Radiant

by Cynthia Hand

  “Did he say anything?” I asked her one of those times, but she shook her head, turned away, her fingers clutching at the small golden crucifix she’s worn around her neck for as long as I can remember. She left me with the image of his shadow looming over her. His black wings cutting off the light.

  My conception was not an act of love. To her, I was a curse.

  She came back to the States and hid herself away, hid her growing belly, her shame. She cut herself off from her family and her friends. People thought she was grieving for her dead husband, and she was, but she was also grieving for herself. Part of her had died that night, she told me. But then one morning a different kind of angel came to her—a golden man, she called him—who told her that I was not a curse, but a blessing. I would be a remarkable child, born of angels and men. A shining child, he said. A miracle.

  That’s when she got the idea to call me Angela, and sometime after that she decided to love me.

  And maybe that’s the snakebite she talks about. Maybe her love for me was that slowly spreading stuff in her blood, like I was a disease that infected her. She didn’t want to love me, but she did. She couldn’t help it. Still, it doesn’t explain why she insists that I stay away from love, like she knows something about me that I don’t.

  “Guard your heart,” is all she says.

  I don’t tell her that I fell in love two years ago. Truly, madly, deeply—isn’t that how the song goes?—I fell in love. That’s what I don’t have the guts to say out loud.

  CLARA

  Angela doesn’t say more than two words on the way back through the old cobblestone streets to the house. She walks like she’s late, almost a run, and occasionally she passes her hands up and down her bare arms as if she’s cold, even though it’s a balmy night. I try to stay out of her head, give her some privacy, but it’s hard. They argued the last time they saw each other—that much I can’t help but pick up. They argued and she was angry when she left him and she wondered if maybe she’d never see him again. And now she’s a hot jumble of panic and wounded pride and yearning, such a deep yearning it takes my breath away.

  She’s got it bad for this guy.

  “Are you okay?” I ask breathlessly when we reach the little house where her grandmother lives. Angela stops on the stoop and glances down the street.

  “I’m fine,” she says, too lightly. “It just got crowded in there.”

  Uh-huh.

  “Wow, I am so tired,” she says, and pushes her way past me.

  Inside, her grandmother is standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot, a sauce of some sort. The kitchen is filled with a wonderful stewed-tomato smell. I swear, the woman is always cooking, day or night.

  “Hi, Nonna. We had a nice time. Going to bed now,” Angela says, and darts up the stairs. I start to follow, but Rosa lifts a hand to stop me.

  “You meet handsome Italian boys?” she asks in her loud, pieced-together English, wiggling her eyebrows.

  “Uh—one,” I answer. “We saw one cute boy.”

  “You must beware the handsome ones,” she says, and makes a tsking noise with her tongue. “Pretty face, rotten soul. Watch out for those. Those boys no good for you. Those boys will get you in plenty of trouble.”

  Turns out, she’s not wrong.

  ANGELA

  Seeing him again is like being lit on fire. I literally feel his gaze on me, a heat that starts at my feet and washes up my body, and I look up, and there he is, sitting across the crowded car on the metro.

  My heart goes all boom-boom-boom, and it’s like the rest of the people in the train dim, leaving only him in bright colors. I have to look away. I have to remind myself that he broke my heart last time. He called me a child. I said some things I shouldn’t have. I stormed out. And when I came back he was gone.

  No calls. No emails. No letters written in his haphazardly scrawled print. Gone. I haven’t heard from him in over a year.

  I remind myself that I’m mad at him.

  But he’s smiling at me.

  Clara is looking back and forth between him and me, bright-eyed with curiosity. The heat has reached my face now. The air in here feels hot and heavy, pressing in.

  I have to get off this train, I think. I try to keep my head on straight, try to act like I don’t care, but he’s pinning me with that smile, an invitation written all over his face. I get up as the train slows down, and I say, “Let’s get off. It stinks in here.”

  All of a sudden I get the image in my head of the green sofa in his flat—sun pouring through the windows, the smell of linseed oil, the roughness of wool on my skin. I feel dizzy with how much I want to go back to that moment. I look over at him again. There’s that flash of uncertainty in his eyes that makes him look like a little boy, even though he’s anything but. He missed me. He wants to see me.

  He wants to more than see me.

  He smiles.

  I don’t smile back. The train stops, and Clara and I get off. I feel like there’s no breathable air in the world, and I take off walking, Clara trailing me with the questions she doesn’t ask, and I don’t want to explain.

  But I know I’ll go to him later. It isn’t even like there’s a choice. In a flash I find myself out on the street again, closing the door softly behind me so I won’t alert Nonna to me sneaking out in the middle of the night.

  Clara knows. That can’t be helped; she was awake when I slipped out. She’s going to want answers, and I’m going to have to provide some eventually.

  But not tonight.

  The metro’s closed. I’ll to have to walk across half of Rome, but I don’t care. I know the path by heart, by heart—a funny expression, so true. My heart knows right where to go.

  I walk and walk. I stumble down the Spanish Steps, aglow and beautiful in the dark, big pots of roses and azaleas lined up along the sides, the fountain at the bottom whispering. I love this place more than any other sight in Rome, and I’ve been avoiding it all summer, because it makes me think of him.

  Some man calls out to me drunkenly in Italian, Come here, sweet beauty, and staggers toward me. He’s harmless. I could knock him out in two seconds flat, but that’s when I start to run.

  I don’t stop until I reach his flat.

  For a minute I stand outside the door and worry. That I misunderstood. That it wasn’t an invitation I read in his eyes. That he was simply being polite, the old, “hello, ex-girlfriend, you’re looking well” expression on his face, and nothing more.

  Is this what I am, his ex? It seems like the wrong word, because he was never really my boyfriend. He was my whole world, but not my boyfriend. Quickly, before I can reason myself out of this, I knock.

  He opens the door immediately, like he was waiting, his hand on the doorknob.

  We stare at each other. He’s wearing the same thing he was on the train, a white dress shirt and khaki trousers, but the shirt is unbuttoned, open, revealing an expanse of smooth brown chest. He is Michelangelo’s David, come to life. He’s everything I remember: the dark, lightly oiled curls, his fine, almost delicate face, the chocolate eyes that make me feel like I’m drowning, never able to get enough air in my lungs when he’s looking at me like that. Like he’s glad to see me. Like he wants me. I gulp in a breath, try to say something witty, because he loves it when I’m witty, but I don’t have enough air. So I give up with the words, and then I literally throw myself at him.

  He catches my waist in his hands as our bodies crush into each other. Our lips come together. I want to touch him everywhere at once, to confirm that this time he’s real, not a figment of my overactive imagination, not a memory. He’s here. He’s mine again. My anger is gone.

  “You jerk,” I whisper when he lets me come up for air. You broke my stupid heart.

  He traces a finger down my cheek, from my temple to the corner of my mouth, smoothing over my bottom lip, which already feels bruised and swollen. I nip at his finger and he smiles, but his dark eyes are solemn.

  “Angela,” he
says like he’s worried for me. “Nothing has changed, you know. I can’t give you any more than this.”

  “I don’t want any more than this,” I say.

  A lie. And he knows it’s a lie. But I don’t care. I’ll play this game if it means I get to see him.

  “Angela,” he says again, and I shiver at the sound of my name on his lips, like a magic word or a prayer. I stop his questions with a kiss, and kick the door closed behind us.

  My first kiss occurred at an eighth-grade birthday party. Typical, I know. We were all sitting around on Ava Peters’s living room floor. We’d already been through a bunch of dumb attempts to pass time, like that levitation thing—light as a feather, stiff as a board—one of us pretending to be dead (Ava Peters, in this case, since she was the birthday girl) while the rest of us lifted her only using two fingers. Hardly mind-blowing, but it was mildly entertaining. We’d also been through a few rounds of truth-or-dare, which ended up with us prank-calling random people and challenging one another to eat dog food or try on Ava’s mother’s bra over our clothes, since none of our truths, at that stage, were very interesting. And then somebody piped up, “Hey, let’s play spin the bottle.”

  I suppose it was inevitable. Hormones.

  I’d been thinking up reasons to excuse myself and go home, because thirteen-year-olds were lame, I thought. Not their fault, really. I was mystified as to why I’d been invited to this party in the first place. Ava Peters, even back then, was one of the most popular girls in school. Why she’d taken a sudden interest in me, why she’d pressed that hot-pink cardstock invitation into my hand after our English class the day before, I could only guess at, but it made my heart beat fast, that she’d asked me. Maybe my remarkableness was finally showing, I thought. Maybe I was finally going to shine.

  But then it turned out to be another lame adolescent party.

  I got up. The words “I have to go. My mother needs me to close up the theater tonight” (when in doubt, blame the weird mother) were on the tip of my tongue, but when I heard this—“Hey, let’s play spin the bottle”—I sat down again.

  Kissing was not lame. Kissing could be interesting.

  We shifted into the rough approximation of a circle and Ava fetched a bottle.

  “Who wants to go first?” she asked, giggling nervously, and I volunteered. I took the sweating brown Coca-Cola bottle between my fingers, set it on the hardwood floor, and gave it a good, hard spin. We all held our breaths, like the bottle had hypnotized us, silent as we watched it turn around and around.

  “If it lands on a girl, spin again,” Ava said. Of course we hadn’t thought beforehand to lay down any sort of ground rules, like where would we kiss? On the mouth or the cheek or what? For how long? In front of everybody or alone?

  I gave Ava my best oh yeah? face, which I’d been practicing in the bathroom mirror at home. “What, are you afraid I have bad breath?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, because then the bottle stopped.

  It wasn’t pointing at a girl. It was pointing at Christian Prescott.

  Christian Prescott.

  Christian Prescott was the hottest guy in school, no contest. Green, green eyes, with a shock of wavy dark hair that he was always brushing out of those green, green eyes, killer smile, tall and lean but not lanky or awkward the way so many of the other boys in our class were. Perfection, that’s what he was.

  I would never in a million years have guessed that my first kiss was going to be with Christian Prescott. What were the odds?

  “Okay.” I cleared my throat and wondered if my face was as red as it felt.

  He did not look particularly thrilled by this situation, but he tried to act cool with it. He was nice, in addition to being hot. He jumped up and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me gently to my feet.

  “The porch?” he suggested.

  “Okay.” This seemed to be the only word I was capable of forming.

  Everybody else sat there frozen, shock-faced, as he led me to the back porch. It was snowing outside, tiny white particles catching the porch light. Christian closed the door firmly behind us, then joined me as I leaned over the porch railing, staring out into the darkness behind Ava’s house.

  “We’d better make this quick, or we’ll freeze to death out here,” he joked.

  I wanted to say something sassy like, Oh, I think we’ll be warm enough, trust me.

  “Okay,” is what I said. Again. I wished that I had brought lip balm. I had a tube that tasted like Dr Pepper. That would have been nice. He could have told everybody at school that I tasted like Dr Pepper. What would he tell them now?

  He leaned closer, his green eyes somewhat wary, like I might bite him, but also curious. He smelled like Ivory soap. And Doritos, since we’d been eating them at the party earlier. I probably smelled like Doritos, too, but at least we both did. He wouldn’t be able to say that I tasted any worse than he did.

  My brain struggled to process: Christian Prescott. Right here. Right now. About to kiss me.

  My first kiss.

  I tried to remind myself that I was, in fact, completely worthy of this guy. He was but a mere human, and I was the child of angels. One half-divine being. A shining child. Christian Prescott was lucky to get to kiss me.

  “Close your eyes,” he mumbled, like he of course had done this kissing thing before, and this was how it was done properly—you closed your eyes.

  “Don’t boss me around,” I said. I put my arms around his neck and pulled his head down until his lips were on mine. I waited for lightning to strike. I waited for fireworks. I waited for sweeping music in the back of my mind.

  Nothing.

  That’s what happened. Nothing.

  His lips were warm and soft on mine, gentle but not passive, and it should have been amazing. It should have made my toes curl or something. But it didn’t. It was like kissing my brother, if I’d had a brother. Which I don’t. It was almost gross, in that way. Completely fraternal.

  I stepped back. He stepped back. He smiled like he was relieved. “That was good,” he said, and I could tell that he was being kind. He knew that it was my first kiss.

  He really is a stellar guy. I don’t know why Clara doesn’t give him a chance, already.

  “Okay,” I said to him, back to okays again. “Let’s go in.”

  And that was that.

  After the party my mom asked me if I had a nice time.

  I shrugged. “Parties are lame.”

  She seemed pleased by my answer. “Were there boys there?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer—she’s the type of parent to call ahead and grill Ava’s parents about their plans for their daughter’s festivities.

  “Boys are lame,” I said, and made a face. Then I went up to my room and plunked down on my bed and took out my journal.

  First kiss today, I wrote. I didn’t feel anything spectacular. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

  I put the pen down. I’d kissed the hottest boy in my school, and I’d felt nothing.

  I picked the pen up again.

  Or maybe I could never be content with a normal boy, I wrote. Maybe I’ll have to wait for someone remarkable.

  And that’s exactly what I did. I waited. I knew the moment I saw him that he was the one I was waiting for. The one whose kiss would make me see stars.

  Someone remarkable.

  CLARA

  It takes a few minutes to extricate myself from Angela’s grandmother. Angela’s already in bed when I arrive upstairs, covers pulled up to her chin, eyes closed. I get in my pj’s and slip into the creaky metal-framed bed next to her, then turn out the light and wait for her to say something. Anything. But she turns her back to me. We both lie there in the dark and listen to the sounds of Rome, the mopeds on cobblestones, car horns, people shouting, the snatches of laughter and fragments of Italian from down the street.

  This is not a city that goes to bed early.

  After a while we hear Rosa shuffle into her room for the nig
ht. Angela sits up. She slides out of bed and moves toward the door, not stopping to get dressed, which means that she never got into her pajamas in the first place. She’s like a cat burglar as she pads her way silently down the hall and sneaks down the stairs. I hear the creak of the front door. And then she’s gone.

  Suddenly I’m wide awake.

  I wonder if there was something I missed on the train, a secret conversation that said, Meet me later, at that place, or if she simply knows where to find him; or maybe she’s randomly gone to look for him in this city of a little less than three million people. Or I guess it’s possible that she’s not with him at all but wanted to be alone so I wouldn’t see how upset she is, so she wouldn’t have to talk to me about it. I’d understand that. I know that love can hurt.

  All I know is, she could hardly wait to get out of here.

  It’s not fair, I think. Angela always pushes me to tell her everything that happens to me, and if I hold anything back and she finds out about it later, she gets all miffed and hurt and stuff. But when it comes to her own life, oh no, that’s personal. No secrets in Angel Club, she always used to say. Whatever. So yeah, as her official best friend, I’m offended.

  But then there’s the part where I don’t tell her things, either.

  Two hours pass. Three. It’s now two in the morning, and still no Angela. I get up, pour myself a glass of water, drink about two sips and dump it, stand and stare out the window onto the empty street below. The city’s quieter now. A cold draft moves across my bare feet and I shiver. I tell myself that Angela’s tough. She knows how to take care of herself. She’s been coming here every summer for her entire life, without incident. She’s probably fine. I force myself to lie down again, but sleep’s not happening. I keep coming back to that memory of hers I caught earlier, a moment away from being kissed. The anticipation of his lips on hers. The charged space between them. The sharing of breath. The look in his eyes as he decided to throw caution to the wind, and kiss her.