Chapter 3

Matt, Ty, and I had just spent an awesome Saturday afternoon trekking through the Kea'iwa Heiau State Recreation Area, which was across the valley from where I lived, not far from Matt’s house. In those days none of us could drive, so anything we could walk to or reach from the bus line was golden. With football season over, Matt was determined to keep active and stay in shape, Ty liked to pretend he felt the same, and I was happy to be outside doing whatever they were doing. This particular day was unusually cool, and we’d gotten rained on more than once, but we’d still had fun. The trouble didn’t start until we came down off the trail and were crossing one of the parking areas.

Ty and Matt were talking water polo. They were excited about being teammates again, which apparently hadn’t happened since Little League. I was excited about the upcoming girls’ season, too, since I was actually half decent at water sports. So you can imagine, with all this happy activity going on, exactly how thrilled I was when a perfect stranger walking in front of me started flashing like a strobe light.

Forget the sepia-tone thing. For the first few seconds, I didn’t even connect what I was seeing with the color changes of the past. This guy was all flash. My first thought was that he must be wearing some kind of battery-operated costume. But when I looked closer, I knew that he couldn’t be. His whole body was morphing from negative to positive and back again, not only his clothes, but his skin and his hair, too.

He was a young guy, mid twenties maybe, and he was walking with another guy and a girl the same age. All three of them moved slowly, like they were either tired or high, and they weren’t talking to each other or even smiling. I couldn’t understand why neither of the guy’s companions were reacting to his blinking on and off. I even looked over at Matt and Ty, fully expecting them to be staring like I was. It was only when the flashing stopped and the guy briefly turned a washed-out shade of red, then went back to normal, that I finally caught a clue.

“Oh, my God!” I squealed, stopping in my tracks.

Matt and Ty stopped walking also. They looked where I was looking, then back at me. “What?” Ty asked, puzzled.

“That guy,” I blathered. My limbs started to shake. “He’s in trouble. Real trouble!”

Once I understood what was happening, the dots connected in my brain all too quickly. I had only seen the flashing once before. One time out of three, and that was with my grandmother. I had wondered before if maybe my six-year-old mind had embellished that part. Now I knew otherwise. There was only one difference I could think of between Grandma’s death and the other two deaths predicted by The Warning.

My grandmother had died within hours.

“I have to do something!” I wailed, more to myself than to the guys.

“Lace, what is wrong with you?” Ty asked. “What are you talking about?” Both he and Matt kept looking at the three people walking away from us, but of course they could see nothing wrong with any of them. The slow-moving trio approached a rusty, beat-up looking car and the guy who had been flashing pulled keys out of his pocket. He started flashing again.

“No!” I cried helplessly. “Ty!” I grabbed his arm and pulled on it. “We have to stop that guy from driving! He’s going to get himself killed!”

“What, is he drunk or something?” Matt asked. “We don’t get it, Lace. How do you know?”

“I just do!” I insisted. The guy was unlocking the doors now.

My friends took another look. “Not seeing it. Sorry,” Ty said.

“We can’t very well go over and tackle the guy for no reason,” Matt said sensibly.

“I didn’t ask you to!” I snapped. The car doors were open now. All three of the people were getting in. The driver guy was still flashing. Light. Dark. Light/Light. Dark.

I pulled away and started running. “Stop!” I yelled at him. “You have to stop!”

I knew I was acting like a crazy person. I could hear footsteps behind me as Ty and Matt followed, but I really didn’t see that I had a choice. I wasn’t going to do nothing. I couldn’t do nothing!

The people in the car were already rolling their windows down for the drive (as is the custom in Hawaii) and they heard me shout. The driver stuck his head out the window and watched me curiously as I ran up, although not quite as curiously as he probably should have, given that I had two teenage guys hot on my heels who for all he knew were trying to attack me — or him, or his car, or something.

Flashing guy was not overly concerned. “Whuzzup?” he asked.

I stopped myself short about six feet from his car, with Ty stopping right behind me. A second later Matt arrived and nearly bowled us both over. When I’d recovered my balance and part of my breath, I answered.

“You really shouldn’t drive,” I gasped. “I don’t think it’s safe. I really don’t.”

You have to understand, this was not some well-thought-out strategy on my part. If I’d had more time, I might have come up with something brilliant, like telling him I’d seen somebody messing with his brake lines, or planting a bomb under his fender. But I had no time, and I wasn’t thinking.

“Why not?” he asked.

I studied his grayish-blue eyes and noted that they didn’t look red or glassy, like you’d expect if he was drinking or smoking pot. He just looked tired. And now, annoyed.

I felt like an idiot. But what did that matter, really? “It’s just a feeling I have,” I said meekly.

“Lacey,” Ty whispered in my ear. “I really think you should leave him alone.”

The driver of the car rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well… Whatever. Thanks.” He put the car in gear.

I started to move forward again, but both Ty and Matt put a hand on my arms to stop me, and I had no idea what my next move was going to be anyway. The guy backed his car out of the space and pulled away without ever once looking back. The girl in the back seat did, though. She twisted her head around and stared at me with a goofy grin on her face, like she was watching an ape swing on a vine in the zoo. And she kept on leering at me until the car was completely out of sight.

“You want to tell us what that was all about?” Ty asked.

I thought about it. “No,” I answered, feeling defeated. “No, actually, I don’t.”

“You’re shaking like a leaf, Lace,” Matt noted. “Are you sure you feel okay?”

I looked down. I really was shaking.

Crap. Of course they thought I was nuts. How embarrassing was this? And what had I accomplished anyway?

I hated this!

“I think I need some water,” I said. “Then maybe we could sit down for a while?”

The guys agreed, and from that point on, none of us mentioned my psychotic episode. The two of them started acting like nothing had happened, and after I managed to stop shaking, so did I. But I was only acting.

I knew I wasn’t wrong. I knew the guy was going to die. I hadn’t thought to get his license number; I didn’t even know his name. But I knew he would live no longer than my grandmother had. And that knowing feeling made me sick inside.

I’m not sure how I got through the rest of that day. All I remember is sitting alone in my room that night, sifting through the local news sites on my phone. What I was looking for didn’t take long to find. A truck-car accident on the H1 had snarled traffic for hours that afternoon. The driver of the delivery truck had walked away from the crash. There had been three people in the other car. One man and one woman had been taken to Queen’s Hospital. The driver was pronounced dead on the scene.

In the days that followed, I found out more details. The delivery truck driver had been drinking, but wasn’t over the legal limit. The driver of the car was speeding. Witness accounts of who was to blame were contradictory. The driver’s name was Tony Blawnox, he was twenty-two years old, and he worked as a waiter at a restaurant in Pearl City. I confirmed that he was the guy I’d seen in the parking lot by looking him up on social media.

I also calculated that he’d died less than an hour after I talked to him.

The whole episode left me almost physically ill. I did miss school for a day, pleading stomach pains, which were real. But as much as I wanted to talk to someone about what had happened, this time I didn’t bother telling my parents. If three perfect “coincidences” hadn’t swayed them, why should four? I couldn’t stand any more skepticism. Of all the people I was close to, the only one who was sure to believe in such craziness was Ty. But as tight as we were at that point, something held me back from telling him. I couldn’t forget how weirdly competitive he’d gotten with those silly Zener cards, and a part of me was scared that even if he did believe me, he would be more jealous than he would be sympathetic or helpful. He might even deny believing me because it wasn’t something he could handle.

So I didn’t tell anybody. And the knowledge that I had predicted four deaths and tried and failed to stop two of them ate at me like a cancer. I tried to tell myself that I had done all I could. But when does telling yourself that ever help? You always still wonder.

I was on track to driving myself into a deep funk when something beyond my control derailed my brain completely. And I mean that literally. My brain was derailed, as in knocked off its tracks, lights out, bye-bye. I walked into gym class one morning and the next thing I remember was my mom picking me up at the ER. Apparently, Matt almost killed me.

At least, that’s what he said happened. The poor guy was practically hysterical when he showed up at my house that evening with both his parents, a dozen roses, and a teddy bear. He told me that the class had been playing badminton and that he had accidentally mowed me over while moving backward to make a shot. Apparently my feet had come out from under me, the back of my head had hit the floor, and I was unconscious for a while.

Poor Matt. He really did think he’d killed me. I’ve never seen any guy look quite as miserable as he did that day. His profuse apology was kind of embarrassing, since I couldn’t remember getting hurt or even being afraid. I did feel pretty lousy, though. My head hurt, I kept getting nauseous, and everything around me seemed to be happening in slow motion. Still, that day I swear Matt was in worse shape than I was! I truly felt sorry for the guy, but I couldn’t seem to tell him enough times that I was fine. The truth was, if I had to get a concussion, he’d picked the perfect time. That accident forced me to stop dwelling on my guilt about the waiter’s death, because for the next couple weeks, I was too foggy-headed to concentrate on anything.

Another positive thing came out of that concussion as well. I got to know Matt better. Before the accident, I really only saw him when Ty was around. The three of us had fun together, don’t get me wrong, but they were always doing their “guy thing” and I was a hanger-on. And when we were in a bigger group, Matt’s attention was usually focused on another girl. But when I was stuck at home after the concussion, he came to see me every day, and then it was just the two of us. I wasn’t allowed to use my phone or watch TV, so I was bored stiff, but he would come over and talk to me, sometimes for hours. He talked differently with me than he did around Ty… his sense of humor was different; he seemed smarter, somehow. We talked about everything. Not just our own lives, but what was wrong with the rest of the world, and how we planned to fix it.

I enjoyed those talks immensely. I knew I was seeing a side of Matt that most girls didn’t see, because he wasn’t flirting or trying to impress me — he was just being real. Ty came to visit me too, but he didn’t come as often or stay as long. Not that Ty wasn’t sweet to me when he did come. He played the guitar and we sang together, which I loved. But I could tell that he felt uncomfortable being there when I was sick, because he was always uncomfortable around sickness and sick people. And I felt uncomfortable because he was uncomfortable. He knew that Matt was visiting me too, but I don’t think he knew how much, and I didn’t tell him. Not that Ty ever acted jealous. But I had the feeling that he would feel threatened by all the time Matt and I were spending alone together, even if we were just friends.

Interesting how the subconscious works, isn’t it? Because even though I was still one hundred percent devoted to Ty back then, I think that getting closer to Matt had an effect on me. I think it showed me what I was missing.

Too bad I didn’t pay attention. Because when I got The Warning for the fifth time, it would have helped to have a boyfriend who cared.