by Aaron Slade
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“I’m ready,” I said. We walked to where Adam and Dad had been standing the whole time. Evee told Colonel Ford bye. It was as if all the worrying was for nothing. They didn’t suspect anything from their neighborhood human.
“No problems?” Adam asked.
“None,” I said. “Where’s my dad?”
“He teleported to his office to call your mom,” Adam said. “But we’re officially signed out.”
We decided to return to my house, but someone else approached me.
“Excuse me.” I turned around to see Zana. Her smile was a little unnerving, but it wasn’t enough to bring me down. “May I have a word with you?”
I looked at Evee, who seemed nervous. Colonel Ford didn’t notice us at all. “Sure,” I answered.
Zana led me a few feet away from where Adam and Evee waited. “Can I ask you a question really quick, Casper?”
I stayed in control of my emotions, refusing to allow my smile to falter. My sunset colored aura outshined her black one. “Go for it,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder then faced me again. Fear struck my heart for a moment before I banished the emotion altogether. Zana’s eyes turned blacker than her aura and focused into mine, trying to pierce my control. “Do you have an extra-human trait?”
She was trying to hypnotize me. I stopped myself from jumping at the sight of her terrifying gaze. I continued to stare into her eyes as I answered. “No… I’m human.” I was able to answer freely, to my surprise.
Her eyes returned to normal, and she seemed less intimidating. “That’s all I wanted to ask.” She walked away as if nothing had happened, satisfied with my answer.
Her hypnotic influence hadn’t worked on me. I noticed how bright my aura shined, and wondered if it shielded me from her influence. It was the only explanation. She had no reason to doubt her ability, which was why she accepted my answer so easily. I was certain she expected her EHT to work a hundred percent of the time.
I returned to Adam and Evee.
“What was that about?” Evee asked.
“I’ll tell you when we get to my house,” I responded. I was a little worried that Zana had taken the time to question me further. She had tried to force me into telling the truth with her ability. I got lucky– or was it supposed to work out this way?
Adam put his hands on my shoulder and the crowd of students and Military personnel disappeared.
LUST AND LOSS
Evee:
The house was empty tonight, the same as it had been the last several nights. Everything seemed calm on the base, which was the exact opposite of Fallon’s atmosphere. After the registration at the high school ended, people prepared for the town registration. Families in Fallon panicked, but the Military reassured them that if they had nothing to hide, they would be fine. It kept Dad, or the Colonel, busy for all hours of the day and night. Every citizen of Fallon was required to participate in the new registration, except the students of Fallon High School. More soldiers were deployed to Fallon, and it felt like Seattle all over again. From what little I’d seen of Dad, he grew more desperate every day to find the flyer.
Dad refused to let me leave the house all week, but I still went to school in my phantom body. The high school was back to normal now that the registration was over, but Casper’s house was far from normal. Everyone was baffled as to why his brain scans didn’t show any ghost matter. How could that be possible? Casper and his uncle consulted Dr. Miller’s book a number of times, but the book was as useless as ever. They decided that the ghost matter of Casper’s brain must be really small or hidden or truly nonexistent.
As the orange sun set behind the facilities and houses on the base, I realized more and more I didn’t want to be alone, and thankfully, I didn’t have to be. Casper would be expecting me, so I prepared to go to his house. He got off work from Legacy around eight, so he should be home by now. I ascended the stairs, entered my room, and prepared for bed, putting away my schoolbooks and dressing in my pajamas.
I pulled the cool covers up to my shoulders, and adjusted my head on the pillow. Once my eyes were closed, I concentrated hard on Casper’s house. It was like going to sleep, fading from one reality to the next. As if wandering into a dream, I opened my eyes in the familiar ivory and beige living room. The house was quiet and dark, but I could see dim light from under Casper’s door. I walked down the hallway to his room, smiling back at his pictures that hung on the wall, lingering a few seconds to glimpse my favorite picture of his younger self on the tricycle. I moved past Uncle Jesse’s room towards Casper’s. Phasing through the wood door, I found Casper on his bed wide awake.
“I was wondering if you were ever going to come,” Casper said. He wore black shorts and a white t-shirt, his usual nightclothes.
His open journal rested in front of him on his bed, and he had a pen in his hand, chewing on the end of it like a pencil eraser. I noticed a full page freshly written in the black ink, and somewhere among all the jumbled letters, I spotted my name. I’d try to sneak a peek if I could. I hadn’t read his journals again since the first time when he allowed it, but he never acted shy about what he wrote. I imagined these days there were more good things written in them, rather than his old memories of being socially tortured by our classmates. He placed the open journal on his desk. He turned to me with a mischievous grin.
“What movie should we watch tonight?” I asked. Whether we watched a movie or not it was unavoidable. Casper wanted something on his television at all times to make up for any silence. If not a movie, then we’d at least listen to some of the music chips Adam left lying around Casper’s room. Adam had left some of The Beatles music for Casper, but he still hadn’t listened to it.
“Let’s see,” Casper said. He pulled out a shoebox that contained hundreds of small movie chips stacked neatly in rows. He stored the boxes under his bed, and divided his movies into genres. I hoped for a comedy, but there was no telling with Casper. “Let’s see… how about…No!” He threw a chip back in the box and continued searching.
This became our nightly routine. I waited as he picked another film I’d never seen. It could take the length of a movie for him to decide which one to watch, and, somehow, I managed to wait patiently every time. Hitchcock, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Kubrick were among Casper’s favorite movie directors. The names just sounded old and foreign to me, but he spoke of them so much I dedicated a portion of my memory to them like old dates in history that I’d never need to know. Casper picked a movie chip from the box labeled Science Fiction and inserted it into the flat-screen television that hung above his desk.
“This is a good one,” he said. “It’s called Alien. It’s about...”
“An alien?” I guessed.
“…Correct,” he answered.
I couldn’t resist teasing him when he showed me his nerdy side. Directors, actors, and cinematography would be described in full detail. Any random fact Casper could possibly know, he knew and shared with me in great length. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Casper knew all the movies capable of making me teary eyed or laugh so hard I eventually cried, but crying wasn’t as much of a problem in my phantom body, thankfully.
“It’s by a guy named Ridley Scott, who also directed...”
Casper prattled on about other works the director had done through the opening credits. The movie didn’t really matter to me. I was more interested in what we might talk about before we fell asleep. The last hours of the day were always great for conversation. Some nights Casper passed out twenty minutes into the movie, and other nights we didn’t even watch the movie. We just talked. We talked about how we wished we could tell Sara the truth. Sometimes Randy came up, but Adam and Seth always came into our conversation.
The two of us positioned ourselves on Casper’s bed so we could both watch the movie a little, but I knew we wouldn’t finish it. Sometimes it took us three whole nights to watch one flick. Nothing happened for th
e first twenty minutes of the film except the camera panning over computers and fancy, futuristic equipment, but the film proved to be more terrifying than I anticipated. I cringed a few times, especially during the scenes with the alien. A little too bloody for my taste. I jumped, even in my phantom body, every time the creature popped out, and I envied the lead character’s bravery. Ripley was her name.
Casper rested his hand on the image of mine as he did most nights. It was the closest we could get to holding hands when we couldn’t touch, but sometimes I thought I could feel it in some strange, impossible way. I wanted to feel it– more than anything did.
“I wish you were really here,” Casper said.
I thought he’d read my mind. “Your parents wouldn’t like that, and neither would my dad.” The only reason being in his room so late was an option, was because I wasn’t actually there.
Casper started to say something, but then he paused, clamming up and avoiding my eyes. Whatever crossed his mind, he acted nervous about it. He finally found my eyes again. “Someday…if you were really here… would we…?” He let his eyes speak the words for him and he tried hard not to be embarrassed.
It struck me what he meant the moment he couldn’t say it. “OH!” I laughed, covering my mouth, hoping my phantom body wouldn’t blush. How long had Casper wanted to ask me? I didn’t know how to talk about it, but somehow Casper had more confidence than I did on the subject– what a boy! I reminded myself that I was almost eighteen, and talking about it was the smart thing to do. “I want that too… but not here. Not in your parents’ house. And especially not with your mind-reading uncle in the next room.” The lack of privacy in Casper’s house came off a little weird to me.
Casper’s eyes widened as if he’d forgotten about Uncle Jesse. Casper agreed with me respectfully. The conversation embarrassed us both, but charged our feelings and emotions with a new longing. We could barely kiss without Casper hovering off the ground, so I couldn’t imagine what being more physical would do to him. Ever since our first kiss, I’d discovered I’d opened a type of door with Casper, letting lust into his life for the first time.
“I still wish you were here. Our auras don’t blend unless I can actually physically touch you. I haven’t seen the pearl color in over a week.”
I looked down where our hands rested, wishing I could see the wonderful light he saw. The way he talked about his ability made me feel so colorblind compared to him. Sometimes, I stared and focused so hard, it was like I could see it, but I knew it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. Casper never hesitated to describe it in the best detail he could.
“Casper?” I asked. He found my face. “My aura is a light blue and yours is a tint between yellow and orange, right?”
He shook his head. “Saying blue or yellow-orange is a gross over-simplification,” he said, sounding kind of nerdy again. “I can’t describe the colors perfectly. It’s ineffable.”
I felt confused hearing the word, thinking Casper had sneezed. “In-ef-fa-ble?”
Casper found my reaction comical, trying to keep a straight face. “I heard Sara use that word the other day. It means that something can’t be expressed in words.”
“Oh!” Leave it to Sara to teach us all the words no one else knew.
“Yeah, but cyan and amber are about the closest matches on a color wheel to our auras. I looked up the colors in the Military’s encyclopedia to be certain before I assigned the colors to everyone in my journal.”
“How do our auras combine to make pearl?” I asked.
He looked up, pausing. “I don’t know… I’ve never thought about it. Maybe it’s more about the connection the two people share rather than the actual blending of colors. What if the color we make is symbolic of the people we are when we’re together?”
“Maybe it’s ineffable,” I said.
He laughed again. He told me how his parents had the same ruby-colored auras, and thought that maybe having the same shade of aura meant some kind of deeper connection. What did it mean that Casper and I had different colors?
I felt myself falling asleep. My eyelids were heavy, but so were Casper’s. As a joke, the two of us continued using the word ineffable. The alien’s acidic blood in the movie was ineffable, or Randy Alcott’s new attitude was ineffable. Zana’s motivation for killing flyers was, unfortunately, ineffable. The two of us looked for excuses to use the word, which got old quick, but somehow remained funny.
“Casper?” I asked.
“Huh,” he mumbled.
“Can I stay here tonight?”
He blinked twice. “Of course.”
“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I feel so alone when I’m there. Usually I go back after you fall asleep, but tonight I want to stay.”
He flashed his true, perfect smile for the first time in days. The handsome face I’d seen in Shannon’s vision became Casper’s constant cheerful expression. “The best part about me is that you never have to be alone if you don’t want to,” Casper said.
“My body is already asleep,” I said. “I can stay here the whole night and just dream next to you.”
“Sounds great,” he said.
With the movie still playing, Casper turned off the light, took off his shirt, and got under the covers. It was the first time he’d had the confidence to take off his shirt in front of me, and I feasted my eyes, feeling some of those lustful urges take over. I’d walked in on Casper doing push-ups and sit-ups when he was alone in his room and it embarrassed him horribly. He said he felt pressured to do some workouts with Adam as a best friend– and I knew it was the truth. As girls, Sara and I agreed that Adam had the best body in school, but Sara said Adam was an annoying health freak and protein junkie. I thought Adam’s hard work paid off, but I’d never tell Casper that. I liked him slender– someone I could wrap my arms around. Compared to Randy or Adam, Casper was small, but he did have a lean athletic build with great muscle definition that complimented his olive skin.
“Sexy,” I teased. I shot him a wink.
“Ha ha!” he laughed sarcastically. His body made one of the top slots on his long list of insecurities.
I beamed. “You should have more confidence in your looks.”
“I don’t think I’m bad looking,” Casper confessed. He pulled the blankets up to his shoulders as if to hide his body. “I just don’t know that I’m good looking.”
“Well you are,” I chimed. “You’re very handsome.”
We faced each other in his bed. If Casper had been raised differently or been treated like one of the popular guys, he’d have been an arrogant ass about his looks. Girls would have found him irresistible, or at least I wouldn’t have been his first girlfriend. My attraction for him was unparalleled to other boys I’d crushed on in the past. Because of the way he’d been treated all these years, Casper acted humble about his striking features. I loved the masculine curve of his jaw, and the dimples that formed along his chin when he smiled.
“I’ve just never been treated like I was attractive,” Casper added.
“If girls could see what I see right now, I think you would have more admirers,” I said, staring at his chest and abdominal muscles. The branded insignia on his shoulder drew more attention with his shirt off, but I could barely make it out in the dim light of the television. He noticed my eyes pause on the scar.
“I’d almost forgotten this was here,” I said.
He traced the outline of the eight-shaped mark with his finger. Lying down, it looked more like the mathematical sign for infinity I’d seen on Sara’s bedroom walls.
It was like a dream come true going to sleep next to Casper. Just knowing that he was there made a huge difference. I wished I could have felt the warmth of his arms wrapped around me or given him a kiss, but physically, more than twenty miles separated us.
“Good night,” Casper whispered.
“Night,” I managed. My mind shut down for a long overdue, relaxed sleep. Casper stayed on his side of the bed, insuring
that my phantom body had its space. He’d joked before that it would be creepy to wake up inside my phantom body– I agreed. My mind relaxed easier than it would if I’d been alone on the Military Base. While my body rested miles away, I watched Casper fall asleep.
Casper:
“Casper?”
All I could see was the boundless darkness of sleep and the blending ocean of colors in the far distance. I tried raising my hands in front of me so that my aura would illuminate my surroundings, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t see my aura at all, and I began to panic.
“Casper?”
It was Evee’s voice, calling from a long distance.
“Casper… Wake up!”
Her words grew louder and closer.
“WAKE UP, CASPER!”
I opened my eyes with a deep, swift breath of air, shocked out of the place between sleep and awake. I could barely make out my room in the darkness until I fueled my aura with Evee’s presence, and it brightened the area around us.
“Are you awake?” Evee asked. A concerned expression stretched her lips thin.
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s wrong?” My speech and movements were groggy as if half my brain were still asleep. I found it hard to concentrate.
“I think someone’s in your house,” Evee said. Her aura extinguished. “I heard movement and...”
“It’s just my uncle,” I interrupted. I lay back down and closed my eyes. “He doesn’t sleep during the night; our dreams keep him awake.” I let out a deep yawn, sensing that she was still on edge.
I could feel her disagreeing. “No… this sounded more like a window shattering,” she said.
“He may have dropped someth...”
Mom screamed on the other side of the house in such a way that my yellow aura short-circuited. The sound made me jump out of my bed like a second prick of electricity that hit me right in the chest, and my heart raced from the horror in Mom’s shrill shriek. I felt a sore lump grow in my throat. “Something’s wrong.”