Free Auracle by Gina Rosati Page B

body back before he finds out what’s happened.
    I spend the night hovering over my bed while Taylor snores, hoping she’ll pop out of my body during a dream so I can get back in. Sometime around one o’clock and then again at four, my mom comes in and shakes Taylor’s shoulder, just like the doctor told her to. Taylor wakes up enough to grouch at her, and then my mom leaves us both in the dark again.
    I wonder if Rei considered the danger of someone taking possession of my body if I wasn’t in it. I never really thought of it before, but it makes sense. If there’s an empty shell left lying on the beach, won’t a hermit crab move into it? I’ve encountered spirits in this dimension who are obviously dead and wandering, but I’ve always shied away from talking to them. Maybe my subconscious was smart enough to realize if a dead soul had known I’d left a perfectly good living body lying around unguarded, it would just be an invitation for trouble.
    *   *   *
    Watching Taylor sleep is like waiting for a pot of water to boil. I need a better plan of action here, and since planning has never been my strength, I consider how Rei would deal with this.
    One of Rei’s favorite quotes is from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” It’s a principle of aikido, too, to get inside your enemy’s mind and find out what makes them tick.
    In principle, that should work, but know myself? I can’t even get into myself right now. But maybe I can learn a little more about Taylor. Really, all I know about her is from what I’ve seen at school. I’ve heard she lived in a big house on Main Street, which makes me wonder how she’ll handle slumming in my crappy little house. What will she think when she wakes up in the morning and has to deal with my hungover father? I wait until first morning light to head over to Main Street and cruise up and down until I find a mailbox with block letters spelling Gleason stuck to it. I don’t bother with such formalities as ringing the doorbell. I just slip right through the wall and find myself in a lavish master bathroom that’s bigger than my bedroom.
    The girl was loaded. I mean, you can’t even compare apples to oranges; this is more like watermelons and raisins. I drift through a wall into an opulent master bedroom where the king-sized bed is still made, and then another bedroom that has the sterile feel of a guest room. One of the bedrooms is decorated in a sporty boy motif, with a tween-aged boy asleep in the bed. The last room looks like a picture out of a magazine, and the furniture in here easily costs more than all of the furniture in my house combined. Her computer is state-of-the-art, and she has a flat-screen television attached to one wall. On another wall, there’s a floor-to-ceiling bulletin board hosting a rainbow of award ribbons and dozens of photographs. I take a minute to check out all the glamorous shots of Taylor. Nope, she is not going to like living in Anna Rogan’s bony little body.
    Three doors lead out of Taylor’s room. It’s pitch-black through one door, so it’s probably a closet; one door leads to the hallway; and the last one leads into her own full bathroom. She has her own bathroom? She had her own bathroom … with cushy two-ply toilet paper and everything. Again I wonder: what did a two-ply girl like Taylor see in a one-ply guy like Seth?
    And how will this upper-class girl deal with my lower-class life? Maybe after she’s had to clean my father’s puke off the toilet seat a few times, she’ll leave my body of her own free will.
    Or maybe she’ll find my life is better than no life at all.
    The smell of coffee wafts up the stairs. I follow it downstairs to the kitchen where Taylor’s parents pace around two silent cell phones which sit on a granite countertop. Their auras are a strange mix of anger, sorrow, and hope. If I could appear right here and tell