Free Indigo by Gina Linko Page B

was there. I forgot myself in those paintings. They weren’t rainbows, they weren’t color wheels, not haphazard combinations or streaks of colors, but rather descriptions of things. Thingsthat defied words and description, things that didn’t really have names or titles. They were something akin to feelings. Truths. Shown through patterns and movement, through the slightest variations of blues. Shown through the arch of a slow gradation from yellow to orange, through the fierce growth from white to red to purple.
    I saw … friendship? Patience? Pride? No, those words only hinted at what was in these paintings. It was indescribable. Like the feeling you get when you’re eight years old and you wake up on Christmas morning, everything in front of you. Or how it feels to look into someone’s eyes and know that they just really get you.
    Or how it feels to do something right, something selfless—that floaty feeling underneath your ribs. This was here, spelled out in his paintings.
    I was mesmerized.
    But then it kicked on. Inside me. That roiling flame in my chest, and I was right back inside myself. Right back to the same old problem. I cleared my throat and turned around, embarrassed by how caught up I had gotten in the paintings.
    “They’re auras,” he said. He had found a T-shirt now and handed me a bottle of water from the fridge. He looked less sure of himself.
    And I was aware of how these paintings, this place as a whole, was private to him.
    “Your grandmother is Lila Twopenny?” I said. I fingered the top on the water bottle.
    “Yes, and my mother had what you have.”
    A beat passed until I realized I was staring at him, his dark blue eyes, the fringe of eyelashes. “How do you know about me? I’m sorry I’ve been … weird.” I blushed, not knowing where to look.
    “I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”
    “This is all just … kinda … an ocean of crazy for me. I think that I—”
    “I heard what people said about you at school. I read some things. I kind of study this stuff.” He gestured toward his lab table.
    “You think I’m electric?”
    “It’s what we tap into, I think. All of us who are extra somehow. Physio-electricity. You’re a conduit.” He motioned around in the air. “It’s out here, you conduct it, and you turn it into something.”
    “But how?”
    “Now you’re asking questions I can’t answer … yet.” He smiled, back to his easy self.
    “Have you seen your mom do these things?”
    “No, she died when I was a baby.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. I waited for a second, took a drink of the water. “Could I ask your grandmother? I mean …”
    “Sure. But it’s all magic to her.”
    “It’s not to you?”
    “No.” I liked his certainty.
    “Do you know anyone else who can—”
    “I did, years ago, when I was a kid.”
    I let out a sigh. I so wanted to be able to have someone who had all the answers. A guru of physio-electricity. But I figured that would be too easy.
    “So what is this?” I asked, motioning to the stuff on the table, the equipment.
    “Experiments.”
    “I see.… What are you testing?”
    “Electricity. Life.” He laughed. It was a good sound. “I just started copying the masters.”
    I raised my eyebrow.
    “You know. Early electricity. Leclanché. Franklin. Faraday.”
    “In the hopes of …”
    He smiled. Seemed amused. “In the hopes of … everything. I mean, why not? Seemed like a good place to start. I mean …” He paused and motioned to a contraption on his table. A silver ball, about the size of a soccer ball, hooked up to some wires. “It’s a Van de Graaff generator.” I shrugged at this. He flipped a switch and a barely audible hum filled the garage. The atmosphere shifted a tiny bit, and he motioned me over toward him. “When the masters first learned how to harness this, grab some of the static electricity out of the air, they were wild at what that could mean. The possibilities, ya know?”