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concrete. The bandage was loose on her grandfather’s forehead, but that was not what made her start crying. It was the color around him, black as dried blood. For as long as she could remember, she’d seen colors around people—a deep blue shimmering around Ramona, an orange so magnificent clinging to her friend Diana she could hardly bear to look at it. Her grandfather’s, however, was the first one that reeked. It stunk like the deepest part of the compost pile, like something being eaten away.
    “Oh, honey,” Doug said. “Don’t you cry.”
    He held her and that was worse. Emma didn’t even know him. She wasn’t about to start caring for someone who was only going to die. But whether she knew him or not, his arms felt familiar. He had the same awkward hooked grasp her mother had. He made the same clucking noise between his teeth. And though her mother had sworn Ramona and her friends from school were their family, that they weren’t missing anything, Emma knew now that Savannah had lied. A real family made her cry when she’d thought she’d been perfectly happy. Pretty soon, they’d get her shouting for no good reason and missing what she’d never even known.
    Emma pulled back. She couldn’t look him in the eyes. He had two blond tufts of hair that stood up straight from his scalp; the rest was just pink, mottled skin, like the flesh of a baby whale. She looked straight at the sun, until she saw red. That didn’t stop her from noticing that her grandmother’s aura was even redder—red as blood, red as rage. It sizzled and sparked around her head; one streak flew straight to the top of the Juneberry tree and spooked the crows into flying. That stopped Emma’s tears. That was wonderful. Maggie’s meanness was like an alien creature, a monstershe wanted to hide her eyes from, but couldn’t, it was so marvelously awful. Emma had been set on running away tonight, as soon as the moon dipped behind Kemper Mountain, but she decided right then to stay awhile, because it was obvious something was going to happen.
    Her mother’s aura was the same as always, lavender, the color of a dreamer. Wisps swirled out from her to curl around Doug’s shoulders.
    “This is so wonderful,” Doug said. “And all because of this little thing.” He gestured to his forehead as if it were nothing, as if they all couldn’t see the blood slipping out around the bandage.
    Emma pressed her arms to her sides. She had expected a lot of things to happen when she turned fifteen. She figured she’d finally start filling out her bras and maybe get a chance to French kiss. What she had not been prepared for was the way she would slowly stop believing in everything. First in luck, because every boy she showed the slightest interest in fell in love with her best friend, Diana; and second in God, after her classmate Benjy Martinez was kidnapped from his own front yard, taken to the top of Mt. Tamalpais, and beaten senseless. And, just lately, Emma had stopped believing in her mother.
    Savannah had raised her on laughter and stories; every cloud had been a guardian angel, every sudden rain had meant good fortune. Now all that seemed ridiculous. Life couldn’t possibly have so much luck.
    Her mother reached for Doug’s hand.“It’s going to be fine now. I can feel it. Let me read your fortune. I’ll prove it to you.”
    “Oh no,” Maggie said. “Don’t even think about it.”
    “Mom, it wouldn’t kill you to open your mind a little.”
    “It’s open all right. Open enough to know it’s all a bunch of garbage.”
    Another thing that happened to Emma when she turned fifteen was that she started wanting her mother to be like everyone else. She wanted her to get a little mean when she was tired. She wanted her to stop getting that look in her eyes when Emma cried, like it was killing her. She really hadn’t expected to get what she wanted, but now it looked like she just might. This wasn’t Savannah’s world. She stood so