Seers Read Free Page A

a week later I was sent home.
    I’d actually grown pretty used to it. The perpetual swirl of colors around people was now almost easy to ignore. And so now—two months later—as far as my family was concerned, I was perfectly normal.
    Only one other person knew about my strange new vision, and that was my best friend, Kellie Pearson. (Or Lee, as she’d preferred ever since the third grade, when Jimmy Bates had teased her for being girlie. Lee had beaten him up to prove her point, and also changed her name.)
    But though I pretended to be normal, I knew I wasn’t. After almost an entire summer of ignoring the strange light show, and the gold lining that everyone had around them, there were still times that I couldn’t help but focus on the auras that revealed so many emotions.
    Jenna was shoving a piece of toast in her mouth. The usual
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    thin golden thread outlined her body, and the blue color of content swam around her body. Josie looked much the same, sipping her juice. Only mixed in the blue was a tinge of red. I’d come to think of that as her competitive streak. It was almost always present in her, even when she was asleep.
    Grandpa was still hiding behind his paper, but his visible curling fingers were surrounded by many colors. Green, which I’d come to decide was uneasiness, mixed with blue and flecks of yellow happiness. It was easy to imagine that whatever he was reading was making him worry—or maybe he was thinking about the accident, too. I didn’t need to see auras to know that Grandpa thought often of his son’s untimely death.
    Grandma was as she always was. Equal amounts of blue and yellow. And then—just at the edge—gray. She was still mourning the loss of her only child, and though she was a positive person, that sadness never left her completely.
    Not for the first time, I glanced down at my own arm. But all I saw was the regular lightly tanned skin. For some reason, I couldn’t see my own aura. At first, I’m not going to lie, I felt a little cheated by this fact. But, later, I decided that it might be for the best. It would only be depressing to see what I was feeling: gray, more gray, some brown for pain, and then maybe the smallest bit of white—hope that things wouldn’t be like this forever. That someday I would wake up and think of something else other than the car accident. That my first thought in the morning wouldn’t be covered in pain and loneliness.
    “You girls better hurry,” Grandma called from across the kitchen, breaking through my thoughts. “You don’t want to be late your first day back.”
    s
    I drove the twins in my car. It wasn’t anything fancy—an older and slightly rusting Hyundai Elantra, maroon in color. My parents had given it to me for my seventeenth birthday. At one time it had 12 K • • •
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    been new, but that time was long past when they’d bought it. But it was fairly priced, and surprisingly reliable. All in all, I loved it.
    The girls took their regular places in the backseat, and I pulled out of the driveway carefully. Some people would probably consider me a boring driver, because I was so cautious now, so slow, but I would never take car safety for granted again.
    “Pass me your iPod,” Josie demanded, leaning forward against her seatbelt.
    Without taking my eyes off the road, I waved a hand toward my backpack, sitting on the seat beside me. “It’s in there.” Josie groped for the backpack, and finally managed to drag it into the back seat. I heard the zipper pull and seconds later my sister let the bag thump to the floor. “Any requests?” Josie asked, already tapping and sliding her fingers on the dial.
    “No Taylor Swift,” Jenna said, nose buried in a book.
    Josie found what she was looking for, and leaned forward to plug in the iPod. Seconds later the beginning strains of “Love Story” filled the car.
    “Make it stop!” Jenna groaned.
    I