It took all my strength to break momentum and pull myself backwards. The metal sides of half-a-dozen train carriages flashed in front of my face and I landed on my left hand with a dull, but audible, crack. Some distant part of my consciousness registered pain.

The platform was in chaos. All around me people were screaming and yelling and carrying on. The train doors opened with a ping and the passengers about to disembark stopped short, looking at the commotion in confusion. 

Then they saw me and stopped.

I must have looked awful: face sweaty and red with exertion, skin pale and clammy with fear. My heart felt like it was trying to pound itself out of my ribcage and every breath felt like someone was stabbing me in the chest with a pick made out of ice. My left hand was killing me and seemed to be swelling to the size of my calf. Stinging tears had formed in the corners of my eyes…

The worst thing about having these visions is that majority of the time there’s nothing I can do to prevent them from coming true. The only deaths I can stop are murders and accidents, and even with those, I can't save every victim. 

By some miracle, this time, I did.

Breathing ragged, I looked down at the boy in my lap, my right hand still tangled in the back of his shirt. He stared back at me, trembling like a leaf. I don't know what possessed me, but I wiped my hair out of my face, smiled and said, ‘Hi.’

He wet himself and cried.

As if on cue, everyone sprang forward. The other elementary school kids ran up and started bawling, blubbering things about how they wanted their mothers and promising never to play at a railway station again. It took a business woman, a young couple and one stationmaster to try and calm them down. 

A man in a business suit got on the phone and called the paramedics, kneeling down and asking me questions like a responsible adult.

What's your name? Evelyn White.

Does anything hurt? Everything hurts.

The answers came automatically, blurted out with no real thought. Might have been the shock setting in, or perhaps it was just that such events had become routine.

I went through it all again when the ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The stationmasters had gotten service back on track and most of the crowd had dispersed with the train. As the paramedics helped me stand – I was too stubborn to go on a stretcher – I looked over at the other platform. 

Mismatched brown and blue eyes met mine. The boy in the black hoodie stared back at me and the expression on his face was cold.

* * *

Aunt Linda was waiting for me when I emerged from the outpatient wing. My left arm was wrapped in a cast and a sling and she’d brought me a change of clothes since my uniform was wet and smelled like pee. 

I don’t blame the kid. If I weren’t so experienced in life-threatening situations, I probably would have peed a little too.

… I really shouldn't be proud of that. Let's go back to Aunt Linda.

Aunt Linda isn't really my aunt; she's one of those aunts that gained her title by being a good friend of Dad's. The two of them are so close that it took me twelve years to figure out that she and I aren't actually blood-related. If we were, then I'd have a little Mediterranean in me and would tan instead of looking like a broiled lobster after being exposed to the sun.

Dad likes to joke that she's an old flame he dropped when he met Mum. Aunt Linda on the other hand insists that he's full of rubbish and that they only know each other because she assists him with his research.

I have no idea what research she's talking about. My mother was a nurse and according to Dad, his occupation is 'treasure hunting'.

I would have thought that it had something to do with research for his expeditions because, you know, you don't just pick a place at random and start to dig. You need to do some planning and investigation beforehand. Yet, as far as I can tell, all he does is close his eyes, screw up his face like he needs to use the loo, and point at a random country on the map hanging half-way down the hall before declaring it as his next destination. He’s usually gone the next morning – no planning or investigation needed. Heck, he doesn't even leave a note to say goodbye.

Needless to say, I've asked Aunt Linda what research she was talking about, but she refuses to elaborate any further. Apparently the only reason she mentioned it before was because I ‘ambushed her’ while she was drunk at one of her annual Christmas parties.

I swear, all I did was ask how she and Dad met.

I suppose that if I really wanted answers, I could wait until Christmas, pour a bottle of wine down her throat and ask her again, but she'd be furious when she remembered the next day. Trust me when I say that an angry Aunt Linda is not someone you want to meet.

Anyway, when Dad's off gallivanting overseas – as he often is – Aunt Linda is the one they call when I get into trouble. This was the third time in the span of one month that the hospital had summoned her from work and she wasn't very pleased.

The first time was because I was preventing a death by fire and the medics wouldn't listen when I said I was fine. The second was because I was covered in someone else’s blood while getting as many people out of their cars as I could after a ten-car pileup five kilometres from school. She’s used to picking me up after I've been involved in something big, but that didn't stop her from giving me the same long, loud lecture about how I could have been killed, crippled, or worse as always as she drove me home.

I’m never sure what would classify as ‘worse’ since she more or less covered all bases, but I'll admit that she's right. I've had my share of near-death experiences and I know that when I'm trying to yank people out of harm's way, I don't exactly think about the consequences for myself. And I don't mean that in a selfless, heroic way either – more like a pig-headed, simplistic, I-have-a-single-track-mind kind of way. I literally forget all about the possibility of danger until it's staring me in the face and about to take my head off.

All things considered, a broken arm was a small price to pay for to changing that kid's future from smooshed by a train at the age of ten to dying at eighty from natural causes. But you know what they say: no good deed goes unpunished.

I let her get the rant out of her system without complaint – just sat there and nodded in all the right spots. Afterwards, she sighed, apologised and started her usual practice of asking generic parent-y questions about school and my day, to which I replied with my best of generic teenage-y answers.

‘How's school going?’

‘Fine.’

‘Keeping your grades up?’

‘Yup.’

‘Has that Chinese boy asked you out yet?’

I had no idea what Chinese boy she was talking about but the answer was ‘no’ anyway.

She frowned, keeping her eyes on the road. ‘Really? Given how long you've been friends, I thought something would have happened by now.’

‘I don't have any Chinese friends, Aunt Linda.’ And given how limited my number of friends was, I was certain of the fact.

She flapped a hand at me. ‘Oh, you know who I'm talking about. That Asian boy you're always hanging out with… Roy.’

‘Ryo.’ She always gets it wrong. ‘He's Japanese.’

‘They all look the same to me.’

‘Wow, talk about casual racism.’

‘Oh, relax,’ she said, flapping a hand and turning into my street. ‘I didn't mean it like th— Well, would you speak of the Devil!’ She pulled into the driveway and rolled down her window. ‘Hello, Roy!’

Seated in one of the two wicker chairs on my front porch, beneath the totally unfunny plaque that reads The White House, Ryo looked up from his comic book. 

The sign was my dad's idea. Don't ask.

At Ryo's feet, Hobbes – the German Shepherd Dad bought to 'look after me' while he was away – looked up too. His ears twitched and his tail wagged, but other than that, he didn’t move.

This is a normal scene to me.

Ryo put down his book with a sigh. ‘Hi, Linda. What are you doing here?’

‘I brought back your runaway wife. Come help her out of the car like a good boy.’

With a frown on his face, Ryo got up and obeyed with Hobbes following close at his heels. 

Sometimes I think he gets confused about who his master is. Err – Hobbes, I mean, not Ryo.

The frown had turned into a glower by the time he reached the car. I was already out of it by then, fumbling to pick up my school bag and the plastic bag with my stained uniform in it with my one good hand. Without a word, Ryo leaned in and took them from me, eyeing my cast like it was diseased.

I sighed. Lecture number two, here I come...