Indigo

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.

10

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,