Indigo (12 page)

“You better hurry,” she said, glancing toward the door of Mrs. Twopenny’s room. “And Mr. Huskins said to use the
cafeteria kitchen door.” I was kind of shocked that Mom was letting me go with Rennick, not really knowing him. It seemed out of character, but as I turned to follow Rennick toward the elevator, Mom called, “Tell your grandfather I’ll bring those seeds I promised him next week.”

And then it all came together for me. Duh. Mom knew his family. Figured. And this made me feel a little better too.

We walked toward the front entrance of Chartrain, and I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting a camera flash or something. I took account of my body, the way my skin felt, the normal, everyday feeling in my chest. It seemed almost difficult to recall the faraway feeling of the indigo flame under my ribs.

We neared the front desk, avoiding Holly, who was on today, and I peeked out the front window. Sure enough, there were two news vans, and at least a dozen people in front on the sidewalk.

We turned, facing each other for a second in an odd, what-do-we-do-now kind of way, and Rennick just laughed, easy and low. “Let’s go through the back,” he said. He stuck out his elbow for me to lock my arm through.

I hesitated just for a second and was actually about to loop my arm through his when he thought better of it. “Oh, sorry,” he said, dropping his arm.

We walked side by side toward the cafeteria. I lengthened my steps to keep up with him. “I’m parked in the back lot, so that works,” he said.

“Why do you care about me? Why did you try so hard to help me?” The words came falling out of me just as we hit the cafeteria.

I stopped, waited for him to answer. He looked back, a serious expression on his face, but one corner of his mouth rose into the slightest of smiles. “Your aura.”

I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

“What about my aura?”

He smiled fully then, a little bit embarrassed—flirting? Was he flirting? I smiled too, and my stomach did this flip-flop. God, he was hot. That tousled hair. And he liked my aura.

“I can tell a lot about people from the colors, and I’m usually—no,
always
—right.”

I told myself to settle down. How could I go from so abnormal right back to total high school girl in the amount of time it took to notice the ridiculous length of his eyelashes, the deep indigo of his eyes? I swallowed hard, rolled my eyes at myself. I started walking toward the kitchen again, and he fell in step beside me.

“I have a lot of questions,” I said.

We reached the kitchen, where Rennick said hello to a few people. Then he pushed the back door open, toward the alley. We stepped outside and looked at each other.

“I really should say thank you. I mean, I don’t know what is going on exactly, but the possibility that I am not the Grim Reaper herself is pretty explosive. I can’t thank you enough for trying to help me.”

“Of course I had to help you, Corrine. You saved my grandmother,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun. He pointed toward the gravel lot on the left. “And you’ve got this inexplicable power, this sixth sense going on. We extrasensory loners gotta somehow look out for each other.”

Oh, so that was it. I was part of some sliver of society with this gift or something. Of course that was it. Weird kinship. He had a duty to reach out a helping hand. I shook my head a little as I followed him to the car. Of course. I was silly for thinking it was something else. Something more personal.

As Rennick chivalrously opened the passenger door for me, I actually swallowed a laugh. I wasn’t twenty-four hours back into the regular world. Not twenty-four hours back into interaction, talking, relating with others, and already I had fallen into the worst trap for a seventeen-year-old girl: a cute guy with a killer smile.

He drove like a grandpa, five miles under the speed limit, and he never took his eyes off the road. It made me want to make a joke about it. I almost did, but he was so earnest, sitting at the wheel of his dirty, beat-up Jeep, old country music playing on the radio.

“You know Mia-Joy?” I had nearly forgotten how to make conversation.

“Some,” he said. “Interesting aura.”

I wondered at this. But I plunged into a different subject. “You go to Liberty.”

He nodded. Nothing else. I rubbed my knuckles on my lip, thought about all that had happened, where I was, who I was with. “You went to Penton Charter.”

“I had to leave and come live with my grandfather. Help him out.”

“That’s nice of you.”

His expression changed a little, darkened. “Plus, I needed a change.”

I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. There was something behind his face I couldn’t quite read. I let it go. I looked out the window, leaned my forehead on the cool glass. It felt too weird to talk, to let myself look at him, to not temper all of my movements and interactions. I couldn’t exactly remember how to be normal. How did I used to hold my hands before? How did I tilt my head? Was I staring too much?

“We’ve lived like bachelors for a while,” he said as he pulled into the driveway, as if this explained many things: the house, the boat propped up on his porch, him. He stopped the car.

“We’re here.” He got out of the Jeep, and Bouncer came bounding out from the nearby tree line. His front paws were on Rennick’s shoulders in a heartbeat, and then he put his chin to the ground, looking up at me with those big brown eyes.

“He wants you to pet him,” Rennick said.

I bent down next to the dog. His tail beat harder against the ground. His eyes were so humanlike. I reached out my hand. My
hand
. Was I really going back to a normal life? Was what happened with Lila Twopenny enough to prove anything?

I reached my hand out and placed it on Bouncer’s forehead.

I was going to try.

His fur was smooth and glossy. I scratched his ears, his neck, and Bouncer rolled over on his back, put his paws in the air.

“Oh, you’ve made a friend,” Rennick said, and I rubbed the dog’s belly.

“You sure he’s not a bear?” I said. “He’s totally big enough.”

“And he’s just a pup.”

“Really?” Bouncer was following us up the porch now.

“Yeah.” Rennick laughed, his eyes crinkling into half-moons. “Dodge found him out near the gravel quarry. Someone had neglected him, hit him, I think. He was mean, snarling, if you can imagine it. Bit my grandfather on the hand. Bit me too. More than once.”

“Jeez,” I said. “Is that where you got that scar, the one on your elbow?” I had seen it when he was driving, a messy white zigzag of flesh from elbow to wrist.

“Yeah,” he answered. “And this one.” He pointed to his eyebrow, and I could see small, jagged lines.

“Were you scared of him?”

Rennick shook his head, put his key in the front door. “He just needed to learn kindness from someone.”

I followed after Rennick and Bouncer, turning that phrase over in my mind, loving the frank way Rennick had said it. As if it had been so obvious. Kindness. The answer.

We walked immediately into a family room with polished wood floors and an old woodstove. The walls were cluttered
with maps, some framed, some held up with thumbtacks; some were recent aerial images with crisp colors, others black-and-white, smudged, older than old. I walked directly toward a plain wood frame holding a dog-eared, yellowed, gorgeous map.

When I got closer, I could see that it was topographical, mapping the land, the rivers, the streams, and the swamp areas of this little wedge of the Gulf Coast. It was hand-drawn, intricate, handsome. And it inexplicably reminded me of Rennick himself.

“It’s from the eighteen hundreds.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Not too long after the Louisiana Purchase and everything. It’s French.”

I noticed then that the key and the compass rose were in French, which made the map seem all the more elegant. I found the French Quarter; it was marked, and there were several named parishes, all written in a romantic curlicue script.

I followed Rennick into the kitchen and sat down at the farmhouse table. The kitchen had white cabinets, white everything, very homey but spare and simple. There was no microwave, no dishwasher.

“We kind of live like pioneers,” he said, chuckling. “Been just me and Dodge for a while. But Lila’ll soon …” His voice trailed off.

I chewed on my thumbnail, didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want to take credit. It didn’t seem real.

“You must be hungry,” he said finally. He pulled out an old iron skillet.

I suddenly realized I was. “Starving, actually.”

“Omelet or grilled cheese? That’s about all there is on the menu del Rennick.” He cast a smile over his shoulder at me, and I thought I saw his hand shaking a little when he placed the frying pan on the stove.

“Grilled cheese, and thank you,” I said.

“I’m hungry too. I just figured—”

“No, I mean, thank you for getting me out of Chartrain today. For trying so hard to help me the other day. For—”

He stopped what he was doing, turned and looked at me. “You don’t have to thank me, Corrine.”

I shook my head. I got up, leaned on the counter. “Rennick,” I said, and saw the left corner of his mouth go up in a nearly imperceptible grin when I said his name. “Why, though? Why did you try so hard to help me when I was nothing but a bitch to you? I mean, did you just know I could help your grandmother or—”

“No, I didn’t even think of that.” He didn’t look at me. He stared down at the floor between us, scuffed the heel of his shoe back and forth for a second. And it hit me at that second how much Rennick reminded me of this shy kid Lester Meechum that I went to grade school with. I wondered at that. Could Rennick Lane be nothing more than the shy, smart, nerdy kid in the class, stuck in the body of a rebel with the hair of some kind of emo lead singer? This idea
seemed right. And I was beginning to realize that Rennick didn’t even know how he came off. Did he still see himself as that nerdy kid? A boy with a microscope and test tubes in his bedroom?

“Why did you help me?” I repeated.

“Can’t a guy just like your aura?” He didn’t look at me, but he smiled. My mouth turned up as well. The air between us prickled again, and the tension against my skin changed, the air against me … tightened. Rennick’s head snapped up.

“Do you feel that?” I said. Bold. More like the old Corrine than ever.

Rennick nodded.

“What is it?”

“A charge. Electric. Physio-electric.”

“I only feel that with some people. Between me and certain people. Or only before … before an event like Mrs. Twopenny.” I was really putting my cards on the table. For just a moment, I realized that I was here in this backwoods house with some guy I hardly knew, telling him my darkest, deepest secrets and doubts. I tried not to stand outside of myself and see it like that. Because it seemed like the first time in a long, long time that I might be getting back to some kind of normal, and I didn’t want that to end.

Rennick went to the fridge and took out bread, cheese, and butter. “I feel it too, sometimes. I know what you mean. I think … I think it ties into body chemistry, electrical impulses in the body. That’s how a lot of what you do and
what I see works. I think that’s how it all works. Proving it is another story.”

He turned toward the stove. I sat at the table again, and when he passed by the sink window with the sun streaming through, the light hit him; for a split second I saw a rainbow of colors around him, enveloping him, lots of reds and oranges. It left as soon as I noticed it. I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes. I almost said something. I started to, but I stopped myself. Had I just seen his aura?

No. I dismissed it. A trick of the light.

“Rennick, I have a zillion questions.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Just ask. I want you to.” He flipped the toasted bread with a spatula. “I just don’t know how to get started. I don’t want to scare you away.” And although he wasn’t turned completely toward me, I could see in his face that he meant it. His brow was furrowed, his jaw tight. He was nervous.

I sighed. “Tell me exactly what you see.”

“Colors. Halos of color. Sometimes colors that seem like they are radiating off of people’s skin, their whole bodies, like an outline.”

“So what exactly is interesting about Mia-Joy’s?” I asked.

“Jagged, ripped hole in her aura.”

I watched him finish toasting the sandwiches. Had I been in Chicago, I would’ve laughed right here. Thrown my head back and laughed at the whole situation. But I was not in Chicago.

Rennick went to the fridge, got a jar of pickles, a pitcher of tea. He put the grilled cheese on plates, scooped out a couple of pickles from the jar, and brought the food to the table. “Grilled cheese and pickles. Gotta love ’em.”

“So, a hole in an aura, does that usually mean … what?”

“There is no manual,” he said, taking a seat next to me, handing me a glass of ice-cold tea. “But I’ve seen similar things with some people. It usually isn’t good.” He looked at me hard.

I swallowed. “Her diabetes? She’s okay, though. Her mother said that it smoothed out since she switched to shots.”