by Cynthia Hand
I can’t help but giggle at the excited puppy-dog expression on her face. “You’re like a kid in a candy store here, aren’t you?”
“Oh come on, can you blame me? This is an amazing research opportunity.”
Leave it to Angela to see this as a “research opportunity.”
“Okay, let’s hear it,” I say.
She fishes her notebook out of her bag and turns on a flashlight, flips through the pages to find her place.
“Okay,” she says, clearing her throat, “here’s the skinny: the northwest branch of the congregation has been meeting here since just after Wyoming officially became a state back in 1890. Right now there are about forty members.”
“So it’s not all Jackson people?”
She shakes her head. “They’re from all over the northwestern United States. But I did find out that Jackson is a kind of angel-blood hot spot, with the highest concentration of us living here than anywhere else in the area. I couldn’t get anybody to tell me why though. I have a theory that it’s the mountains, but that’s just a theory.”
“Okay, Miss Wikipedia,” I tease.
She grins, swats at me feebly, and then returns to the notebook. “Most of the angel-bloods here are Quartarius. There are only nine Dimidius, and they’re the leaders of the group.”
“Right. Because the Dimidius are so rare and special,” I say with a hefty dose of sarcasm.
Angela scoffs, but there’s an excited glitter in her eyes. Here, where most of the people are a mere quarter angel, Angela is a half. She is rare, and special, and all that.
“I’ve also noticed that everybody treats your mom differently than the others,” she adds. “Like at the campfire, everyone always listened carefully to what she said, like she’s a font of wisdom or something, even though she didn’t talk very often.”
It’s true. When Mom got up and said she was going to go to bed, everybody moved carefully out of her way as she passed. There was something about the way they responded to her, a particular kind of reverence.
“Maybe she’s their leader,” Angela says. “I think it’s a democracy here, but maybe she’s like the president.”
Man. How could she not tell me any of this?
“Are you okay?” Angela asks. “You look like you’re freaking out again.”
“Yeah, well. This isn’t exactly a place I expected to be when I woke up this morning, you know?”
“I know. I can’t believe Christian knew all about this, and he never told us,” she says, still peeved.
“Oh, lay off Christian. It’s not like you’re such an open book yourself,” I snap, using Christian’s words. “Hypocritical much?”
Angela sucks in a breath. Her jaw tightens. Then she tosses her long pigtails over her shoulders, snaps her journal closed, and lies down, putting her back to me. Off goes the flashlight. We lie there in the dark, stars overhead, the whispering of trees. It’s way too quiet. Angela doesn’t say anything, but I can tell that she’s not asleep. Her breaths are shaky, and I know she’s mad.
“Ange . . . ,” I say when the silence grows unbearable. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I get so sick of it, too, all the secrets. Sometimes I feel like nobody in my life is completely straight with me, ever. It really ticks me off.”
“No, you’re right,” she says after a minute, her voice muffled by the sleeping bag. “Christian never promised he’d tell us anything. This place is classified, I get that.”
“Did you just say I’m right?” I say as solemnly as I can manage.
“Yeah. So?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to write it down or something. In case I never hear you say that again.”
She turns slightly and shoots a grin over her shoulder. “Yeah, you should do that, since you’re unlikely to be right ever again.”
Fight officially over. Which is a relief, because Angela can be a royal pain in the behind when she’s angry.
“The secrecy is part of being an angel-blood,” she says right as I’m starting to fall asleep. “You know that, right?”
“What?” I say groggily.
“We always have to hide ourselves. From the Black Wings, from the rest of the world. Take your mom, for instance. She’s over a hundred, but she looks like she’s forty, which means all her life she’s had to keep moving so that people wouldn’t notice that she didn’t age naturally. She always has to have a secret identity. After that long, the secrecy would become second nature, don’t you think?”
“But I’m her daughter. She can trust me. She should tell me about these things.”
“Maybe she can’t.”
I think about this for a minute, remember the fear I sensed from her earlier at the campfire. Fear of what? I wonder. What’s so scary about us talking about hell? Besides the obvious, that is. And why hasn’t she told the congregation about what happened with Samjeeza?
“Do you really think she’s the leader of the congregation?” I ask.
“I think it’s highly possible,” Angela says.
Then I realize something else: my mom knows Walter Prescott, Christian’s uncle. Which means that she probably knew from the day I came home and said his name that Christian was more than just a boy I had to rescue from a forest fire. All that time, she knew that Christian was an angel-blood. She knew that my purpose was more than a simple search and rescue.
She knew.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whisper. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad that I never told her about Angel Club.
“Just catching up now, are we?” Angela whispers back.
“I guess.”
“She could have a good reason,” Angela says.
“She’d better have a good reason,” I say.
It’s a long time before I fall asleep.
I dream of roses, white roses, the edges already starting to brown. I’m standing in front of a mound of freshly turned earth, staring down at Mom’s nice black pumps on my feet, and I’m holding roses. Their sweet scent fills my nose. I can sense the presence of other people around me, but I don’t look up from the dirt. This time, I don’t feel grief so much as I feel hollow inside. Numb. The wind stirs my hair, blows it across my face, but I don’t brush it back. I stand there, holding the roses, staring at the grave.
Death is a transition, I try to tell myself, a passing from one plane of existence to another. It’s not the end of the world.
That’s what Mom has always told me. But I guess that depends on how you define the end of the world.
The roses are wilty. They need water, and suddenly I can’t stand the thought of leaving them to dry up and die. So I crush them between my hands. I tear off their heads and then I let the petals sift through my fingers, falling oh so slowly, gently, onto the dark soil.
Christian is standing by the lake in the moonlight. I watch him bend to pick up a rock, turning the smooth stone in his hand a few times before he leans and skips it across the water.
Every time I see him I’m struck by the fact that I don’t actually know him. In spite of all the conversations we’ve had, the time we’ve spent in Angel Club together, the way I memorized practically every detail about him last year like some obsessed little Mary Sue, he’s still a mystery to me. He’s still that stranger who I only get glimpses of.
He turns and looks at me.
“Hi,” I say awkwardly, suddenly aware that I’m in my jammies and my hair must look like a bird’s nest. “Sorry. I didn’t know anybody would be out here.”
“Can’t sleep?” he asks.
The smell of roses lingers in my nose. My hands still feel pricked by the thorns, but when I inspect them, they’re fine. It’s all in my head. I am driving myself loony tunes.
“Angela snores,” I say, instead of trying to explain myself. I bend down to look for my own skipping rock, find one—a small flat stone the color of charcoal. I stare out at the lake, where the moon is rippling. “So how do you do this?” I ask.
“The trick is in the wrist,” he says. “
Kind of like Frisbee.”
I toss the rock and it goes straight into the water without even a splash.
“I meant to do that,” I say.
He nods. “Sure. Perfect form, by the way.”
“There’s something off about this weather,” I say.
“You think?”
“No, I mean, something missing. It feels like summer except—” I think back to all my late nights with Tucker last summer, gazing up at the stars from the back of his pickup, naming the constellations and making up the ones we didn’t know. The thought of Tucker makes my throat get tight. I remind myself that my dream doesn’t happen until spring. I don’t even know if it’s this spring. I have time. I’ll figure this out. Stop it, somehow.
“Crickets,” I say as it occurs to me. “In the summer, there are always crickets chirping. But here it’s quiet.”
We listen to the sound of the water lapping at the shore.
“Tell me about your vision, Clara. The new one, I mean,” Christian says then. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to know, officially. Because you’re thinking about it pretty much nonstop, and I’m not doing a very good job at not noticing.”
My breath catches. “I already told you most of it. It’s Aspen Hill. Springtime. I’m walking up the hill with all these people, apparently headed for a grave. And you’re there.”
“What do I do?”
“You . . . uh . . . you try to comfort me. In my head you say, ‘You can do this.’ You hold my hand.” I start searching around for another rock so I won’t have to meet his eyes.
“You think it’s Tucker who’s going to die,” he says.
I nod, still not daring to look over at him. “I can’t let that happen.”
He coughs, then does his laugh/exhale thing. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve decided to fight your vision.”
This should be the part where I feel sorrow, if Mom is right. I’m definitely fighting my purpose, pushing back against all that I think is expected of me. But all I feel in this moment is anger. Even though I suppose it’s true; I can never accept things. I can never let them be what they are. I’m always trying to change them.
“Hey, you asked me, and I told you. You don’t like it, tough beans.” I start to storm off back toward my tent. He catches my hand.
I really wish he would stop touching me.
“Don’t get mad, Clara. I want to help,” he says.
“How about you mind your own business?”
He laughs, lets go of my hand. “Okay, too late to tell you not to get mad. But I mean it. Tell me why you think it’s Tucker’s funeral.”
I stare at him. “You don’t believe me? That’s not exactly helpful.”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just—” He’s tongue-tied in a way I’ve never seen. “Well, I thought my vision was showing me one thing, and then it turned out totally different.”
“Right, because I blew it for you,” I say.
“You didn’t blow it.” He catches my eye. “I think you changed it. But what I’m saying is that I didn’t really understand it before. I couldn’t.”
“And you understand it now?”
His gaze breaks away. “I didn’t say that.” He picks up a rock and skips it perfectly across the water. “I want to make sure you know that I don’t think you ruined anything, Clara. It’s not your fault.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You followed your heart. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You actually mean it.” I’m stunned. I’d always assumed he’d blame me.
“Yes,” he says with a ghost of a smile. “I actually do.”
Chapter 9
Paradise Lost
“Farewell, happy fields, / where joy for ever dwells! hail, horrors! Hail, / infernal world! and thou, profoundest hell / receive thy new possessor! one who brings / a mind not to be changed by place or time,” reads Kay Patterson. She has a nice reading voice, I’ll give her that, even though I suspect that underneath her polished exterior beats a heart of pure evil.
Okay, so not pure evil. Because Christian liked her, and Christian’s not an idiot. Even Wendy says that Kay’s not so bad when you get to know her. So there must be something I’m not seeing.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” she continues.
“Good, Kay,” Mr. Phibbs says. “So what do you think it means?”
Kay’s immaculately tweezed eyebrows squeeze together. “Means?”
“What is Satan saying here? What’s he talking about?”
She looks at him with clear annoyance. “I don’t know. I don’t speak old English, or whatever this is.”
I’d mock, but I’m not doing much better. Or any better, truthfully, when it comes to this book. Which doesn’t make sense. I’m supposed to be able to speak and understand any language ever spoken on earth, so why am I so lost on Paradise Lost?
“Anyone?” Mr. Phibbs looks around the room.
Wendy raises her hand. “I think maybe he’s talking about how terrible hell is, but for him, it’s better than heaven, because at least in hell he gets to be free. It’s that ‘better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’ idea.”
Creepy. I always get squirmy every time the topic of angels comes up in any regular-person conversation, and now that’s happening in English class. I’m sure my mother would not approve this reading material.
But then again, she probably already knows all about it. Since she knows everything. And tells me nothing.
“Excellent, Wendy,” praises Mr. Phibbs, “I can see you’ve read the CliffsNotes.”
Wendy turns a lovely shade of crimson.
“No harm in reading the CliffsNotes, dear,” Mr. Phibbs says jovially. “It’s good to get someone else’s interpretation. But it’s more important that you wrestle with these texts on your own. Feel the words with your gut, not just hear them in your head. But O, how fallen! how changed / from him, who, in the happy realms of light, / clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine / myriads though bright,” he recites from memory. “Beautiful words. But what do they mean?”
“He’s talking about the angel he used to be,” says Angela from up front. She hasn’t said a word during this entire conversation, neither of us have, but now it’s obviously getting to be too much for her to sit here and be quiet when he’s talking about angels. “He’s lamenting how far he’s fallen, because even though he’d rather make the rules in hell than obey God in heaven, like he said, he still feels sorrow, because now he’s”—she glances down at her book to read—“in utter darkness, . . . / as far removed from God and light of heaven, / as from the center thrice to the utmost pole. I’m not sure how far that is, exactly, but it sounds like pretty far.”
“Did you feel that in your gut?”
“Uh . . .” Angela’s a brain person, not a gut person. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, an insightful interpretation, anyway,” he says. “Remember what Milton tells us at the beginning of the book. His goal here is to explore the idea of disobedience to God, both in the rebellion of the fallen angels and in the heart of man, which leads to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. . . .”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I don’t want to explore the idea of disobedience to God—not exactly a gut-friendly topic of conversation for me right now, since I’ve pretty much made up my mind to fight my purpose.
“Mr. Phibbs, I have a question,” Angela says then.
“Wonderful,” he says. “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
“Right. How old are you?” she asks.
He laughs.
“No seriously. How old?” she presses.
“That’s not at all related to the subject at hand,” he says crisply, and I can tell that she’s rattled him, although I’m not sure why. He smoothes back his white hair, fiddles with the piece of chalk in his hand. “Now shall we get back to Satan and his
plight?”
“I just wanted to know if you’re as old as Milton,” Angela says, acting playfully, nauseatingly dumb, like she’s teasing him, like it’s not a serious question, even though it is. “Like, did the two of you ever hang out together?”
Milton, if I remember what Mr. Phibbs told us last week, died in 1674. If Mr. Phibbs ever hung out with Milton that would put him well over three hundred and fifty years old.
Is it possible? I look at him, noting the way his skin sags in places, the host of deep wrinkles on his forehead, around his eyes, circling his mouth. His hands have that gnarly tree quality to them. He’s clearly old. But how old?
“I only wish I could have had that pleasure,” Mr. Phibbs says with a tragic sigh. “But alas, Milton was a bit before my time.”
The bell rings.
“Ah,” he says, his blue eyes sharp on Angela’s face. “Saved by the bell.”
That night I sneak out to fly to the Lazy Dog. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s my angelic nature. I sit outside Tucker’s window with snow in my hair, and I watch him, first as he works on his homework, then getting ready for bed (and no, I turn away when he’s changing, I’m not a total perv), and then as he falls asleep.
At least, right this minute, he’s safe.
Again I consider telling him about my dream—I hate keeping this from him. It feels like something he deserves to know. I’m so angry with Mom, I realize, for all the secrets she keeps from me, but am I any different? I’m keeping this secret to avoid alarming him needlessly if by some stroke of luck I’m reading my vision wrong. I’m holding back because his knowing about it won’t change it. I’m protecting him.
But it still sucks.
Around twelve thirty or so, his window suddenly jerks open. I’m so startled—I’d been half asleep—that I almost fall off the roof, but a strong arm grabs me and hauls me back over the edge.
“Hi there,” Tucker says brightly, like we’re bumping into each other on the street.
“Uh, hi.”
“Nice night for stalking,” he observes.
“No. I was—”
“Get your butt in here, Carrots.”
I climb awkwardly into his room. He puts on a T-shirt and sits cross-legged on the bed, looking at me.
