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playing hide-and-seek in my memory. If I could find it—”
    My voice shook. “You’re kind of freaking me out. Find what?”
    She stood and fingered a long gray dread like a pet snake. “What they call people like you.” She covered her lips with two fingers, then her eyes darted back to me. “I’ve read about it, or heard about it. I can’t remember which. But I do remember this—silver ones are very rare. Almost mythological. So rare they’re thought to be wiped from the earth.”
    Wiped? I didn’t like the sound of that.
    She paused a moment, possibly weighing whether to continue, and then spoke softly. “I feel a strong impulse to tell you this, so I’m going to follow it. If I’m right, well then, honey, don’t go telling folks about your silver aura. It’s a risk you shouldn’t take, no matter how much you trust someone. Evil wears many masks, and there are those who want nothing more than to find someone like you.”

Six
    A
    fter tossing around in my bed all night, I finally dragged myself up and got dressed in the half light of sunrise with nagging questions plaguing me. I had gone to Say Chi’s for answers but left with more questions.
    People wanting nothing more than to find someone like me?
    Why would anyone care if my aura was silver? Yet again, I was reminded of the man and his strange words at the hospital as he faded from view. A mighty flame follows a tiny spark .
    I was the spark.
    That much I could see with my own eyes.
    But who was he?
    Bumps sprang up on my arms. Fear and uneasiness had become a coat I couldn’t remove. I rode my bike home so fast last night, I nearly got hit by a car. I was unable to sleep through my worry, knowing everything in my life had changed but not why.
    After scanning the book about seeing and reading auras and finding nothing on silver people, I sat at my desk and fired up my computer. For the first time I could remember, I outright disobeyed my father by getting online and searching “seeing colors around people” and “auras.” Silver was rarely mentioned in color charts. When it was, the description of seeing some silver in a person’s aura was pretty benign. No, I didn’t have a lot of money. No, I wasn’t pregnant. God. I yawned and scoured the pages with weary eyes for any reference to the ominous stories Faye mentioned about people with silver auras but found nothing.
    Maybe I was the only one, the last of a mysterious tribe of freaks.
    Maybe we had been wiped from the earth.
    Chills rolled over me, raising the hairs on my arms. I bit my lip and decided to forge ahead and put my query in a public forum on a site where people had online discussions about seeing auras. Perhaps they knew about scary people with all-white auras, too. I didn’t see the harm in simply asking about colors. Maybe someone else out there had seen someone silver like me or was someone silver like me.
    Maybe I wasn’t alone.
    Halfway through typing my question, my bedroom door swung open. My dad’s eyes went to the computer screen before they landed accusingly on me as he crossed the room. His face darkened when he read what I’d typed. “What are you doing? You know how I feel about this, Cora,” he said, stabbing at the power button on the computer. My question on the screen blipped to blackness.
    “What are you afraid of, Dad? How can looking up information about auras possibly harm me?”
    “It’s not information, honey. It’s mis information.”
    “Says the man who watches Edmund Nustber on TV.”
    He sighed in frustration, causing his aura to expand to dirty brown overlaid on yellow. “For entertainment,” he said. “Not for facts.”
    I folded my arms. “Well, this is my entertainment.” He started to shake his head no, to open his mouth and toss another prohibitive statement at me, but I’d had enough. I glared at him. “The more you tell me not to open a box, the more I want to.”

    Later, swerving through the halls at school, I told Mari and