If the handsome guy was delightful to look at with normal vision, he was doubly glorious by the light of his spirit aura. He was practically a beacon, radiating a green glow of vitality adorned by silvery rays that usually indicated kindness and honesty, all mixed with flashing white sparks of determination. It was a miracle that such an intense aura didn’t make her head hurt. Surely he wasn’t like this all the time. It must be the excitement of the game making him blaze so brightly.

“Well, what do you see?” The guy said, his voice low in what sounded like reverence.

Amy held back the ‘you’re gorgeous’ screaming in her mind. She’d sounded foolish enough already. She blinked, refocusing to not lose the concentration needed to maintain the sight.

“Hmmm.”

Once Amy was over the initial shock of viewing the handsome football player’s dazzling aura, other details came into focus. Smoky, dark wisps indicating pain drifted off his arms and temples, but only in non-troublesome amounts. Probably the unavoidable results of the physicality of the game. There was the occasional hint of other colors and patterns, but nothing beyond an overall impression was truly definable. For the most part, everything looked normal, if a tad overwhelming.

She was about to move on to analyzing the other players when an unnatural feature caught her eye. A patchy, rusty streak traced horizontally along the lower center of his face, right where his mouth would be. The brownish, artificial tone suggested a manufactured magical effect. It was likely depleted of most of its original potency. Amy was no expert, but it looked similar to the broken-down residue of discount health tonics she’d studied in her lab classes.

A quick scan of the much less radiant auras of Mr. Handsome’s teammates revealed similar, yet fainter, traces of rusty residue. Amy was pretty sure she’d found the sources of bad breath and sparks that George and Terry had described. It wasn’t definitive evidence, but it was a strong lead.

She blinked away the aura vision to reveal dozens of eyes fixed on her in breathless anticipation. She turned toward Mr. Handsome, who also appeared eager to hear her verdict.

“Your lips have magic on them.”

A few fleeting seconds of profound quiet followed her announcement. Then one of the boys off to the right ruined the moment.

“Hey Higgy, you hear that? Your lips are magic.”

Boisterous laughter erupted around her, causing Amy’s head to begin pounding from a mix of acute embarrassment and the strain of prolonged aura sight usage. She wanted nothing more than to dig a deep, deep hole and then bury herself in it. Preferably with a few tons of rock piled on top. Maybe with the epitaph ‘Here lies a fool who says the stupidest things’.

The comments were getting progressively raunchier until the handsome guy whose name would be forever branded in Amy’s mind as ‘Higgy’ made a sideways, slashing motion with one gloved hand.

“Hey, that’s enough, you all.”

Mumbled, snickering comments rippled for a few more seconds as his chuckling teammates slowly complied. By this point, Mr. Armstrong had finally returned to assist, as had head coach Hansen and a couple of the refs. Mr. Hansen wasted no time addressing Amy,

“You found something, didn’t you Tucker?”

She was about to reply when Handsome Higgy stepped forward.

“I swear sir, none of us were cheating. If someone used magic on us, they did it without asking and without us knowing. Please, you have to believe me.”

While the coaches and players geared up for another argument, Amy slipped back into aura sight one last time on a hunch. Despite the growing throbbing in her skull, she soon found what she was looking for – a faintly shimmering patch on the ground a couple dozen yards away. It bore a telltale metallic residue that was turning the same sickly rusty shade that marked the players’ faces.

Back in normal sight, Amy noticed that the patch was right beneath the lowered tailgate of a pickup truck that had been pulled up near the visitor’s side benches. A group of adults stood nervously next to the truck while a tarp had been thrown haphazardly over the contents of the truck’s bed.

“Now that looks suspicious,” she whispered to herself.

“What does?” came a low, whispered reply from nearby that made Amy’s insides curl in an unexpectedly pleasant fashion. She forced herself not to look over while the feeling ebbed.

Although the logical portion of Amy’s brain told her to alert Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Hansen to what she’d just found, the more emotional side held her back. As she scanned the now worried faces of the visiting team’s players, her gut instinct told her that honestly, they weren’t really at fault. She firmly suspected that the people surrounding the truck were misguided parents determined to bring victory to their sons. It didn’t feel right punishing said sons for their parents’ misbehavior.

As the arguments grew heated, Amy found herself meeting the distressed gaze of handsome Higgy again. His face begged in silent plea for her help. Suddenly, a crazy plan popped into her head. Although it might make her unpopular with the home crowd (and get her in huge trouble if she messed up badly enough), she knew she had to try. Amy took a deep breath to solidify her resolve.

“Sirs?” she called out to the coaches and refs, “I think I might have been mistaken.”