I watched two girls who called each other best friends. They joked and giggled, but the reddish light around them was anything but friendly. It competed for space in angry jabs. It made me think of all the times my body tensed around the VIPs even though they were smiling to my face. Were invisible energies always there, always telling the truth, if only we knew how to decode them?
Finn Doyle laughed with Serena Tate, who had her hand on the arm of his striped shirt. I could see the outline of a white tank underneath it. His short dark hair was a bit wild, spiked and crested down the middle. He looked like a rock-star poet, all the dark temptation of a rebel mixed with a sweetness, like maybe his biggest secret was the teddy bear under his pillow. He laughed at something one of the girls said. When he turned on the full flare of his smile, he was undeniably stunning.
Finn looked up and spotted me watching. I had an absurd urge to duck but squared my shoulders and turned away.
“Enjoy your quiet,” Mrs. Boroff said, heading out the door.
The door swung open again a couple of seconds later. “Forget something?” I called out to her.
“Yes. I forgot to properly introduce myself the other day.”
My head jerked up. I liked the question in Finn’s tawny eyes, to balance out his confident smile. I also liked the soft colors that blanketed him. He looked…warm.
“I know who you are.” A barb of pain stung my finger when I carelessly pricked it on the needle of a cactus. “Damn,” I whispered.
Finn stood beside me. “All right there?” He pulled my hand toward him to look. The crackle of energy between us flustered me, so I stared down at our hands together instead of looking at his face. Vapors of golden-orange danced from his skin. He wore a double strand of beads on his wrist and behind them, a leather bracelet with silver studs. The beads were gleaming and faceted, surprisingly delicate. A gift maybe? From a girl back home?
“Yes,” Finn said.
“Yes, what?”
“You asked if these were a gift from a girl.”
I slipped my hand from his grasp. “I did? No I didn’t.”
Perhaps I should’ve gone to the nurse. There was seriously something wrong with me. First, I fist his shirt like a deranged mental patient, and now I couldn’t trust my mouth not to blurt out fluttering thoughts.
“My mother gave them to me. Before I came to the States.”
“Oh? It’s sweet that you wear them.”
He smiled but crinkled his brows together. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“They’re very feminine,” I answered, more bluntly than I meant. Coy and flirtatious were obviously not in my repertoire.
“In actual fact, she made me promise to not take them off.” He fingered them lightly, causing the beads to sparkle in the diffused sunlight of the greenhouse. “So, are you saying you think I’m feminine?” he asked with a tilted smile. He leaned toward me a fraction closer. Intermittent hints of red hairs mixed with the dark whiskers on his jaw below his curved lips. I wondered what his bottom lip would feel like under the pad of my thumb.
I stepped backward, stuffing my rising hand into my pocket. Oh, hell no. There was nothing feminine about him. He was all male. It radiated off of him like fumes. But not in the testosterone-soaked way of most of the guys at school. He wore his masculinity like a light scent that made me want to get a bigger whiff.
Finn looked around the greenhouse. The sun-drenched room illuminated the flecks of honey in his eyes. “I’ve walked past this place a hundred times, but I’ve never been in here before.”
I followed his gaze upward to the ceiling. The translucent panes of glass were of varying ages and colors. Some crystal clear, others a faint yellow and deep amber. It felt like being inside a prism, a weathered crystal hanging in the sun, casting slanted shafts of golden light on the emerald plants inside and heating Finn’s distinctive colors.
“This place is a miracle. I don’t blame you for hiding in here.”
My gaze snapped to meet his. I looked into his eyes, which alternated between shy and knowing. “I’m not—I—I am hiding.” I looked away, shocked at my admission. I plucked the spent stems off a geranium. “It’s just that I can breathe in here.” I sighed deeply, feeling decidedly short of breath since Finn had come in. How did he manage to suck all of the oxygen out of a place full of plants?
He cocked his head toward the window. “You can’t breathe out there?”
I looked again at the wall of kids preening and posing outside, the overwhelming clouds of color rising and falling around them. “No.”
“You’re different from them.”
Story of my life. I’d always been different, never fit in, but he had no idea how different I felt lately. “That’s probably not a compliment, but I’ll take it as one.”
Finn tickled my nose with the tip of a fern. “I meant it as one.”
I swatted it away. “Why are you in here? Really. Did one of them dare you to do this?”
He grinned, amused. “A skeptic, huh? If I was dared, it’d be something along the lines of ‘I dare you to approach the beautiful girl with the large Do Not Disturb sign on her chest.’”
I stared at him. The light swirls of faint red and pale yellow radiated from him in tranquil drifts. Maybe it was the brilliance of the light in the greenhouse making me uncertain whether the light was his, but the strange thing was, I couldn’t just see it, I could feel it. Strongly. Finn had gravity, pulling me toward him.
My hand was suddenly on his chest, quickly registering the hard heat of his heart under my fingers. I pulled it away as if I had been burned. Embarrassment mixed with confusion, warming my cheeks while giving me chills. “Go away,” I whispered. “You’re too…potent.”
He bit his bottom lip and gave me a lingering stare. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Until next time, Cora,” he said with a slight bow of his head before walking out.
My body hummed, a warm aftereffect from Finn’s visit, as I meandered through the greenhouse, examining the botanical prints and pictures Mrs. Boroff had tacked to the narrow wooden slats between the glass panes. Most looked like they came out of an ancient Latin field guide. There were a few contemporary prints of rare or extraordinary flowers. But one in particular caught my eye.
My heart quickened. Someone captured on camera what I had been seeing around people since I got sick. It was a picture of a maple leaf, but it looked like an X-ray. The intricate vein patterns were highlighted in brilliant white as if lit from behind. The leaf glowed with shades of purple, pink, and indigo. A luminous white light outlined the entire leaf. Starry points of it dotted the veins. There was an entire universe contained in one leaf.
“Can you tell me about this picture?” I asked Mrs. Boroff when she returned.
She pushed her bifocals up her nose and waddled over. “That, my dear, is a leaf.”
“Clearly, but—”
“Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s Kirlian photography of the leaf’s aura.”
“Its aura?” I’d heard that word before but had assigned it to the realm of all things woo-woo, categorized with reincarnation, chakras, and past lives, a word belonging to the hippie types who made up such a big part of Santa Cruz. I couldn’t believe the possibility hadn’t occurred to me before that moment. “You believe in auras?”
“Oh yes, dear. Every living thing has an aura. It’s the energy field around us. The essence of who we are.” She leaned in and whispered excitedly, “Our dense little bodies can’t contain all that we really are. We spill out around the edges.”
With my thumbnail in my mouth, I asked, “Can people see auras?”