. All that remained was a contentedness that our relationship had run its natural course.
Bastian, though, managed to keep me completely off kilter. There was no line in our relationship. Or if there was, it was a massively blurry one that neither of us could see. I wasn’t in control of what was between us and I don’t think he was either and that was exponentially scarier.
I must have been giving him a weird look because he shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“Unless of course, we’re not friends,” he said and focused on tearing the tab from his can. Then he stopped and looked back up at me. “Which is a possibility, although considering your dwindling friends list I’m inclined to think you aren’t in a position to be choosy.”
“Fine. We’re friends, happy now?”
“I wouldn’t describe myself as happy. It’s more of a smug type of sensation.”
I rolled my eyes and walked past him back to the living room. This time I sat in my dad’s recliner, intentionally keeping a physical distance between us.
“So, only the first vision made sense?” I asked in an effort to refocus us.
“Yeah. The other stuff you said was very random.” He read over the notes he’d taken. “Do your visions typically last that long? The first lasted about five seconds, the second was nearly thirty.”
“I guess thirty is lo
nger than normal. I’ve never bothered timing them.”
He nodded and hummed as he jotted down a notation.
“What? Is that a bad thing?”
“No, but it means we need to establish a baseline. Is Phoebe here?”
“Yeah, why?”
“We could time you checking her future and she would let us know if the length of time is typical.”
I gave him a tight smile to share how unimpressed I was by the suggestion. “We could, except she’s dead to the world right now, and oh yeah, I’m not seeing anyone else’s future anymore. That’s why we’re focusing on you.”
“I see your point. For now then, we’ll simply record the timings to see if a pattern develops over the course of our experiment.” He arched his back, stretching briefly, and then settled against the cushion. “I’ve determined we should conduct the vision check three times per session with two sessions a day, separated by no more than fourteen hours.”
I pretty much laughed in his face. “There’s no way. You may not have a life outside of this experiment, but I do and Spring Break is prime time to live it.”
“All right, one session a day, but at least three times. And you have to be willing to look into someone else’s future each day.” He held up his hand to halt my argument. “If we don’t have any observations of your attempts with someone else, then we can’t compare them to when you check mine. This in turn means no comparable data and no conclusions that could help you.”
I really wanted to smack him upside the head and mess his dorky haircut. Yet, he had a point I couldn’t argue with.
“Okay, but not Phoebe.” I didn’t want to see the moments leading to the nothingness that was ahead of her.
“That probably is for the best. She’s a touch too erratic. Owen or Bianca would be better,” he suggested.
That worked for me. Neither of them faced the same future as Phoebe, at least not for many years.
“How do we make sure I can check their future every day?”
“That does pose a dilemma. Give me time to think of an alternative. In the meantime, you should do me again.”
Watch Me: Teen Paranormal Romance (A Touched Trilogy Book 3) Page 18