Through Indigo's Eyes
Copyright © 2012 by Tara Taylor and Lorna Schultz Nicholson
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Interior design:
Pamela Homan
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons living or deceased, is strictly coincidental.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939086
Tradepaper ISBN:
978-1-4019-3528-3
Digital ISBN:
978-1-4019-3529-0
15 14 13 12Â Â 4 3 2 1
1st edition, July 2012
Printed in the United States of America
Content
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September 1997
My mind went blank.
I could see nothing but white.
No, please, no. Not again.
The guitar pick I held in my hand dropped to the floor, and I couldn't move to pick it up. My body was frozen. My father's old guitar, sitting in my lap, felt heavy and cold, like someone had suddenly placed a block of ice in my lap.
That is, until the spinning began. It usually happened right after my mind went blank and the cold set in. It was almost as if I were on a Ferris wheel at the fair and I couldn't get off, even though I wanted to.
I don't want to see. I don't want this. What if it's bad?
Spinning. Spinning. I kept spinning.
I squeezed my eyes shut until I was sure my face was creased like my favorite shirt when it had been in the drier for too long. I tried to breathe deeply, down into my stomach, to make it not happen. But there was no halting it or even slowing it down, and the swirling sucked me into a deep vortex, a tunnel. I had no control.
Sliding.
Down a long tube.
Until, suddenly, I stopped. This was itâthe place I didn't want to be, the place I had tried to avoid. Through no wish of my own, I was forced to look through a telescopic lens into a fishbowlâonly I wasn't seeing fish.
No. I'm not seeing pretty fish at all.
I was having a vision.
Two people were in my lens: a boy and a girl. Burke Brown, the star hockey player in my high school, who was dating my best friend, Lacey. I couldn't tell who the girl was. Not Lacey. Burke grinned as he wrapped his arms around her. The girl's back was to me, though she looked familiar, and I knew she was someone from our class. She wore a tight, black, short skirt and an equally tight, turquoise T-shirt, both of which accentuated her curves.
Burke tilted his face down, and the girl stood on her tiptoes, reaching up and putting her arms around his neck, her T-shirt pulling away from her skirt to show bare skin and a small butterfly tattoo etched into the curve of her back. Their lips met; they kissed, long and hard, the heat between them igniting the air, creating sizzling sparks that I could actually see above their heads. The noise of the sparks crackled. I was watching and listening in 3-D.
I felt like a voyeur. This wasn't for me to see.
Only I am seeing it.
I wanted to turn away, but I had nowhere to turn. From past experience, I knew my visions had 360-degree powers.
The kiss ended, and the girl slowly pivoted and gazed in my direction with droopy, sexy eyelids, lipstick smeared across her face.
Oh, gawd.
It couldn't be. But it was.
Amber McKinnon.
Lacey's worst enemy.
The vision dissolved. I was back to blank for a second. Then, like the snap of a finger, I was once again in my purple-painted bedroom with the black furniture, my guitar nestled comfortably on my lap. The cold was gone. The white was gone. But the vision was carved in my brain. I buried my head in my hands as my body trembled and shook. A massive headache launched itself in my frontal lobe, and I pressed my fingers to my forehead, rubbing frantically, trying to make it go away.
At least you didn't see anyone die.
“Shut up!” I had this mean female inner voice that talked to me all the time. And then I had this soothing man's voice that also came to me. They were totally opposite and made me think I was going crazy.
“I never see people die, stupid. I only see
hints.
“
I threw a pillow across the room, hitting my vintage Jim Morrison poster, the magenta and white psychedelic one where he looked as if he had wings growing out of his back. I loved the Doors, even though I knew no one else my age listened to them. Morrison's poetry just spoke to me, and sometimes it calmed me.
“Meow.” Cedar, my black cat, sat up, licked her paws, and stretched as only a cat can, with her back arched and her tail spiked. Then she looked at me with wary eyes.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered, scratching her behind the ears. “I didn't mean to scare you. Don't leave me alone, okay?”
As if she understood, Cedar gracefully walked in a circle before she lowered her body and curled into a ball, purring loudly. I petted her soft back. I wished I could forget things as easily as Cedar could and let my emotions fade in one purr. I slipped the guitar over my head and stuck it under my bed. Alone in my bedroom, I liked to strum out songs that I tried to write. The ones I made up to make me feel ⦠make me feel what? Part of the world.
Or outside the world?
Face it, Indie, you will always be on the outside.
“Don't,” I whispered. “Don't talk to me. I just want to be a normal seventeen-year-old. I want this all to go away so I can have a boyfriend.”
Indie, this is not a bad thing.
This time the voice was the soft whisper of the kind man. I had no idea who he was or why he spoke to me, but he always tried to soothe me. He was nice. But today I didn't feel like being nice back.
“Yes. It. Is. It's awful.”
Sometimes one must acceptâ
“Go away! You leave me alone, too.”
I put my hands to my ears and rocked back and forth, my bed creaking underneath me. “Lalalala.”
I kept rocking. I was always going to be on the outside because I had visions, visions that came true. And I'd been having them since I was little. When they first started, I was naïve enough to think that everyone around me also saw and heard things. I didn't know that other people weren't like me. Like that time with my friend Anna.
I had been nine, and I was with Anna at church. We were dressed in pretty dresses, and we sat on the hard wooden church pews, our legs dangling below us, not quite touching the kneeling bench. I glanced around at all the people and the rainbow of colors above their heads as the minister talked on and on. I was supposed to be listening, but all I could see were the bright colors and ⦠the pink and red hamster cage in my room. Suddenly my stomach felt sick. Was something wrong with my hamster, Teresa? Sadness swept over me and covered me like a heavy, scratchy blanket. My mom and I had gone to the pet store and bought the pretty cage to match my Strawberry Shortcake covers. And I'd picked Teresa because I liked that she was gray and brown, instead of just brown. I fidgeted until the minister stopped talking and we were excused. On the way out of church, I whispered to Anna, “Something is wrong with Teresa.”
When we got home, I ran to my room and stopped as soon as I saw her lying frozen stiff in her cage.
Anna screamed. Then she turned to me and asked, “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” My voice was quiet. Looking back, I now realize how calm my voice sounded. Unlike Anna, I didn't seem surprised at all.
“You're scary! I want to go home.”
My eyes pricked with tears. Did she really think I was scary? Why did she think that?
