“Yeah. I am.” He sat up and put the car into gear and inched to the shoulder, then put it in park and set his blinkers. The car smelled of sour food and sharp cigarettes and God, it smelled of the body in the trunk.
“It’s not easy to be precognizant,” Alan said, and pulled back onto the road, signaling even though there were no taillights or headlights for as far as the eye could see.
“I believe it,” she said.
“He stopped telling us things after a while. It just got him into trouble. I’d be studying for an exam and he’d look at me and shake his head, slowly, sadly. Then I’d flunk out, and I’d be convinced that it was him psyching me out. Or he’d get picked for kickball and he’d say. ‘What’s the point, this team’s gonna lose,’ and wander off, and they’d lose, and everyone would hate him. He couldn’t tell the difference between what he knew and what everyone else knew. Didn’t know the difference between the past and the future, sometimes. So he stopped telling us, and when we figured out how to read it in his eyes, he stopped looking at us.
“Then something really—Something terrible… Someone I cared about died. And he didn’t say anything about it. I could have—stopped—it. Prevented it. I could have saved her life, but he wouldn’t talk.”
He drove.
“For real, he could see the future?” she said softly. Her voice had more emotion than he’d ever heard in it and she rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, pluming smoke into the roar of the wind.
“Yeah,” Alan said. “A future or the future, I never figured it out. A little of both, I suppose.”
“He stopped talking, huh?”
“Yeah,” Alan said.