I thwack my way through the front door. I decide I love flip-flops, the way they are seemingly so low-key and unassuming, flat and rubbery and made so you can get them caked with sand and wash them off later with a garden hose if you want, but at the same time just a little bit obnoxious because of the constant, rhythmic noise they make as you step. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Rhythmic like the ocean waves, yet plastic and man-made and entirely unnatural. Profane.
People can hear me coming, I think.
Unlike before, when I wore my silent, white ballet flats.
I am no longer a ghost.
As usual, Lexi is buried in a thick book on her desk. She glances up. “Hi, Marlena. Look at you!”
“Colorful?” I say, getting used to everyone’s surprise. “Um, too colorful?”
She smiles. “No. Cheerful. Different. I like it.”
Lexi might be lying, but I don’t care. “Thank you.”
“Angie’s on a call. She should be off in a few minutes. You can wait wherever you like. You know your way around.” She drops her eyes back to her reading.
I resist inquiring whether Finn is with Angie in the office and instead head into the wide open lab. The MRI machine glows bright as always in the stark sunlight streaming through the glass. Before I can decide otherwise, I kick off my flip-flops and climb onto the hard table and lie down. Then I inch myself along the platform until I’m inside the dome. The machine is off, so the effect is unremarkable. It’s just dark and quiet and still.
I place my hands on the inside of the dome and wait, bracing myself.
I wait and wait.
Nothing.
Just silence. Lifelessness. No visions. No sensing other people who’ve been inside this machine, no wounds either physical or emotional. The visions were here just the other day. So where did they go?
I swallow.
There is tension in my muscles, my shoulders especially. I let my hands fall away from the hard, cold metal. They come to rest on my chest.
“Marlena?” Angie’s voice is muffled by the machine. “What are you doing?”
I inch my way out, using my bare feet to pull myself and sit up. Angie is standing by the wall of the lab, seemingly frozen. I suppose it’s not something that happens every day, a girl randomly climbing inside her MRI.
“Hi.” The bright-green flip-flops are still on the floor, waiting for me. I hop down from the table, acting like me being inside an eerie MRI without it being turned on is the most ordinary thing in the world. I slip my feet into the shoes and thwack over to her. I will never tire of that sound.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, slowly coming back to life. I wonder if she notices how today I’m sporting an outfit other than my typical dressed-for-bed attire. I try to look around inconspicuously for Finn to see if he’s hiding in some corner of the lab, but I don’t see him anywhere.
Maybe he’s not coming? Maybe he changed his mind about hanging out with me?
Angie searches my face like she’s trying to see inside my mind. Her eyes shift to the machine and she nods her chin at it. “Thinking about getting an MRI?”
“Maybe?” I say.
Angie’s hair is long and loose today, and it brushes her shoulders. She’s wearing a blue button-down blouse that matches her eyes. Casual but somehow dressed up. Like she could go to the fanciest restaurant around and fit right in. “Did it feel scary, to be inside of it?” she asks me. “Or not as bad as you thought?”
“Not as bad as I thought, I guess?”
“At least this time, you didn’t faint when you touched it.”
I nod. I didn’t. How can a person feel this different overnight? Be this different? Maybe it’s all in my imagination. My attention drifts to the photos on the wall behind Angie. James Halloway. Nicole Matthews. Chastity Lang. All teenagers with gifts like mine, or something like it. “What are you really looking for when you talk to us?”
Angie’s brow furrows. “Who do you mean by ‘us’?”
“You know. All the weirdos you study.” I point to their photos. “Sonar girl and telekinesis boy. The weatherman. And me,” I add.
“You’re not a weirdo,” Angie says. “None of you are.”
“Did you put them in these crazy machines?”
Angie clasps her hands. “Eventually. Yes.”
I think about how an MRI is designed to allow someone to see through you, to literally see through your skin and muscles and bone. Designed to expose all of your secrets, to photograph them in black and white. What would an MRI reveal about me? What’s inside me that you can’t see just by looking? “What do you think you might find in my brain?”
Angie cocks her head. “I don’t know,” she says, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. She has a theory. She’s not telling me what it is. “That’s why I want to do an MRI.”
“Do you have any scans I can look at?” I ask, realizing I’m curious what they look like. “You know, so I can see what I’d be getting into?”
Her expression brightens. “Sure. Of course I do.” She beckons me to follow. We pass her office and keep on going, into a different part of the center. She leads me into another lab of sorts, but this one is small. Three of its walls are covered with giant screens. Angie picks up a tablet from the table in the middle of the room. The lights go dim and the screens grow bright. My eyes take a second to adjust.
“Oh wow!” I reach out instinctively, toward the glow suddenly emanating from the wall. “That’s. . . . those . . . they’re beautiful!” All across the screens are images of human brains. Well, images in the shape of a human brain. The colors are startling. I didn’t know they would be so colorful! Lines and splotches and lakes of red, blue, green, yellow, purple saturate the scans like maps, like winding bodies of water, like . . . “Angie, I . . . I . . . they . . .”
“What?”
Longing, as powerful as a wave crashing into shore, permeates my every cell. I swallow, I breathe, I try to start over. “This probably won’t make any sense, but I recognize these.”
Angie is close in the dark. She’s watching me, not the screens. “I don’t understand, Marlena. Say more.”
“I recognize them from my visions. My visions look like this. Not exactly. But very similar. Like, incredibly, incredibly similar.”
“Really.” Angie’s voice drops an intensely interested octave.
“Yes.” I walk up to the screen to my right, until this one image is only inches from my nose. It almost looks like a sea anemone. There is a stem—the brain stem, I assume—that mushrooms up into a million tiny waving threads, which are dominated by blues and bright purples. I want to touch it, like I might touch a person during a healing. It’s like I am looking at something that came from inside me, that is somehow mine, yet there it is on the wall, as though I painted it and hung it there. “Why does the brain do that? Light up aqua here, and lilac there?”
“It has to do with a person’s activities at the time of the scan, and what emotions they are feeling, their thoughts. Different emotions will light up different parts of the brain.” She points to the purple sections. “These colors can indicate sadness, depression. The blue is associated with anger.” She points to another scan on the wall full of pinks and reds. “Those colors indicate happiness, excitement, engagement with the world.”
I stand on my toes to look at another scan, this one a wild swirl of rainbows. “It really is like one of my visions. And the colors from my visions tell me something, too, about the person I’m healing. What they’re feeling or going through. Though shades of gray and black are what indicate pain and grief in my, um, scan of a person.” I turn to Angie. For once, she’s staring at me like she doesn’t know how to respond. “I’ll show you them sometime,” I offer, wishing she’d stop looking at me that way. “My art, I mean. If you ever come to my house—not that my mother would be happy about that.”