by Scott Speer
“What the hell is going on in here?!” he demanded.
Gasping for breath, all Maddy could choke out was, “Check the propane tank.” Mrs. Neilson stopped struggling and gave an inquisitive look to the large, spherical tank just a foot away from her. Then she scrambled on her hands and knees away from Maddy and sat in the corner, wiping her nose between sobs. Mr. Rankin walked over to the tank and examined it. He put his ear to the valve, and his eyes grew wide.
“It’s leaking,” he said with alarm. “We have to evacuate this classroom. Now.”
• • •
Maddy spent the next period in the nurse’s office, which smelled of Band-Aids and alcohol, before being called before the principal’s desk. Mrs. Neilson agreed not to press charges, and in exchange, Maddy was given lunch detention the following day. Conversely, she was also thanked for helping detect the gas leak, although no one could quite figure out how she had known. Maddy, who didn’t want to open the can of worms that telling them the truth could cause, said she had smelled something walking past the lab. She was sent back to class and tried to finish out the rest of the day ignoring the whispers of her classmates.
The day had gone in her mind from hopeful to disastrous. She felt like a freak, like someone entirely different and out of step with the world. But that, she told herself, was nothing new.
After the final bell buzzed, Maddy pulled her hood over her hair and walked quickly home. She didn’t bother going inside but hurried across the yard and down the small hill to the office door of Kevin’s Diner, where she changed into her waitress’s uniform. Since Tracy had scheduled the night off, Maddy would be spending the rest of her day working the evening shift.
“How was school, Maddy?” Kevin called from the kitchen as Maddy threw her backpack in the office, pinned on her name tag, and pulled her hair into a ponytail.
“You know, uneventful,” she replied, trying to sound as convincing as she could.
“Really? Classes were okay?”
“Yup,” she said, coming into the kitchen and smiling vaguely. She hated to lie, especially to Kevin, but she couldn’t see any way around it. She wasn’t going to tell him about what happened. Being a freak at school she was willing to accept, but she didn’t want to be one at home too. She grabbed her notepad and pen and swung into the dining room before Kevin could ask anything else.
After about an hour, Gwen, Gwen’s friend Jessica, and Samantha Cellato came in. Jessica and Samantha were both juniors, and Sam had been in the biology lab for Maddy’s little performance with Mrs. Neilson. Maddy put them in a booth in the rear, and they all ordered the hamburger dinner. They had, undoubtedly, come in to talk over the incident at school.
“You made the Lunch Special,” Gwen said as Maddy arrived with their Diet Cokes. Of course, Gwen wasn’t talking about food. The Lunch Special was the gossip blog of Angel City High, where a junior named Blake Chambers dished on the goings-on of the school. Gwen held out the Berry for Maddy to read.
The screen featured a blowup of Maddy’s hideous junior-year picture and the headline “MADDY MONTGOMERY ATTEMPTS TO TORCH BIO LAB.” She read Blake’s words aloud.
“‘Dear Maddy, thank you, on behalf of the student body, for trying to set fire to the school. It would be an improvement, no doubt. Next time, though, please wait until the fire starts before beating up Mrs. Neilson for giving you an A–.’” Maddy winced. Jessica giggled.
“Did you get in trouble?” Sam asked, her eyes wide.
“Lunch detention tomorrow,” Maddy said. “I don’t really care. It will give me time to work on my applications.”
“Well, I mean, but how did you know?” Jessica asked as she plopped a straw in her Diet Coke and took a deep pull. Gwen looked at Maddy, her face sincere.
“Did . . . it . . . have to do with what happens?” she asked quietly.
“Happens?” Samantha asked avidly.
“Nothing,” Maddy snapped, glaring at Gwen. “It’s nothing. I’ll be right back with those hamburger dinners.” Maddy left the table, annoyed and a little embarrassed. Gwen lowered her voice.
“Maddy has this thing. She . . . sees things sometimes.”
“What!?” Jessica gasped, her eyes lighting up.
“Shut up, Jessica!” Gwen hissed, but not before Uncle Kevin peered inquisitively out from around the fryer. Gwen gave him a wave. Kevin waved back.
“Not all the time,” Gwen whispered, “just sometimes, she’ll start to see things that don’t really make sense. But they’re usually bad—”
“Three hamburger dinners,” Maddy interrupted as she returned from the kitchen with a tray of food. Samantha and Jessica just stared at her. Maddy stared back.
“What?”
“You, like, see things? Like what?” Samantha asked. Maddy shot daggers at her best friend, who shrank down in the booth.
“Not really,” Maddy said, shrugging, “I guess I’m just a little weird. That’s not exactly news.” She set down the plates and a bottle of ketchup. “It’s just one of those things, like being double-jointed or something.”
“Like being double-jointed?!” Jessica blurted incredulously. “You’re like Wonder Woman or something!” A few other customers turned to look. Maddy felt her face going red. Uncle Kevin came around from behind the counter and approached the table.
“How’s everything going over here?” he asked with a friendly smile.
“Really good, Uncle Kevin,” Gwen offered. “Just having girl talk.” Gwen had taken to calling him Uncle Kevin, just like Maddy, something Kevin liked.
“Oh, okay, sorry to interrupt,” Kevin said, hovering awkwardly. “Dessert is on the house. You girls come by anytime.”
“Thank you!” the girls chorused.
“Would you shut it, Jessica!” Gwen scolded after Kevin walked away. “God, you’re hopeless.” Maddy waited till her uncle was well out of earshot, then crouched down by her friends.
“Listen, if you guys don’t mind, please don’t say anything about it? Kevin doesn’t know what happened and I’d rather it stay that way. Please?”
The three girls nodded. “Sure,” Gwen said, seeming to feel bad about the whole thing. “It’s our secret.”
Relieved, Maddy stood up as the crackling Magnavox filled the silence that had overtaken the table.
“Stay tuned as our life and style correspondent Jamie Campbell will be at the Halo Magazine party later tonight for an exclusive interview with the one and only Jackson Godspeed. She’ll continue reporting on his every move as he prepares for his upcoming Commissioning! Plus more on the absence of bad-boy Angel Theodore Godson from a special gala charity event today. Has his latest divorce already caused ripples in the social world of the Angels?”
“OMG!” Gwen squeaked, turning her attention to the TV. “Jackson Godspeed’s Commissioning!”
“His what?” Maddy asked, craning her neck around to see. Was that what the girl on Angel Boulevard had been talking about?
“Commissioning, duh,” Jessica said, shoveling a fistful of fries in her mouth. Maddy gave her a blank look. “Youngest Guardian ever? First Protections? First save? What city have you been living in?”
“See, everybody but you knows this week is his Commissioning,” Gwen explained, “which means a bunch of parties and events, and then all the Angels dress up and get together and there’s a ceremony where they announce his Protections. And it could be me!”
“If your parents had a crapload of money, which they don’t,” Jessica said snidely through a mouthful of fries.
“They don’t need a bunch of money,” Gwen huffed. “I have the NAS Protection Lottery.” Every month Gwen put most of her allowance into the lottery in the hopes of winning a Guardian for life. On top of their regular protection-for-pay services, it was a big moneymaker for the NAS although five percent of the proceeds went to fund development in Africa and Asia, where only a few disgustingly wealthy political leaders had Guardians.
“You and everybody else!”
“And don’t forget about the NAS charity,” Gwen countered, undeterred. “They raffle off one free Guardian each year.”
“What are odds of winning that?” Samantha asked.
“About one in six billion,” Jessica said.
“Or I could go on . . .” Gwen said. As if on cue, from the TV in the corner blared a promo for the season finale of American Protection, a show in which contestants competed against each other in seemingly arbitrary contests, with the viewers voting who stayed and who went. The ultimate prize was winning the services of a Guardian for ten years and a cash prize of a million dollars.
“Last season sixty-two million of you tuned in to see who YOU chose to be America’s next Protection. You made Sarah the world’s new Protection sweetheart!”
Maddy turned to look. She’d been studying for her AP finals in the spring and had never gone over to Gwen’s to watch with her. On-screen flashed footage of a girl and a boy standing next to each other on a huge stage before an audience. A host opened an envelope and read the name Sarah. The runner-up grimly hugged Sarah as she jumped up and down in celebration. Seemingly from nowhere, a Guardian Angel, Owen Holymead, descended onto the stage, his wings flapping slowly as he landed. He gallantly stepped forward and took Sarah’s hand. The host handed her an oversized check.
“Who will it be this year?”
“Lindsay!” Sam exclaimed at the Magnavox. Gwen rolled her eyes.
“It’s totally going to be Addison, she had a way better performance last week, Lindsay’s so lame.”
Maddy knew the odds for winning the lottery or American Protection or getting a charity Angel were infinitely small, but Gwen and millions across the world still believed every month, every day, that they would be the newest Protection, instantly catapulted into the world of Angel glamour and fame, with their own Guardian. To be saved. Maddy kept her mouth shut.
Gwen took a french fry off Jessica’s plate. “You’ll be sorry when I’m Jackson Godspeed’s Protection and I’m at all the parties with the Angels and everyone wants to be my friend, and you guys are still worrying about second-period algebra.” Gwen turned to Maddy. “You’re coming over and watching Jacks’s Commissioning with us. I even got a little red carpet. We’re totally dressing up. Then after we’ll go to Ethan’s party!”
Ethan’s party. In all the excitement of the bio lab incident Maddy had almost forgotten.
“Gwen, I have three quizzes now on Monday. Two of which, I know for a fact, you do too. Plus my college applications are just sitting there. Look, I know I promised you I would think about it, and I have. The truth is, I really can’t go.” She flipped open her pad and began adding up their bill in her head.
“Come on, Maddy, everyone’s going,” Samantha said, as if that was reason enough.
“Maddy, how long have we been friends?” Gwen asked.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Maddy said, exasperated.
“When else are you going to have fun except this year? Kyle says Ethan’s house is amazing, and what if he actually has a Guardian, and he makes a special appearance? He says you totally have to come, I bet that means Ethan is really into you. If you never do anything else for me ever again, please do this.” Gwen folded her arms over her chest defiantly. It was one of those moments in life, Maddy thought, one of those moments where you had to choose between what you knew was right and your friend.
“Okay, relax,” Maddy said. She put the check down. “I just have to make sure I can get my shift off and that Kevin doesn’t find out.” Gwen jumped to her feet and gave Maddy a hug over the table.
“This weekend is going to be the best ev-er!” she said, transforming the last word into two distinct syllables.
After the girls paid and left, Kevin came around from behind the fryer, holding a spatula in one hand.
“Did your friends have a good time?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Maddy said, loading Gwen’s dirty dish on her tray.
“What was all that yelling about earlier?”
“Oh, just some Angel Gwen is in love with.”
“No, before that,” Kevin pressed. “You girls were talking about an incident at school or something?”
Maddy paused, hoping her expression hadn’t betrayed her. “Just girl stuff,” she said innocently, not meeting Kevin’s gaze. She piled Jessica’s plate onto Samantha’s and took them both on her arm. After a moment Kevin wiped his hands on his apron.
“Oh. Okay. Well, make sure to tell them to stop by again,” he said, and disappeared back into the kitchen. Maddy didn’t realize until he was gone that she had been holding her breath. Slowly and silently, she let it out.
It was the only secret Maddy had ever kept from him. Her visions.
Over the past several years, these strange images would come on her out of nowhere. Bad things, like what she had “seen” today. Except the difference was that this time, she actually recognized someone. That had never happened before. Normally the pictures in her head didn’t make any sense.
Growing up, most of the time she had explained the visions away if Kevin happened to be around. The first time it had happened, they’d been at an amusement park for her ninth birthday, and she’d had flashes of horrible things happening on the rides—bloody, disturbing images. She became hysterical and Kevin was so worried he took her to the medical facility at the park. After a while she was able to calm down. And she’d lied, saying the roller coaster had upset her. Even from that very young age, Maddy never wanted him to know about the strange things she saw. And she certainly didn’t want him to know that lately, it had gotten worse. She already felt like enough of a freak with the way she never felt fully simpatico around her peers. She didn’t need her uncle thinking so too. She loved Kevin dearly, but the fact of the matter was, he wasn’t her parent. Some things were just private.
Gwen often gave her a hard time about not dating, and Maddy usually used schoolwork and work at the diner as an excuse. And she was really busy with that stuff, but Maddy also knew that if she got close to someone, there was a chance one of those unsettling images would come in, and then what was she supposed to say? How could she explain her thing? Freshman year she’d been on a date with Adam Rosen, and halfway through, when they were holding hands, she’d literally run out of the frozen yogurt place they were in after a terrifying image of a car crash hit her from out of nowhere. Adam caught up to her, but she was still upset, and she had Kevin come get her and take her home. Just thinking about it still filled Maddy with shame.
But all of those earlier visions had been just random, like strange mental static of bad images. She thought she was just . . . okay, fine. Mentally sick. Today she actually recognized the people. And a lot of good it had done her: she’d finally made the Lunch Special.
Maddy looked up at the big plastic clock that hung over the dining room. 8:45. Still early. She sighed as she walked her friends’ dishes to the kitchen. It was going to be a long night.
CHAPTER FIVE
Angel Boulevard lay dark and quiet. The palm trees stood motionless. By day it was the city’s biggest tourist attraction, with people from all over the world flocking to the Walk of Angels. At night, though, with its neon signs off and the shops shuttered, this end of Angel Boulevard looked more like an eerie ghost town.
An old man stumbled over the gleaming stars, the streetlights casting looping streaks in his vision. Pockets of people were outside clubs farther down the boulevard, but most everything else shut down at dark, the crowds moving west to the Halo Strip. The man steadied himself against a trash can, then peered in. It was the usual. Angel maps and tourist brochures and fast-food wrappers. If you want to know the character of a people, he always said, look at their trash. He dug his hand down through the garbage until his fingers closed around the smooth, curving surface of a beer can. He pulled it out and leaned back, letting the remains of its contents dribble into his mouth and over his chin. Then he tossed the can back at the trash. He missed and the can rolle
d across the sidewalk and into the gutter.
He didn’t bother picking it up. If the Angels wanted their boulevard to be clean, he told himself, they could come and do it themselves. They’d be cleaning a long time to get the dirt off this city.
He walked over and sat heavily in the doorway he had picked out for the night. It smelled vaguely of urine, but that didn’t bother him. It was out of the wind, and out of the way of the shop owners and the straggling tourists who would still be walking by. With any luck, he wouldn’t be kicked out tonight. He leaned drunkenly against the doorway and watched the glittering lights of the Immortal City spin around him. He smiled. If you had to be homeless, you might as well be homeless in the glorious City of Angels.
His eyes closed, and before he was even aware of his exhaustion, he fell asleep.
When he woke again, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but the boulevard had gone eerily silent. Even at night he could usually still hear the birds in the trees or the occasional stray dog looking for scraps. Tonight, nothing was making a sound. Nothing seemed even to move, apart from the palm trees trembling in the breeze. He sat up and blinked.
Something was wrong.
He was still drunk, that was for sure, but less so now. He could tell he was coming out of it because he could feel the first twinge of what would be his usual headache. This wasn’t an alcohol-induced paranoia, he was pretty sure; something just seemed . . . off. He tried his best to focus his bleary eyes and looked around.
He saw only darkness. Nothing. But something was definitely wrong. He didn’t know it consciously so much as instinctively. As his eyes searched the dark he was suddenly reminded of something he hadn’t thought about in years. Even decades. He remembered being a kid and being afraid of the dark. That’s what it was. It was a feeling. A feeling coming from the dark itself. The night around him seemed to be full of a feral, primitive presence, a gnawing, sweating animal instinct, like fear itself.
