Heal Me (A Touched Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “Whatever is happening to him is beyond what I can do.” I tucked my feet underneath me and hugged my knees to my chest. I wished I actually still wanted to help him.

  “This is more than just him, isn’t it? Are you still upset about that stupid conversation with Phoebe? I already told you that things between you and Dylan would be fine. Just trust me, Lils.”

  “Sure.”

  “I promise, you and Dylan are gonna be together and happy. Whatever he’s dealing with will work itself out,” she said and gave me a reassuring smile. “Feel better?”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’m fine now.” I smiled and gave her a hug.

  I’d read once on one of those pointless Facebook posts that the most common lie people tell is ‘I’m fine’. I can’t recall a single time in my life when I’d truly felt fine. Maybe it was one of those subjective things that means something entirely different to the people I was talking to than I’d always assumed.

  Using those simple, appeasing words came naturally. It was so easy to do, especially with Chloe. She didn’t hear the truth behind the white lies I told, or the words I forced back down my throat, nearly choking on them because they would only hurt someone else.

  “Good,” she said, satisfaction and relief cascading off her in little ripples. “I’m going to get dinner started. Want to help?”

  I shook my head. “I’m gonna finish watching this.”

  Once she’d left, I flipped off the television and went to my room. I sat in my desk chair and stared at the blank computer screen.

  “What the hell is up with Dylan?” Phoebe asked, barging into my room a few minutes later. I swiveled the chair around to face her as she sat on the edge of my bed. “He totally flipped out on Chloe today. I don’t even know what happened. One second they were talking and the next thing I know he’s throwing things and completely spazzing. Holy hell, I thought he was gonna pull some kind of massacre or something.”

  “Hey, I just fixed that,” I said, gesturing to the bedspread Phoebe was mangling.

  “Don’t avoid the subject,” she said, wriggling around and making herself more comfortable.

  “I’m not.”

  She snorted under her breath. “You are. You compulsively tidy your room, so I know you don’t really mind if we mess it up a bit, because it makes you feel justified in straightening everything again. You’re avoiding.”

  “Okay, so maybe I am. I don’t want to talk about Dylan, because I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  “Is he why you passed out yesterday?”

  “I didn’t pass out,” I said, and ignored her snort of disbelief. “I was just tired.”

  “Lils, I had to practically drag you to your room. This kind of thing never happened to you until the last few months. And it’s always around Dylan. Obviously, whatever his problem is, it isn’t something you can fix. You’ve got to stop healing him.”

  Frustration filled me and I rose from the chair to look down at my sister. “I don’t really have a choice, Phoebe. How can I stop my boyfriend from touching me? Besides, this is my gift. I’m supposed to use it to help people.”

  “Not to the point that it hurts you. If you do that you’re screwed.”

  And that was my real problem. It hurt when I healed someone and it hurt if I didn’t. So now I was messed up and screwed.

  She pushed off the bed and left, closing the door behind her. I let out a deep breath before smoothing the comforter back into place. My room was my sanctuary, the one place where I could feel only myself. Phoebe and Chloe didn’t understand that. They had never needed a place to be free of emotions. Keeping things in order meant I could control what was in here, I could keep in the things I needed and keep out all the things I couldn’t handle.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned as Phoebe’s words kept coming back to me. I wanted to deny them, yet part of me knew she was right. My gift shouldn’t hurt me, but it did. She thought it had to do with Dylan, but I couldn’t let him take that blame, because it had always hurt, just not as much.

  Ever since we were little, Chloe and Phoebe had said they wished they’d had my gift, that I had it easy. Chloe had always said her gift was pointless. What good was seeing the future if you couldn’t do anything about it? And Phoebe hadn’t even come into her gift until recently, but she always went on about how it must be nice to always make people feel better.

  They had no clue.

  They didn’t know the fire that burned my hands if I was near someone with even the slightest negative energy, or how my stomach would twist and cause me to vomit when a person was seriously injured.

  They didn’t know that when I took away their cramps, or shaving nicks, or their heartbreak, I took it inside me. That their pain would flow through me and I had to absorb it. Pain, rage, hurt, doesn’t just disappear. It had to go somewhere, and for almost eighteen years, I’d been taking it in for everyone. The idea that it shouldn’t hurt was so foreign. What should it feel like? And could I actually do what Phoebe suggested? Could I simply stop? I’d never tried to touch someone and not heal them.

  I eventually gave up on sleeping and wandered down the hall into the rec room. Sinking onto the couch, I flipped on the TV and started watching an infomercial, yet even a magic salad tosser couldn’t distract me. I wanted to talk to Nanna, but she wasn’t much for small talk. She tended to cut right to the heart of the problem and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Besides, it was almost two in the morning and Nanna would be flat out.

  A shuffling behind me caused me to jump and twist around. Dad was coming down the stairs, obviously checking to see who was still up.

  “Hey, sweetheart. Are you feeling all right?” he asked as he entered the room. He came over and planted a kiss on the top of my head.

  “Yeah, I guess sleeping in so late messed with my internal clock. I’m a little wired.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better. You had me worried when I couldn’t get you to wake up. Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  I shrugged and contemplated how much to tell him.

  “I’m thinking of breaking up with Dylan.” Definitely not the words I’d been thinking of saying. A sense of freedom overwhelmed me, followed immediately by guilt. It was the first time I’d allowed the idea to even form, let alone say the words aloud.

  “Wow. That wasn’t what I was expecting.” He came around the couch to sit on the coffee table across from me. “Is everything okay? He’s not pressuring you or anything is he?”

  Mentioning it to my dad was probably a mistake. He was super paranoid after the mess with Phoebe’s friend Tonya being sent to the hospital by her jerk ex-boyfriend Trevor. Dad was working on getting the charges to stick against Trevor and Tonya had just gotten out of the hospital. Now he’d be suspecting Dylan of the same type of thing.

  “No, it’s not like that. It’s just that he’s... we’re different people now. We’ve been dating for so long. I think I just need some time alone. To figure things out.”

  It was as much of a logical explanation as I could come up with. Besides, Dad had an acute discomfort for all relationship discussions and a limited attention span. He was already fiddling with the remote control.

  I unfolded myself from the couch and gave him a quick hug. “I’m going to head to bed. Love you.”

  “I love you too, sweetheart. Good night and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

  I rolled my eyes at his little rhyme. He was such a dorky dad sometimes. After climbing back into bed, I thought about what I’d voiced. I wanted to break up with Dylan. Whispering the words to myself, I realized I really did. It felt right to think it, to say it, but I couldn’t do it. If Dylan had flipped out over me not being at school, then what would he do if I told him it was over between us?

  Even Chloe knew that I was with Dylan in the future. Christmas, prom. God, I wondered if she’d seen more than that. Was I going to be stuck with this version of Dylan for the rest of my life? Were t
he past few months just a taste of what the years ahead of me would be like?

  The questions drifted until I fell into a restless sleep and a dream filled with multiple Dylans surrounding me, reaching for me, attempting to draw me closer to them. I kept slapping at the hands, trying to evade their grasp. Finally, one of them grabbed my arm and I pulled and pulled until my arm ripped from my body.

  My eyes flew open as I woke suddenly. It had only been a dream, but it was how I felt all the time. As if I couldn’t escape his hold.

  I needed to break up with Dylan, and I had to do it soon, before it tore me apart.

  The decision invigorated me. I glanced at my alarm clock. It was only a few minutes before I normally got up, so I bounced out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom, ignoring the small schedule posted on the door that said Chloe had the bathroom for the next fifteen minutes. As far as I could see, she was still asleep, so I took her turn.

  The water pounded my back and head, adding to the invigorated feeling I had going on. I was finally taking control of my life. I was so used to making others feel good. Today would be about healing myself.

  A loud thump came from the door, followed by Chloe’s clearly annoyed voice. “Phoebe, get out! This is my week to have the bathroom first. I’m going to go into your room and delete all of the music from your iPod. I’m serious.” She banged on the door again.

  I kept silent, letting Phoebe take the blame. I turned off the shower, then twisted my hair up with one towel like a turban and wrapped the other around my body. A puff of steam escaped into the hall as I opened the door and ran to my room, hoping to keep my feet on the cool tile floor as little as possible.

  “I saw you, Lily,” Chloe called from her bedroom. “I get one of your days next week.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t think you were up yet.” I swung my door shut, not wanting her to see my smile. Chloe could be even worse than Phoebe when she was pissed off and I didn’t want to spoil my day.

  Dylan lived a few blocks over from us on the way to the high school. Normally I caught a ride with Phoebe or Chloe, but Dylan walked to school and I wanted to talk to him before class. The light feeling I’d had before leaving home wore off with each step I made toward his house, but the loss of it wasn’t going to deter me. I needed to make the break. The sooner the better.

  I approached his house and, as I walked up the path to the front door, I saw him moving around the kitchen through the window. The doorbell sounded especially loud that early in the morning, but his parents would have already left for work. For over three years, we’d walked to school together, with me picking him up on my way each day. That had ended the first time I’d had to heal him before we even left his house. I’d barely made it to school and the next day Chloe had given me a ride.

  The door opened and Dylan’s unusually cheerful face smiled down at me.

  “Hey! I didn’t know it was my birthday.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me closer for a kiss. I was so shocked by the lack of transfer that I didn’t pull away from his lips at all. It was like being thrown a year into the past and the Dylan I loved was back. Even the winter-fresh taste of his kiss was familiar.

  When he let me go, I opened my mouth to say it, to say I wanted to break up, but the words refused to form. Instead, all I could do was think about how he’d trimmed his hair and that he was smiling. Really smiling. Not the fake one he’d been giving lately to cover his perpetually gloomy mood, but an honest to God, dimple forming, teeth baring smile.

  Was he back? Really back? If he was, did it change anything?

  I wanted answers to all my questions, but I couldn’t ask him, because if he wasn’t, then it would simply be another outburst waiting to happen.

  “So, why the surprise?” he asked as he reached back in the doorway and picked up his backpack. He pulled the door shut and the locked it before taking my hand again.

  This was my chance. This was it.

  “Oh, I thought I’d surprise you.”

  Chicken shit, Phoebe’s voice echoed through me. What was worse than hearing her voice in my head was that it was right. I was chicken. I hated confrontation and avoided arguing as much as possible. When we were little and Phoebe and Chloe started fighting, I always played peacemaker. With the two of them, it wasn’t bad. I could go in, give them a quick touch, and then tell them I would sacrifice my toy, or do their chore instead. Anything to stop the yelling and the fire in my body.

  “This is great,” Dylan said, “because I wanted to ask if I could borrow your English notes today. Chloe bitched me out yesterday after I told her I left mine at home.” A slight twinge of annoyance came from him as we started toward the school. “No offense, but your sister can be a total bitch sometimes.”

  “Well, English is her favorite subject, so I guess she just wants to do really well on this project.”

  “Meaning, you don’t think I’ll do my best?” The twinge was back, only it lasted longer, pulling into me for a few seconds.

  “No, of course not,” I said and tugged my hand from his under the pretext of fixing my hair. I couldn’t do any healing today. If I couldn’t keep myself together without sleeping like the dead, Dad was going to take me to the doctor and then I’d be surrounded by the sick and wounded.

  “Whatever,” he said and thankfully shoved his hands into his pockets.

  The rest of the walk was silent. I knew what I needed to say, but couldn’t find the courage. I wished I had Chloe’s vision to see how he would react, or even Phoebe’s innate ability to say anything regardless of the consequences. Instead, an overwhelming fear that I was only going to hurt him even more struck me.

  Walking through the halls with him made everything else seem far away, like a dream I wasn’t sure how far to trust. His good mood returned and we stopped a few times so he could say something funny to a friend. I smiled and waited automatically. They weren’t my friends, so I only had to stand there and try to avoid bumping into them as they slowly gravitated closer to me like magnets. Most of their emotions weren’t enough to bother me, barely penetrating the fog Dylan’s behavior created inside me.

  By the time he dropped me off at my History class, I was ready to kick myself. I was pretty sure Phoebe would kick me if she knew how I’d chickened out. The scene from that morning just kept replaying in my head and I continually tried to alter the words that had left my mouth, tried to maneuver my former self into doing anything other than following Dylan. Luckily, the teacher didn’t call on me for any answers, because I was oblivious to everything he said.

  It wasn’t until the last ten minutes of History class I realized I had English next and that I hadn’t made plans with Micah about where we would work on our project. I figured I’d just go to Ms. Garcia’s class and see if he showed.

  Fifteen minutes into English class and I sat at my desk in Ms. Garcia’s room alone. No one else was there, well, except for Ms. Garcia. Apparently all of them, including Chloe and Dylan, were taking advantage of the fact Ms. Garcia trusted us. I had my doubts about how many of them were actually working and not simply enjoying a free hour.

  Micah was in the same group as them. He was MIA and yet there I was, sitting alone and feeling like a complete dork. He could have at least told me he wasn’t going to class.

  “Lily, are you sure Micah said he’d meet you here?” Ms. Garcia asked.

  “Well, we didn’t have time to talk after class the other day and since I was out yesterday... I just thought we’d be working here.” Not completely true. He’d told me he’d do everything, but I didn’t want her to think we weren’t working together on it. Or that he’d been so mean.

  “Well, he was in here yesterday. He may be running late.” She shuffled some papers and then walked to the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. If he’s not here by then, I’d suggest taking a look around the school for him.”

  A couple of minutes after she left, the classroom door swung open and Micah walked in, his face flushed. He looked startled to see m
e sitting at my desk, but he sat next to me without any other acknowledgement.

  “You’re late,” I said after he’d unpacked his books.

  “Really? Well, you skipped yesterday.” He snapped open his binder and took out some note-filled paper.

  “I was sick, not skipping.” I hated being on the defensive. I didn’t need to explain myself to him, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. “I was. My dad almost took me to the hospital.”

  “Sure. Well, since you’ve decided to grace me with your presence, why don’t you read over the script outline for the interview?”

  He held the papers out to me and I snatched them away. He was definitely not rubbing me in a good way. I scanned the outline he’d written and was surprised by how good it was. It was interesting and I hadn’t thought that possible for an interview with Stella. I caught a spelling mistake and fixed it with my red pen. It looked nice, bright against the white and black of the page. It might have been childish, but no way would he miss that I had caught him in the wrong.

  I pretended to read over it again while studying him from the corner of my eye. He’d enrolled about a month ago, but I hadn’t really noticed him until the partner situation came up. He was definitely hot. He looked older than seventeen, with short black hair, a slight dimple in his cheek, and a hint of stubble. There was a speck of green in his brown eyes, and his eyebrows were thick, raising up even as I watched. It was unjust that such a hot guy could be such a jerk.

  “Done?” he asked, motioning to the papers.

  “No,” I said, returning my eyes to the notes. I reread a sentence and then reworded it, just to make my point with the red pen that left a beautiful squiggle of letters along the middle of the first page. “I like it.”

  “That’s what I thought.” There was the snide comment I’d been bracing for. I didn’t respond, just stared at him, until he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “What?”

  “I’m sorry you’re not happy I’m your partner and I’m sorry you don’t like me even though you don’t even know me, but I am not an idiot and I plan to work on this with you. If you have a problem with me then ask Ms. Garcia to switch your partner or take an F. Your other option is to suck it up and deal with me.”