by Gina Linko
He nodded. Did some kind of crossing-his-heart, Boy Scout salute. He wanted me to smile, but I couldn’t. My mind’s eye kept flashing to Sophie’s little face. The goggles, the rocks in her hand, the empty look of her death on the Lake Michigan shore.
“ ’Cause I believe it, but I’m still scared. Of hurting someone,” I added, averting my eyes. “Seth Krane. Anyone. You.”
“You’re scared to move on from this.”
I rubbed my knuckles on my lips, opened the back door. I nodded just once. There was some truth in that. I couldn’t deny it.
I expected Mom and Dad to be in the kitchen, all greetings and raised eyebrows, but I heard Dad’s truck pulling out of the garage, and so I assumed Mom was upstairs. I was getting privacy. They probably had talked about this. What had Mom called my friendship with Rennick, my attempt to help Seth Krane? Good for the soul.
I didn’t know about that. But I had to do something.
“One more rule,” I said, unloading the box onto the kitchen table. I turned to look at Rennick, who was pulling all kinds of stuff out of his gym bag. Lengths of wire. A roll of tinfoil. A small cooler.
He looked up from under the fringe of his lashes. “Anything.”
“I can’t touch anyone yet. I just can’t do that for …”
“Got it,” he said, and continued to unload stuff onto the kitchen table. I watched him for longer than necessary. Did I imagine that he swallowed hard against that comment? Did he care about this? Me not touching him? What was I to him? Who was he to me?
I pushed these thoughts away.
He pointed to the glass jar on the kitchen table, the roll of tinfoil, a bottle of carpenter’s glue. “I already spoke with your parents. I hope that was okay. I just wanted them to know what we were doing.”
“What are we doing?” Oh Jesus, this sounded like a loaded question.
And something—embarrassment?—quickly flashed across Rennick’s face. “Only changing the world.” He gave me his most mischievous smile, and my mouth turned up.
He took this as encouragement. “We are going to plunge into this. Do some real work on this. Scientific stuff. Tests. My kind of thing.”
“I’m in, but—”
“You know, we could contact the Tulane lab, include the doctors working on—”
“No!”
Mom came in then to fill her coffee cup. “I can make pancakes?” she offered.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Sure,” Rennick answered at the same time. The two of them chuckled. He gave me a wink. “Moms love me,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Of course they do.”
“You need to eat too, Corrine,” Mom said as she began to take ingredients out of the cupboard.
“If you say so.”
“So what are you going to make here?” she asked, eyeing the glass jar.
“A Leyden jar,” Rennick answered. “It’s part of our scientific approach.” He smiled easily at my mom.
I didn’t share in the smile. I did, however, resist—over and over again—the urge to close the space between Rennick and me, to sniff the scent of him, the sheets-dried-outside-on-the-first-day-of-spring smell that seemed to emanate from him. I wanted to kiss him for showing up this morning with all of this. For his plan of action. For his dedication.
And I wanted to kiss him for other reasons too. Just draw him near, run my hands through that ridiculous rock star hair, lick the stubble on his chin.
I absolutely loved him for showing up this morning, for coming back and trying.
I took the scissors from Rennick and began to cut the tinfoil as he instructed. “Just glue it all around the jar,” he told me. “It’s like an early battery.”
It felt right to be doing this in my kitchen, working at something tangible. This was good, productive, and maybe a little dangerous.
* * *
When we were finished with the Leyden jar—and the pancakes—he opened a cooler.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“Corrine, they’re crawdads. We’re not using lab chimps.”
I looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath. “I’ve read as much as I could online. There isn’t much.”
“I know.” He sat across from me. “But let’s get serious. The first step is that you have to control it. Whatever it is, you have to own it. Maybe summon it.”
I tried not to balk at this. Summon it. “Can you summon the power to see auras?”
He seemed to consider the idea. “Yeah. I see them always. But sometimes I want to see them more clearly. Focus. Anyway, that’s what you are going to do. Try and bring that feeling—whatever it is—back.”
“I have always spent so much time and energy praying for that feeling to stay away.” My voice sounded puny.
“You are in control,” he said, and looked at me sternly. “You gotta believe that, Corrine.”
I bit my lip.
“We can stop anytime.”
But could I?
He took out a small crayfish. Placed it on the coffee table, atop a paper plate. “He’s fresh. Hasn’t been dead long. Less than an hour probably. What can you do?”
Rennick sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and smiled, watching me.
I closed my eyes and focused on the symptoms, the things that usually preceded the indigo lens. I thought about the churning in my chest, the engine of power flickering to life under my ribs, and I concentrated.
Nothing.
“It’s probably going to take a while,” Rennick said.
I tried. I really tried. For the better part of an hour, I tried to get myself into some kind of Zen state, some kind of meditation mode that might bring about the power so that I might possibly dream about harnessing it. But nothing. Zilch.
Truth be told, it was difficult to concentrate with Rennick’s eyes on me. It was difficult to do anything except focus on not touching him.
I vowed to myself to try to summon it on my own. Alone. Later.
We played backgammon instead. Rennick won. Of course he won. All three games. When he was packing up his dead bugs and crayfish, he grabbed a sketchbook from his box of goodies and tossed it across the coffee table at me. He made it seem nonchalant, but I caught the look out of the corner of his eye. “For you,” he said. “You can look at them later. I have to go help Dodge out at the dock.”
“Thanks,” I said, knowing that “thanks” didn’t really cover it. He was letting me in, even as I kept my proverbial distance.
“And Mia-Joy is coming with us tomorrow.”
“She is?”
“She is. I saw her at the Shack. She wants in.”
“Of course she does. God forbid I do anything exciting that Mia-Joy might not be a part of.”
Rennick chuckled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and headed for the stairs, because right then, right when I wasn’t concentrating on it, it had switched on inside my rib cage. Just a little spark, but it caught me off guard. And I felt open, scared. Not in charge. I balked. I had to get away.
Later that night, I sat on my bed, the Leyden jar on my nightstand. We had painstakingly glued tinfoil all around the inside and the outside of the jar, filled it with water, and then put an electrical charge in it and measured the voltage. It was really nothing, just the first in a long line of ever-improving batteries. A visual for how Rennick liked to think of the physio-electric power that we somehow tapped into. “It’s like you hold on to a charge—electricity,” he said, “but more than that. You hold the spark. Give it away through the touch.”
I looked at the Leyden jar, the flame in my chest now gone, and I tried to summon that flame. To bring it, that power, back to the surface. Conjure it. Own it.
Nothing.
I listed in my mind the reasons why I had to move forward from here, the reasons I knew it was safe to at least try. Number one: I knew when it was coming, i.e., the indigo lens. Number two: Maybe I could learn to control it. Number three: I could hea
l?
I focused and meditated, tried and tried. Nothing.
I had given up and was playing Angry Chipmunks on my iPad when I heard the pebbles at the window.
I couldn’t go down there, because I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t want to be near him in the dark.
I got up and slid my window open. “Hey,” I called quietly, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark, searching the shadows for his form. Rennick stepped into the soft light from the streetlamp.
“Hey, you.” He smiled a tender smile. “I didn’t say it earlier, and I just have to say it.” He rubbed at his chin and looked up at me through his lashes in that flirty way. “You’re so brave, Corrine.”
“Rennick,” I said, but that’s all I could get out. I had to swallow against the emotion in my throat.
“Good night,” he said, and he left through the back hedge.
I stayed awake a long while, trying to summon it, reinvigorated by his visit. And when I finally fell asleep, exhausted from the exertion, I dreamt of Sophie again. And this time, when we were on the beach, she played on the rocks, digging for fossils with Rennick.
* * *
“I didn’t know there was going to be an entire zoo’s worth of dead bugs involved.” Mia-Joy turned up her nose at Rennick’s collection of roly-polies and other dead insects spread out on the kitchen counter.
“We’ll start smaller.” Rennick looked serious today. There was an edge to his voice too. Something had changed since yesterday. He showed me the crawdads in his cooler. “I brought minnows too. I don’t know.” He ran his hand through his hair, then kept bringing out more stuff.
“Corrine, you’re going to resurrect an amoeba.” Mia-Joy cackled, then started looking in cupboards for something. But I studied Rennick, wondering at the worry line between his eyes.
“Did you make any headway last night, trying to summon it?” he asked.
I shook my head. Even after his impromptu visit, I hadn’t had any success. But I had spent a lot of time leafing through his sketches, some watercolors, some pastels. Jesus, they were beautiful. Just colors and colors, prisms of light. And there was one aura, repeated over and over, each one from a different perspective. I wanted to ask him if it was mine. I wanted it to be mine, for him to have thought so much about me, even when we weren’t together. But it seemed much too personal a question right now, in front of Mia-Joy, in the daylight.
“I’m making coffee,” Mia-Joy announced, pulling the canister from the cupboard. “Where’s the sugar?” I pointed to the cabinet next to the sink.
“Did you check your schedule online?” Rennick asked.
“School?”
“Yes, Corrine,” Mia-Joy chimed in. “Three weeks till senior year. And why the hell won’t this coffee machine turn on?”
“I haven’t even thought about school.” The whole concept seemed far away, like it belonged to a different Corrine.
“So are you two going to be all will-they-won’t-they, making eyes at each other all school year?” Mia-Joy said, eyeing me. She gave the switch on the coffee machine several last tries and then swore under her breath.
“Try another outlet, farther from Corrine,” Rennick said. “Corrine sort of interferes with machines.”
Mia-Joy laughed. “Okaaaay.” She turned her attention to me. “There’s also this article I wanted to tell you about.”
“The one where they refer to me as the anonymous teenage healer, yet they name my parents one paragraph later? Or how about the one where I’m the Gypsy medicine woman. That was on someone’s blog.”
“No,” Mia-Joy answered. “Something else.”
Rennick shook his head and took one of the minnows out of the water, placed it on a paper towel. I watched its eyeball. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t look away. Its mouth kept going, kept hoping and trying for that water.
I reached to scoop him up and put him back in Rennick’s cooler, but Rennick gave me a look. “It’s a minnow,” he said. I stopped myself.
“So tell me,” I said.
Mia-Joy was pouring water into the coffeemaker now. She and Rennick were having some sort of conversation with only their eyes. It ended with the haughty look I’d seen Mia-Joy give so many times, to her mom, to me, to everyone. Mia-Joy did what she wanted.
“Mia-Joy, we talked about this.” Rennick sat down at the table. “Are we going to start?” he asked me, a last-ditch effort.
“No. Tell me about the article.”
“You’ll only get upset and—”
“Listen,” I said, an edge to my voice, “you may have your opinions. You may think you know what I do or don’t need to know. But I am not some delicate flower. And I want to know.”
Rennick looked taken aback, Mia-Joy pleased with herself. “Okay,” she said. “The boy you spilled coffee all over at Café Du Monde last summer. Remember, Bryant? Apparently, he’s some kind of seer or telepath. Whatever.” Rennick shook his head, got up from the table, and for a second I thought he was going to leave. But he didn’t. He just walked over to the sink, stared out the window for a second.
“What about him?” I said. “Did you know he was …?”
He nodded. “His aura.”
“He got beat up, Corrine. Pretty bad,” Mia-Joy finished.
“Why? I mean, why did they—” I hadn’t been expecting this. I balled my hands into fists. I thought of Bryant’s smile, the way he always opened the door for Mia-Joy and me before bio. He had the most perfect teeth. Had they punched him in those pretty teeth? “Why?”
“He pissed off the wrong kids,” Rennick said. “Who knows? He’s different. It’s all some people need to know.” And when he turned around, I saw that hopeless look on his face, and I absolutely hated it.
And before I realized it, it was there. In my chest. Flaring.
I summoned my courage, visualized harnessing this light in my chest. I made myself stay there in the kitchen and not run away. “I gotta try it,” I said, breathless. “Stand back,” I ordered them. “Is the minnow dead? Is he really dead?” I was out of breath now, and it was working itself up into a rolling, churning engine of heat and power in my chest. My limbs started to tingle and my vision seemed to focus, clear itself of everything but what was on the kitchen table.
I eyed the dead crayfish already on the paper plate. Several half-squashed roly-polies, a long-dead cricket. It was like I could see everything so clearly. Defined.
Rennick picked up the minnow, shook it. “Dead,” he said, and what was there in his face? Did he look a little scared? I looked away. I took a deep breath, and it rolled inside me, growing and blossoming.
“It’s tied to your emotions, girl,” Mia-Joy said. She took a few steps closer, like she wanted to get a good look at what I was about to do.
“Stand back. I mean it, you two. And no matter what happens, if I pass out, whatever, don’t you touch me!” I screamed at them. And then it was there, the indigo lens, and I could feel it charging, pulsing through me, out to my limbs, like a hard, powerful light surging through me, out of my eyes, out of my hands.
I picked up the minnow, and I cupped it between my palms, and at first nothing seemed to happen. Its scales were wet and cold. It was still. I relaxed my muscles, let the surge move through me, reach its fever pitch, work its way into my hands. And then out of my hands.
The current prickled the inside of my palm. And there it was. I felt movement, something whisper-soft against my flesh. I removed one of my hands and looked at the fish. The minnow’s eye was back, the life behind it was there. The mouth moved, hoping again, its body bucked.
I dropped it back into the water-filled cooler and watched it swim. I was breathing little shallow breaths.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mia-Joy said. I looked at her. She was still blue, indigo.
“Sit down, Corrine,” Rennick said. “Before—”
“No!” I said. “It’s not gone.” And I picked up the crawdad, pressed it between my palms. Pushed the surge through me. H
eld it there in my hands. Focused it.
The crawdad came alive. That same tickle. The antennae, the claws. I laughed as I dropped it on the table, and Rennick laughed too.
I picked up those damn roly-polies, and sure enough, in a few seconds all but two came back alive, squirming, rolling themselves into little balls. I placed them on the table, moved to the cricket. I pressed him between my palms. Nothing.
“No, been dead too long,” I said. “Too long.” And I moved on to another crayfish.
I pressed it between my hands and closed my eyes. My breath came in fits and starts now, and I kind of half sat, half fell into the kitchen chair.
I became aware that Rennick was pleading with me. “No more, Corrine. It’s too much.” I opened my eyes and placed the newly alive crayfish on the table.
“I did it!” But I saw now that Rennick was right next to me.
“No more, please.” He was desperate. I didn’t know what was wrong. I was so happy! I couldn’t fight this kind of evidence, but Rennick’s eyes were pleading.
“Just one more. It’s amazing. It’s crazy, and the blue isn’t gone yet—”
“I’ll touch you, Corrine!” he said, low, serious. “No more, please.”
Mia-Joy watched us intently, playing with the newest crawdad. She placed it on the table.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked him.
But I was already nodding. The lens had shifted. It was gone now, and I was exhausted. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Rennick’s. He looked so panicked, wide-eyed and desperate.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was apologizing for. The moment passed, and Mia-Joy was jumping around.
“She did it!” Mia-Joy screeched. She gave Rennick a high five that seemed to snap him back from wherever he was.
“Proof! Real live proof!” he said.
He turned to me then, and it’s like he forgot himself. He reached to pull me out of the chair, but I recoiled.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
“I did it!” I said, smiling, trying to gloss over the rebuke. “I can’t believe it, but this is really true. This part of it.”
