Auracle

by Gina Rosati

  They take a break mid-morning. Everyone stretches, shuffles to the end of the benches, and goes off in search of bladder relief, caffeine, a quick smoke, whatever.

  Rei appears to have something else in mind.

  Taylor stands with her friends, who are busy vilifying Seth’s attorney for making Vienna cry. As Rei approaches them, the conversation stalls, and all eyes are on Rei. He does look very handsome with his hair neatly combed away from his face, and nobody seems to notice this is the third time he’s worn the same outfit this week. As he passes them, he smiles directly at Taylor and says hi, and this simple word somehow floats off his lips surrounded by tiny hearts and flowers. There is a collective sigh as he pushes through a metal door that leads to the first floor.

  Rei makes his way down the stairs and into a hallway where there are restrooms and an alcove with soda and snack machines. Several coins later, he is now the owner of his first package of peanut butter cups.

  What the hell is that boy doing? He already ate a bowl of oatmeal and a banana for breakfast, and it’s not like Rei to eat candy. I can only surmise he plans to give them to Taylor, but I desperately hope he’s not planning to hand those to her in this crowded courthouse with all these television cameras. That would be like, Go To Jail. Go Directly To Jail.

  He peels off the wrapper, stacks the peanut butter cups and shoves them both into his mouth at once.

  Holy crap! Where’s my camera when I need it? I surge into view to show him my astonished expression as he drops the wrapper into the trash.

  He holds up one finger to tell me hold on a second while he chews them slowly, and I start to laugh at his chipmunk cheeks, but he isn’t laughing with me, so I stop. I can’t remember Rei ever eating peanut butter; it’s just one of those things Yumi never had in the house to keep things safer for me.

  “Stay close and stay invisible, okay?”

  I nod and fade out of view as footsteps come click-clacking down the stairs.

  “Rei?” I didn’t realize my voice could sound so sexy.

  He swallows hard. “Hey, Taylor.”

  “I’m up next, to testify.”

  “I know.”

  She wilts against the wall. “I don’t know what to do, Rei. I just … I would get up on the witness stand and tell them this was all a big mistake if I thought maybe you and I could…” She touches his arms, and her fingers crawl toward his shoulders like spiders.

  I know that expression on Rei’s face, the one he has when he doesn’t want to do something he knows he has to do. He takes a deep breath …

  … and he kisses her.

  Again!

  Somewhere upstairs I hear the bailiff’s loud voice telling people court is ready to resume, but neither Taylor nor Rei show any sign that they heard him. Rei slides his arms around Taylor and pulls her closer to him.

  This time, it’s Rei who’s all into the kiss, his mouth forcing her lips apart, his tongue sliding deep into her mouth. Really deep! Okay, a little too much tongue there, buddy! She certainly seems to like it, though. She lets out a little moan and her back arches as her arms come up around his neck. Ack! Aren’t there laws against inappropriate public displays of affection in a federal building?

  She moans again, but this time it sounds different, not pleasure, but … something else. Her bright pink aura sallows. She tries to twist her head away from Rei’s, but his hand cups the back of her head and he holds her mouth tight to his until she pushes hard against his chest.

  “Rei, stop. Something’s wrong, I…” She can’t seem to catch her breath. Now she looks scared and she holds on to Rei because she has to, not because she wants to. “I can’t … breathe! What’s wrong with … me?”

  Rei sits on the floor and pulls her down onto his lap. “Where’s the epi?” he asks while tugging her purse strap off her shoulder.

  “The … what?”

  “The epi! Remember I told you to keep that with you all the time? Where is it?”

  “I think it’s in … my backpack.”

  Oh, I wonder if she means the backpack that’s at home sitting on my bedroom floor.

  “What?” He yanks open the zipper of her purse and searches unsuccessfully for the familiar cylinder case. “Taylor, you were supposed to keep that with you all the time!” He wrestles his cell phone out of his pocket and dials 911, adjusting his arm to catch her head as it lolls back and she starts to gag. “Come on! Come on!” he urges the dispatcher to pick up. He talks fast, and as soon as he flips his phone shut and pockets it, he lifts her up in his arms and takes the stairs three at a time.

  The police officer in the hallway takes one look at Rei and pulls out his radio.

  “I’ve already called 911,” Rei tells him. “See if you can find Lydie Rogan in the courtroom. Tell her that her daughter is having an allergic reaction and she doesn’t have her epi with her.”

  The cop doesn’t argue; he just hustles away.

  Taylor’s face is inflating into a big, blotchy mess, and her lips look like sausages. Rei looks around him wildly for I don’t know what—my mother, the paramedics, me? All of the above?

  I surge into view right in front of him.

  “Is this disabled enough?” he asks me.

  Taylor writhes in his arms as she tries to breathe.

  “I’m sorry!” Rei looks down at Taylor, then back up to me with an anguished look on his face. “I couldn’t think of any other way.”

  I nod, but I don’t have time to listen to his apologies right now. If I don’t make this happen now, it will all be for nothing. Sirens scream in the distance, but anything can happen in the time it takes for that ambulance to get here, especially since my insurance policy is sitting at home in my backpack.

  I don’t need a deep breath, but I go through the motions of taking one anyway. I feel like I’m standing at the top of Red Rocks preparing to leap eighty feet down and plunge into the icy waters of Lake Champlain. Taylor is clearly suffering from the histamine that’s flooding her body right now. Her breath rattles in her chest since it’s hampered by her swollen esophagus. For over a week, I’ve wanted nothing more than to get Taylor Gleason out of my body and reclaim what’s rightfully mine. Now that moment has come, and I’m wishing I was anywhere but here, poised to pull Taylor out of that mess that is my body and dive in myself.

  The first thing I do is make sure I have enough energy to finish what I start. I close my eyes and pull, from beyond me, out into the farthest depths of the universe, until I’m sure I can do this, I can just reach in and …

  … pull.

  She is so weak and disoriented from the allergic reaction that she pops right out of my body. She responds with a panicky howl.

  “No! NO!”

  Rei sucks in his breath when my body goes limp in his arms and the slits that are my eyes turn white. This is probably happening because nobody’s in there right now, but someone better find that epi and find it fast!

  “Anna! Anna!” My mother is running on her sturdy legs, followed by the policeman, who shouts into his radio. Some idiot with a television camera has followed them into the hallway, and a few other people have come out to gawk, as well. Great … an audience. I close my eyes and psyche myself up to dive in anyway.

  Right … now!

  Something grabs my wrist.

  “No, Anna, please! You have to let me back in! Please!”

  The word please only works in certain situations and this isn’t one of them. She’s weak, I can feel it. We scuffle to get back in, but she’s now molded to fit into my body, and I no longer am, so she claims my body once again.

  “Anna! Honey, can you hear me?” My mother kneels beside me, crying, and tries to pull me out of Rei’s arms, but he won’t let go.

  “Check your purse,” Rei orders my mom. “She needs an epi.”

  I reach out, and the boundaries of my body are permeable to me now. It’s as simple as pulling someone’s hand out of a mitten.

  “No!” she wails as she pops out for
the second time. “Anna, please! Please don’t do this to me!”

  The echo of Rei’s voice reminds me what is mine.

  “Sorry!” I apologize for the last time as I scramble in and …

  Oh! Oh! I don’t remember the first allergic reaction I had when I was four because I left fast, and I didn’t come back until it was over, but this is …

  … agony!

  I desperately want to duck back out of here and tell her she can have my body. I’ve been free for so long that being stuffed back inside my body feels like I’m trapped in a sarcophagus and buried alive. There is no air in here, something I’ve taken for granted not needing for the past week, but I need it now, need it badly, and there is none. The itching from the hives is excruciating, and there’s so much chaos within my body, it’s nearly impossible to get the vibrations to merge. I feel her clawing at me, trying to get a grip on me to yank me out, and I stretch out fast, latch my discarnate fingers into my flesh fingers as best as I can and try to hold on, but all I want is to let go and fly away from all this pain.

  I feel myself losing consciousness. Somewhere above me there’s a loud buzz and spinning lights and voices sound so very … very far away. Rei’s voice is a mantra, begging me to “holdonholdonholdon.…”

  The pain is sudden and sweet in my thigh, and a rush of chemical energy floods through my body, giving me just enough strength to …

  … vomit. Except my esophagus is still swollen and it feels like I’ve inhaled some of it. I’m wasting all my precious oxygen trying to cough it out, but there’s nowhere for it to go.

  There’s a commotion around me involving people who hold my head and force my mouth open, then they shove something down my throat and I panic and fight against it because it hurts, but everyone is stronger than I am right now. Rei’s voice is there somewhere begging me to hold still and it sounds like he’s crying.

  And then there is air, sweet beautiful wonderful air.

  I try to open my eyes, but they feel puffy and through thin slits I see the ceiling above me is filled with unfamiliar faces. It occurs to me that everyone from the courtroom has probably filled the hallways to rubberneck as I’m loaded onto the stretcher and carried out to the ambulance. I hear Rei say he’s coming with me in the ambulance and some guy tells him, no, he’s not, and then Rei’s voice gets that same dangerous tone he used with Jason Trent and he says, “Yes. I. Am.”

  And then I hear someone with that polished television kind of voice asking questions that are nobody’s business, and my mother’s voice says, “Her name is Annaliese Rogan, and she is the only eyewitness.”

  CHAPTER 35

  In the emergency room, they won’t let Rei in to see me right away, not until they evaluate my risk for a biphasic reaction, which is, in plain English, a second reaction that’s even worse than the first. This is when I know my sense of humor is back because I laugh in the doctor’s face with my floppy lips and tell him nothing could possibly be worse than throwing up on the six o’clock news.

  They let my mom in, though, and she is full of nervous energy, fluttering all around and driving me batty. She’s completely worked up about my reaction, which was probably even scarier than the first time this happened since this time we had an audience of about a hundred people and a television camera.

  After a while, they decide to admit me for one night. They wheel me down the hall in plain view of the normal people who are just visiting and can’t help staring, so I pull the sheet up over my head and let everyone on the elevator wonder if I’m dead. My mom comes into my hospital room long enough to get me settled, then she leaves to get some lunch and check messages from work.

  It takes a long while to settle back into my body after so much time away. It feels squishy and uncomfortable now, and heavy, like I’m made out of lard. I keep wondering why my arm is so sore until I remember, oh yeah, hideous tattoo. I’m still really itchy and puffy and my throat hurts from the stupid tube they shoved down there. I entertain myself by trying unsuccessfully to get the assorted studs out of my ears, tongue, and nose, but even if I didn’t have these stupid acrylic nails on my fingers, my manual dexterity is still way off since I haven’t worked all the way back into my fingers. I work on the tongue stud first, which is a royal pain because it has some sort of screw-on backing to it, and I feel like I have lobster claws instead of fingers. I have about half the studs out of my ears when I hear a knock at the open door.

  “Anna?” Rei’s voice sounds so tentative.

  When I look up, he looks so tentative, as if maybe he’s intruding or he thinks I might be mad at him. Even though I can no longer fly, I launch myself off the bed and three steps later, I feel his arms around my waist and my feet swing out from under me as he spins me halfway around.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t cry when I saw him, but that’s a lost cause now. It sounds like he’s crying, too, so it’s okay. At some point during all these tears, he lifts me up, just like he did Taylor and carries me over to the bed. I’m dreading the moment he’ll plunk me down, just like he did Taylor, but he doesn’t. Instead, he sits and leans back against the pillows, holding me in his lap. “I’m sorry,” he says over and over into my hair. “I am so sorry!”

  “Stop it!” I cry into his damp shoulder. “No more sorries!”

  He leans back so we are eye to teary eye and whispers, “You said it was risky, but I thought you were exaggerating because you were scared I’d get caught. God, Anna,” he chokes back a sob, “they were pulling out the defibrillator in the ambulance. They didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  “But I did make it. And you couldn’t have known how bad it would be. Even I didn’t know for sure what would happen this time.” I look him straight in the eyes so he knows I am fine. We are fine. Everything is fine now.

  “I should have listened to you,” Rei persists. “Yesterday when I kissed her, I thought I could knock her unconscious by pressing on her carotid artery, but it was taking too long and I was afraid she’d figure out what I was doing. I thought the peanut butter cups would be…”

  “Shhh,” I hug him tightly. “It’s over, Rei; it all worked out. Don’t second-guess it.”

  He hugs me back and his shaky sigh of relief seems to blow away the top layer of his sorrow. We sit like this for I don’t know how long, and all I can think is how good it feels to be touched again. His neck smells sweet and his breath warms my cheek. Every now and then, he rubs slow circles on my back or brushes his chin against my hair, as if he wants to make sure I’m really here.

  Even before I was trapped outside my body, the only person who really touched me was Saya. My father never touched me unless it was to grab my arm and squeeze. My mom always seemed to have fresh lipstick on when she was leaving, so I didn’t even get a goodbye kiss from her most of the time. Rei limited himself mostly to those affectionate squeezes around the back of my neck.

  But when Rei and I were much younger, we were all over each other the way kids are, totally unconcerned with boundaries. We used to wrestle, tickle each other mercilessly, use each other as a pillow or a footstool. Before Saya was born, Yumi used to give Rei back rubs to get him to sleep, so of course, we used to give each other back rubs, too. Rei taught me games: with our fingers we would draw treasure maps on each other’s backs with an X to mark the spot, or he’d draw giant concentric circles on my back that gradually got smaller and smaller until he would pretend to pull a string from the center of the circle and it would feel as though the very core was being pulled from my body. One day when we were about eleven, Yumi walked into Rei’s bedroom and found us both shirtless, me straddling Rei’s backside with a handful of lotion. To say she was not very happy is an understatement. The two of us got a long lecture about how we were getting older now and what constitutes appropriate behavior between young men and women, and that her Boswellian Body Butter was very expensive and not to be played with. After that, it was as though Yumi put a fence between us.

  I realize now how mu
ch I’ve missed him, not just during the past week but for the past five years. Even though he was right next door, it felt like some part of me was missing. Rei is the yang to my yin, not my opposite, but a complimentary force that balances me out. Right now, I just want to align myself with him, to stretch out on the bed and pull him over me like a blanket. Right now, there is no other place I want to be.

  But nothing lasts forever. Eventually Rei runs his hand up and down my bare calf, which I hope Taylor took the time to shave this morning. “Are you cold?” he asks, and he squeezes my bare foot. “You are—your feet are freezing! Didn’t they give you any socks?”

  “Socks? What socks?” I say and hope he doesn’t see the plastic bag containing one pair of fuzzy but hideous gray no-skid socks I tossed on the vent underneath the window. I change the subject. “Want to help me take out the rest of these studs?”

  “Sure. As soon as you get under the covers and warm up your feet. And yes, you do need socks. You don’t want to walk on the hospital floor with bare feet. Who knows what you’ll catch.”

  What would I do without Rei to point out all the dangers I overlook? “I missed you,” I confess as I slide off his lap and under the blanket.

  “I missed you, too. Did you get that tongue stud out?”

  “Yes, that took forever with these stupid nails.” I wiggle my fingers.

  “I bet. Let me see…” Rei tucks my hair behind my ear and gently pries the back off the first stud. “Well, at least she didn’t put gauges in.”

  “No, but she pierced my belly button. I discovered that when I went to the bathroom.”

  Rei grins. “Do you need me to get that out, too?”

  “Um, no. Actually, I thought I’d leave that one in.”

  Rei stops mid-earring. “Really?”

  I grin at him. “Kidding.”

  “Oh. Not that you couldn’t leave it. I mean…”

  “Too late. It’s out.”

  “Oh.” Rei pries the back off another earring. “So … not to get you worried or anything, but do you think Taylor’s still around somewhere?”