Bang

One

It’s been over a week since Sawyer kissed me and told me he was seeing a vision now, and it’s all I can think about. I can’t wait to get out of this apartment, which I am tethered to until Monday—that’s when the doc said my internal injuries will be healed enough so I can go to school again. My older brother and best friend, Trey, has been great, of course, slipping notes to Sawyer for me and delivering replies back to me. But for some reason Sawyer won’t explain his vision on paper. “It’s too . . . frightening. Too gruesome. Too . . . everything,” he wrote.

And me? I’m sick about it.

Absolutely sick.

Because it’s my fault. I was so relieved when my vision ended—no more snowplow crashing and exploding into Angotti’s restaurant, no more body bags in the snow, no more Sawyer’s dead face. After weeks of that stupid vision taunting me, and after nearly getting killed because of it, I was naive enough to think it was all over and I’d get to live a happy life. Relatively, anyway. Under the current parental circumstances, that is.

But then, once I got home from the hospital, Sawyer sent me that note. He had to see me, he said. That night, 2:00 a.m. And I wanted to see him, too. I eased my broken body down the stairs and we stood in the snowdrift surrounded by breathy clouds and he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and it was the most weirdly amazing feeling. . . .

And then the amazingness of my first kiss was over. He pulled away and looked at me, his gorgeous green eyes filled with fear, and his voice shook. You know that billboard?

Those words haunt me.

Obviously I was not only psychotic enough to have a vision, but I managed to give the stupid vision disease to the one person I was trying to save.

It’s beyond horrifying, sitting here knowing he must be experiencing the worst kind of frustration and pressure to act on the vision and—Did he say “gruesome”?

Let me say it one more time. Sick. That is what I am.

And so very sorry.

I rack my brain trying to figure out how this could have happened. Was it because he hugged me on the street the night before? Because he held my hand afterward in the hospital? Maybe there’s some kind of physical transference going on. I have no idea.

I have done something horrible to the boy I love, and I don’t know how to stop it.

All I know is that I need to get out of this hoardhole before I lose my mind.

Oh, wait.

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Excerpted from Bang by Lisa McMann
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