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 heal?
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
“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
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 Cafe 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 …?”
