My stomach fluttered nervously as I got dressed for school and saw how pronounced the silver light was around my entire body. With or without clothes, I glowed. I sparked. I looked freaking flammable. The shiny light was a part of me, moved with me, flared out from my torso when my anxiety erupted.
Something was definitely wrong with me, and I wanted to know what. The fever had to have affected my brain, and it was getting worse.
Exhibit A: the patrons in the busy Starbucks all had bodies shrouded in misty blankets of color. I stood in line before school and tried to gawk inconspicuously. Not an easy thing to do. I was sure that anyone who really looked at me would know I was an agitated mess. Good thing people don't really look at each other.
I fixated on the woman in front of me who, if you counted the misty blue-white fog around her, had a personal space boundary of about three feet, nearly touching my abdomen. I took a tiny step back.
It would be one thing if my eyes projected the light consistently, but no two people glowed exactly the same. I shifted from one leg to the other, eager to order my coffee and wait outside for my cousin, Mari. Preferably at a table where I could close my eyes for a couple of minutes and turn this off. I had to get my wits about me before school. Janelle might have had a point about not rushing it.
The room suddenly grew cold.
Icy air spread across my back.
My eyes blinked heavily as my energy plunged. People faded in and out of focus, and I swayed on my feet, my legs rubbery. A heaviness spread through me, as though an iron anchor had been cast inside my body. I rolled my gaze over my shoulder, that simple movement causing my stomach to lurch. Behind me, the same dark eyes that had stared coldly in the hospital stared at me again.
The man, who was shrouded in a solid cloak of white light, stood a few feet away, and an invisible rope of taut energy stretched between us. It was as though he were tugging on it, pulling me out of myself. I felt the same weightlessness, the same sense of bleeding invisibly as I had in the hospital. But when I opened my mouth to cry out, I was unable to make any sound. Feeling a snap of release, I pitched forward, and the man walked out of the building into the bright morning.
My heart thumped as I waved off people's offers to call someone for me and stumbled out into the morning sun. I looked up and down the street for the man before collapsing into a metal patio chair. Breathing deeply, I willed myself to calm down and think rationally. What in the hell was that? I had thought, maybe, the hospital incident had been a delusion brought on by fever, delirium. But that was the same man, affecting me in the same terrifying way. I was sure of it. The same man who had frightened me by whispering about fire and sparks.
He never touched me. So why did I feel as if I'd been severely violated?
Mari smiled as she marched toward me, her pace exact, like she had gone through boot camp as a toddler. I watched shimmering gold light dance off her olive shoulders and wondered if it was the screwy vision thing or her shiny shirt reflecting in the sun. Mari had a sequin addiction. All attempts at intervention were unsuccessful.
She looked at me from behind the curtain of her short black bob. "Why are you staring at me with crazy eyes?"
I blinked. "Uh, because only you could pull off combat boots with a sequined tank."
"Thanks. Seriously though, your mouth is talking fashion," Mari said, leveling her gaze at me, "but you look like you were just visited by a clown carrying a doll, with slasher music playing."
"Shhhh, it's only seven a.m., and I've already had more bizarre than I can handle," I answered in a quivering voice.
"Okay, let's get our caffeine, and you can tell me all about it while we walk to school. Dun's waiting for us. Are you okay to go to school? You look like hammered crap."
"Thanks." Part of me wanted to go home and crawl in bed. But aside from seeing colors around everyone and the abrupt blanket of fatigue covering me since I saw that man, my body was fine. My psyche was a mess. Maybe school would be a good distraction. I was spooked and didn't want to be alone.
We sipped our lattes while walking. Mari's lips tipped up in an amused grin when I told her about meeting Finn in the hospital. "Finn Doyle delivered flowers to you? That's almost worth getting deathly ill for."
"I know, right?" I inwardly cringed at the thought of seeing him at school. I was baffled by my behavior. Mostly, the part where I had lost all control of my faculties and clutched his shirt like a thug in a dark alley. The only thing worse than doing that was not knowing why. It had been uncontrollable.
"So, how you doin'?" Mari asked.
"Better. But they ran more tests because my vision is...fuzzy."
"Well, your fever was so high, you probably nuked your brain. I bet there's a mushroom cloud of intelligence around your head."
"That's the problem, though. There seems to be a mushroom cloud around everyone's head." In fact, the light surrounding Mari's entire upper body appeared to expand and contract when she breathed. I rubbed my eyes again and sighed.
"You'll be okay, prima. Not to change the subject, but I'm changing the subject. School's almost over. You think your dad will finally let you come to Chile with me this summer? Plans are in the works already."
"Yeah, right. I think we're lucky he lets me go to public school with you. If he had his
way, I'd still be homeschooled, I'd never leave the house, and if I did, I'd be bound in Bubble Wrap and have an armed escort."
"To need an escort, you'd have to actually go places."
I glared at her. "I go places."
"Uh-huh." Mari linked her arm through mine, and we walked around to the front of the school where our best friend, Dun, sat on the retaining wall in front of the flower beds. The ends of his long black hair lifted with the light breeze, as though invisible fingers caressed the silky threads.
"That dude has prettier hair than anyone we know," Mari said, waving him over. "I mean, look at him. When did he get so effing beautiful? We're going to have to look out for him, you know. I saw one of the VIPs eyeing him like he was the last steak on Bitch Island."
Mari could always be counted on to speak her mind, and she usually said what I was thinking but was too shy to say. Nobody seemed to get offended when she threw her curveballs of truth at them. Maybe it was all in the pitch.
In the last year, the Good-Looks Fairy had paid Dun a visit and granted him another foot of height, so he towered over us at six feet, with broad shoulders and a fierce Apache-warrior look. He didn't seem to realize he had changed, which only made him cuter.
The day Dun became my friend, I was thirteen and I'd discovered him crying into his knees against a tree outside my house. He was bloody and bruised from being beaten up by Mike Hahmer, then just a mini-VIP. Mike had tried to cut off Dun's long black braid. I remembered Dun sniffling pitifully and saying, "He said he was 'scalping' me." Mike hadn't finished the job. The braid dangled like a broken tail, cut halfway through.
I convinced Dun to come inside. Mari showed up, and the three of us powwowed about the half-shorn braid. We declared that he should obviously have a Mohawk because he was Apache and because it was very badass. From that day forward, Dun walked a bit taller. And nobody messed with him. Not that anyone would mess with Dun with Mari around. People could sense the undertow of danger in her. She was the only girl in a family with four brothers—that was practically prep school to be a lethal female assassin.
"Oh, and brace yourself," Mari whispered to me. "Dun's gonna grill you about Chile, too. He's serious about going. His grandma said if he can pay for it, he can go. I'm donating airline miles to the cause."
"You want him to go that badly?"
"Obviously." Mari gave me a sideways glance. "I want you to come that badly, too. But money's not your problem."
It was so wrong that Dun might get to meet my own grandmother before I did, but there was no point in griping, yet again, about my dad's militant overprotectiveness. I'd never get to go to Chile or Ireland, no matter how many times I asked. My chains didn't reach that far.
Dun kissed my cheek, then Mari's. "How are my girls?"
I swear I inhaled a palpable hit of happy when Dun touched me. I would also swear he was glowing a bright, sunny yellow. My mouth dropped open in astonishment that the color matched the bright mood. "I was worried about you, Cora. Mari says you're seeing double or something. Am I doubly handsome this morning?" He grinned.
"Hell no," Mari said. "I was just telling Cora how we need to give you a makeover."
I glanced around at the throng of students passing in all directions, swirls of colors trailing after them like their own personal clouds. The colors had substance, too, like fabric. There were endless variations, prismatic and ever-changing. I felt light-headed.
Dun eyed me with concern. "You okay?"
"I–I don't know. Don't make fun of me, but I'm seeing colors around everyone. It's overwhelming, like walking through a kaleidoscope." I looked down at my shoes. "Strange things are happening... It's scary," I admitted in a microscopic voice. "I think something is seriously wrong with me, and my dad is totally blowing it off."
And something about my mother. What happened to my mother?
"Well," Mari said, her brown eyes taking a thoughtful skyward slant that meant she was thinking, which could be dangerous. "Let's whomp on this with some research."
I eyed her skeptically. "No offense, but if the doctors don't have a clue, how are we supposed to come up with the answer?"
"Aren't there a ton of sites, like, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me dot com?" Dun asked.
Mari smacked him in the back of the head.
"My dad made me swear I wouldn't look it up online. He says misinformation will only make me paranoid, that I should deal only in facts."
"Your dad never said I couldn't look it up," Mari pointed out. "Hey! We should email Grandma. Mami Tulke's the authority on all things bizarre."
"Great," I said, with absolutely zero confidence that my little Chilean grandmother was going to be able to diagnose this strange ailment. "She'll probably advise me to sleep with a lizard skin under my pillow or something."
Mari knocked Dun's shoulder and motioned to me with her head. "Speaking of Mami Tulke, guilt trip. Now."
"Oh, yes." Dun held up one finger and cleared his throat. "Rule number one of the Articles of Friendship states we do all things of a fun and adventurous nature together. Rule number two states that if you cannot adhere to rule number one, you'd better have a damn good reason."
"I love how many rules we have, yet there never seem to be more than two," I said.
"Mission statement. We are a non-club club with rules that are not rules," Mari said as if that cleared everything up.
"I think you two are forgetting that I don't have any decision-making clout here. My dad will never let me go. It'll kill me to watch you guys fly off into the sunset without me."
Mari elbowed me hard in the ribs. "Yo, Finn Doyle is staring at you, hard."
"No, he's not," I said, forcing myself to keep looking straight ahead. "Why would he be?"
Dun leaned in to Mari. "I think something is wrong with her eyes," he said. "Cora, you don't see what everyone else sees."
I dared a glance in Finn's direction, and our eyes met and held. The air around him pulsed with a subtle golden-pink glow that radiated from him in smooth waves. I blinked and tore my eyes from Finn's. Dun spoke the truth, all right. I was definitely seeing things differently than everyone else.