• Momma tells me to pretend I don’t see the colors. “You’re making that up!” she tells me. “There aren’t any colors sticking out of people’s heads.” There are I tell her. But she just doesn’t listen. She can’t see them but their plain enough to me. There are blues around some people and reds around others.
    Ms. Fuller, who was my favorite teacher in the world, is the one that told me that the colors were called auras. She had a golden aura. So beautiful. She was always so nice. She told me that I was special, that it was a gift that I can see the aura.
    Momma acts like it’s a curse. She gets really mad when I talk about them, and tells me to be quiet about my craziness. I’m not crazy, and ms fuller knows that most of all.
    My grandpa hand a gray aura. A light gray. Kind of like fog. He stayed at our house because he was sick but one day Momma forgot to give him the medicine. I saw that all the color went away. When I told Momma she got real mad and started to yell at me. She said I was old enough to stop with all my lies.
    The next day, my grandpa died. I wanted to ask if having all the color go away had something to do with him dying but momma was already so upset and I didn’t want to make it worse.
    Once I saw a man with a black aura. He was kind of scary. He told me he had candy and he would give me some if I got in his car. I wanted the candy but I was afraid of all that black around his head, so I ran home as fast as I could. A few years later, when I was old enough to go to school, Momma told me never to get in the car with strangers. I didn’t know that when I ran from the man. All I knew was that I’ve never seen a black aura and I never want to again.
    I don’t know what color my aura is. I look in the mirror but I can never see it. I like thinking my aura is a light gold, just like Ms. Fuller. But I don’t tell momma that.