Read Touched for Free Online

aware of Crazy Cross protocol. I was wondering how long it would be before they kept their distance, too, when another memory bubbled through.
You will stretch your quads and hamstrings and then you will hear …
    I was just starting to relax and stretch my muscles when a tiny redhead’s words floated over on the breeze. “Hear about the little girl who died on Seventh today?”
    A guy was with her. He said something about an ambulance.
    Then she said, “One of the lifeguards went completely nuts. They had to drag him away in a straitjacket.”
    I wanted to slither between the boardwalk planks. “Hey, wait,” the girl said. I turned away but from the corner of my eye saw her pointing in my direction. Whispers were exchanged. “Him?” the guy asked. Then they both laughed. The guy said something that sounded like “Figures.”
    Great. At this rate, I’d be lucky to make it out of high school without the words “Crazy Cross” printed under my yearbook picture.
    I turned back toward Sphincter and saw him breaking away from the throngs of girls. He strutted right on over to … Oh, perfect. The angel was here. Had she seen the rest of the runners avoiding me like the plague? She was wearing the same thing she’d had on when I saw her earlier today—shorts, a tight tank, and running shoes. Duh, of course she was here, she was a runner. Did she go to my school? How had I never seen her before?
    I watched Sphincter put the moves on her. He said something—a joke, probably, by the way he raised his eyebrows and laughed like he was the wittiest scumbag on the planet—and she looked at him and smiled, but politely, not like she wanted him or anything. I was impressed. Most girls would have taken one look at those muscles and jumped in his arms. He said something else and she just kind of shook her head, still smiling graciously, then walked away and started to stretch against the chain-link fence.
    No goal, Sphinctie.
    Two seconds later I realized I was staring at her with this admiring grin on my face and wiped it off. Had to concentrate on my running.
    Concentrate. Right.
    A few minutes later the tryouts began. Sphincter’s group went first. He bopped and hopped at the starting line on the boardwalk, cracking his neck, all ego, Mr. Showman. Every part of his body screamed, Watch me, watch me . His dad was standing behind the fence, on the beach, in prime position to see every move. They gave each other a thumbs-up, which looked so fake, like the final scene from some cheesy sports movie. I couldn’t believe we’d ever had anything in common. Then, as he lined up among the other runners doing the 100 meter, something came to me.
He’s rotting from the inside .
    It was a bit of a conversation, but it was so strong I knew it couldn’t be my imagination. I’d never heard it before, so it had to be in the future. And whenever I looked at Sphincter, I felt it so strongly that it had to have been about him. Rotting from the inside? He was the poster child for healthy living. The starting gun went off and he pulled to an easy lead right away, pumping his long legs and smirking the whole while. Rotting from the inside. Yeah.
    But then I heard the voice again.
You shouldn’t be jealous of that. There’s more to him than you know .
    The voice was familiar. It was one I hadn’t heard much of, and yet it was easily recognizable.
    The angel. So we’d talk again? She’d want to talk to me after what happened today?
    I turned toward her. She was sitting on a bench, not watching the race like everyone else. She was more interested in her fingernails. She inspected her thumbnail, then brought it to her mouth and ripped the top of it off in a sort of savage way. Somehow she made that look cute.
There’s more to him than you know .
    Well, I knew Sphincter’s life wasn’t a picture postcard. For one, everyone in school talked about his dad. Yeah, it was nice that the guy came to support his son during tryouts, but he was