“One must fall. He was my charge and my responsibility, and the face of the world changed irrevocably with his decision.” Kishi waved cheerfully to Nash, who was pulling out to the road at two miles an hour, if that. I had the feeling if I got out right now, he’d lurch over to the curb and call me over to talk.
Still disgruntled at getting cast out for such a silly reason, I said, “I still think it’s an injustice.”
“Some among the Thronos would agree with you,” Kishi said. “But don’t trouble yourself too much on my behalf. The only hardship in my life is picking which movie I want to see with Drina when in truth I want to watch all of them. I’ll let her pick. It’s better that way.” Starting the car, she pulled over to the mail truck and idled there. “I am glad to meet you, Jessa Bright! You should come over for dinner some night.”
I opened the door. “Thanks for the rescue with Nash.”
“I don’t think he’s cut his bangs since I saw him last in June,” Kishi mused.
“Hey, Jessa! Lotus said to tell you that you’re welcome!” Zakia shouted across the parking lot. Looking through the rearview mirror to see him, Kishi stiffened.
What was it with these two and Zakia? I wished her goodbye and closed the door. She rolled down the window, yelled goodbye, and peeled around the corner. I waved to Zakia and got into the mail truck to go home.
I claimed the sofa that afternoon to work my way through a mound of homework. The phone rang and I let it go to the answering machine since I wasn’t sure that I wanted to talk to whoever was on the other end. Since it turned out to only be Savannah, I picked it up and we plodded through a trig assignment together. At the end of it, she said uncomfortably, “So, are you and Nash dating?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “Look, he’s really nice, but he’s just not my type.”
“Yeah, I bet L.A. has tons of better guys.”
Tread carefully, I thought. I shouldn’t deride Nash if Savannah was secretly harboring a crush on him. “Spooner has plenty of nice guys to look at. I’m just not into that one.” She warmed up immediately after I said that, so the crisis was averted. We hung up and I moved on to my creative writing assignment, which was to write a poem. I scratched out a dozen starts and shelved it for the time being. It wasn’t due for a while, and the only words coming out of my pen were about living when I should have died. That was too personal to hand in for school, and it might make Mr. Rogers think I was suicidal. A more benign topic had to be found.
Fog rolled in, so the scanty light able to pierce the thickets of trees was choked out altogether. I sat in my room after dinner and watched the darkness deepen over the bed and desk. My parents were slowly blotted out in the sunshine of their picture, until all I could see was the outline of the shot and then not even that. With the failed attempts at the poem on my mind, I fumbled about for my backpack and wrested the anti-bacterial cream out of the pocket. Germs had never been a fear of mine in Bellangame, but I didn’t go around shaking hands all day there either.
There was a test tomorrow in science. I’d skimmed the chapter downstairs and should spend a little more time with it to make the facts solidify in my brain. Yet I didn’t move from the bed to switch on the lights and get started. School was easier in Spooner than Bellangame, where right now I’d be scrambling in panic on a conference call with Downy and Taylor to cram. Even without putting in much effort, I was going to do fine tomorrow.
I didn’t think that I’d ever feel that anxious about school again, not after the cliff. It wasn’t worth stressing over. Nothing was, not really. Not when it could end in a snap. It was good to know that at seventeen, how unimportant everything truly was. I wasn’t going to be one of those regretful old women wishing that she’d stopped to smell the roses.
But it was going to be isolating, knowing what everyone else took decades to figure out. I closed my eyes and listened to mournful gusts of wind moving down the street. Leaves skittered against the wall of the house, followed by a soft whump. I looked out the window to Adriel.
In two quick steps, I was at the window and scuffling with the latch to pry it open. Wind washed away the warmth in the room. There were no wings behind him, and though his backpack was gone, he was dressed in his school clothes from the day. Crouched on the branch, he had one hand pressed to the trunk for a balance that it didn’t look like he needed that much.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked, feeling like a fool to be speaking to a boy in the tree outside my window.
“I thought that I’d made myself clear,” Adriel said in a dark voice. “According to my sister, I did not. I’m not sorry that I caught you. I’m only worried about repercussions.”
“Why won’t you be my friend at school? Sometimes you’re glad to see me, other times I’m just some random stranger you sit beside in class and at lunch. Which is it?” I asked in frustration. “And where are your wings?”
He looked away from me with a grimace. “My wings are away where they belong so I don’t get them caught in your tree. Would you stop blazing? I’m sorry. Imagine living for over a hundred years without making any appreciable mark, as I’ve been expressly forbidden to make, and then making a huge one. It’s a little bit of a change to get used to.”
I shivered in the cold wind, which felt like dead fingers trailing along my arms. The corner of his lips tilted up as the blaze died to let him look at me fully. He stepped through the open window and said, “You’re freezing.” Turning back, he closed it. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“I don’t know. I just was,” I said.
The levity faded. “Are you upset? You’ve been upset at school.”
“Confused about everything that’s happened with you. This isn’t my world, Adriel.” I debated returning to my bed to sit, or taking the desk chair. But the latter seemed ridiculous in the darkness. Going to the bed, I sat down on the blanket and rested against the headboard. He continued to stand by the window.
“What do you mean it isn’t your world?” Adriel asked.
“I mean that I’m a boring person, leading a boring tiny thread life. Angels and tapestries and shields and all that are a bit beyond my kenning.”
“I don’t find you boring.”
“You should. I’m boring through and through. Maybe that’s why you don’t want to be friends. My soul can’t be very interesting to look at.” I tried not to think about how I wanted to be more than friends, since my soul might reveal it to him.
“I don’t really know how to have friends,” Adriel said, a gentle question in his voice as he inspected me.
“What do you call everyone at school?”
“They’re acquaintances. I tried to have friends long ago. We move a lot, but I maintained some friendships through correspondence. The problem was that the older they got, the older I had to pretend to be, and the more I had to lie. I didn’t like lying. It wasn’t a friendship then, writing a three-page letter that was eighty percent fiction. If they pressed for a visit, I couldn’t go. How was I to explain that forty, fifty years have passed since we were adolescents together, and they’ve gone bald and thick and nearsighted while I’m forever eighteen? So when I move from place to place, I sever those ties I’ve made with acquaintances. I can’t hold onto anyone too tightly, Jessa. They move on, grow up, and they die.”
It was still so chilly in the room. I pulled up a throw around my legs and said, “I know what you are, so you don’t have to lie to me.”
“But you’ll die, too. You’re here and gone on this earth in such a short time. You can’t grasp the speed of it, not being human. To an angel it feels like a handful of heartbeats. You’ll go, and I’ll be left behind. I’m always the one left behind.”
“That makes me sad,” I said.
His eyes moved to the Bellangame High School banner over my bed. “You’ve lost your world for a little while, and you know how much it hurts. I’ve lost mine forever. I fly so fast to get it back . . . and I can’t. Only breaths of it.”
Tightening the throw around myself, I said, “You flew with me a long time that night.”
He shook his head, his features dim in the poor lighting but the surprise visible. “You remember much more than most people would about an experience like that. It should have lulled you to sleep. I thought you were. Since I had to make it look like you’d walked home, we flew together for hours. Actually, I didn’t know what to do with you at first, so we were just flying while I thought about it.”
“I miss it,” I admitted. “That music. It was . . . celestial. And it’s odd to be in mourning for music, but I am. It almost feels like a death to not have it. That’s how you live, isn’t it? Except it’s much more extreme for fallen angels.”
He came to the foot of the bed and leaned on the post, his voice almost in a whisper. “Yes.”
“I heard this little bit of flute music on the radio and for a second . . . less than a second, it had some of that quality. You must never turn the music off in your house, with all five of you longing for it.”
“That’s Drina mostly. Second to flying, that’s where she hears the echoes most strongly. For Cadmon, it’s in nature. Kishi flies unbelievably fast, so she just gets it up in the sky at night over the ocean. For Taurin, it’s not always auditory; he can find that grace in books. He loves to read. Drina once knew a fallen angel who got it through taste. He’d only dine at the finest restaurants.”
“And you?”
“Second to flying, I hear it a little within people’s souls. It isn’t just an aura that an angel sees; a soul is a presence that we feel. I like to spend time around people who have echoes of it. You have a touch of it in your soul. It sounds . . . beautiful.”
I wanted so badly to know the exact reason for his fall. I couldn’t think of him doing anything wrong. Maybe it was sort of like Kishi’s splitter, a change that couldn’t be foreseen or controlled, and he’d made no error at all. “You said something in the car to the restaurant, that you could see almost every soul. Who can you not see?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“That’s being a friend, Adriel. A real friend is someone that you can tell anything to, not letters full of lies.”
He sat on the bed, the mattress dipping down at my feet. Should I turn on the light? It was so strange to be speaking in the dark. My hand hadn’t moved when he said, “This is a complex world, full of complex beings in complex circumstances. Heavy, permanent shielding can feel unpleasant to an angel. It doesn’t always mean anything, but it can indicate a soul lacking in empathy. There’s a boy at school, a junior named Nick Cramer. Have you met him?”
I shook my head and Adriel said, “His soul gets more and more muted by the month. He’s like a dull patch moving around the hallways surrounded by brighter souls. Sometimes it can just be a severe, crippling depression that’s gone untreated for a long time, or an illness like a brain tumor or dementia, but with him . . .”
“He lacks empathy,” I finished.
“So I wasn’t surprised to hear the rumors about him, that he’s violent. And then he proved it last winter by beating his younger brother into the hospital. The boy was only four at the time.”
Shocked to go to a school with a guy who would do such an awful thing to a little kid, I said, “And he wasn’t expelled?”
“He didn’t do it on school grounds. The family got a good lawyer or else a bad judge since he got off almost scot-free. I heard him talking about it once, that he was just practicing some wrestling moves, and I could see he was lying. I know that part of his punishment was therapy, but it’s not helping. It can’t help someone like him. His soul is too dull now to be repaired. So he’s one to avoid.”
“Are there any other people at school like that?” I asked, feeling breathless at this sickening insight into someone I could have passed a dozen times in the hallways.
“There’s a new freshman girl, Alena Myers. She has that dullness, too. It’s like a big blotch in front of the sun, a blotch that never moves. School has barely gotten underway and she’s been quite cruel to other girls already. It makes her happy, as happy as someone like that can be. Drina’s guarded soul was so shielded that barely any light pushed through at all, and what did come through was warped. I shudder to consider what Cadmon’s was like, for him to bring about the death of his own charge.”
Suddenly linking these pieces of information together, I said, “Is that why you and Kishi don’t like Zakia? But he’s not a sociopath, Adriel! He’s a really nice guy.”
Uncomfortably, Adriel said, “Jessa, remember what I said about complex beings in complex circumstances-”
“No, you distracted me. I asked whom you couldn’t see, and you answered with shielded people. You can see their souls, and you just don’t like what’s there.” My mind working furiously, I said, “You can’t see Zakia, can you? There’s something else going on.”
After a long pause, Adriel said, “He’s an absence, because of what he is.”
“What, homeschooled?” I said with sarcasm. “He’s just a teenaged boy.”
“He was long ago, but not any longer.”
“Then what is he?”
“That’s not for me to say. Don’t mention anything to him about this conversation. You don’t want to make the Coopers angry. It could have consequences you can’t foresee, and that you really don’t want.”
Frustrated at his stonewalling, I exclaimed, “They aren’t bad people! God, they were all out searching for me when they thought I’d gone over the cliff and died. His older brother Jaden helped me get home when I was lost as a little girl.”
“No, he didn’t.” Grasping my ankle through the blanket, Adriel said, “Just let it go, would you?”
I kicked off his hand. “I will not let it go! And he did help me; I remember it perfectly well. I was a sniveling wreck about being lost, and Jaden was so sweet.” Groan-moan-hiccup . . . I realized I was hearing the creaking of the stairs. Grandpa Jack was coming up to bed. The mattress flew up beneath my feet as Adriel skimmed soundlessly over the floor to the window. By the time I got out of bed, the window was pushed up and Adriel out to the tree branch. Disco music began to play.
“Jessa, there isn’t any brother named Jaden. That was Zakia,” Adriel said.
Footsteps creaked down to my room, and a shadow fell along the line of light coming under the door. Grandpa Jack said, “You in bed?”
I turned around and called, “Yeah!”
“All right then. Good night, Jessa. See you in the morning.”
“Goodnight, Grandpa Jack.”
When I looked back to the branch, Adriel was gone. I stuck my head out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of him flying away. But what little of the sky I could see through the tree held only clouds.
Chapter Seven: The Gap
When I woke on Saturday, I picked up the cream for my road rash and realized upon inspection of my leg that I no longer needed it. The new skin was a slightly brighter pink than the rest, but it was fading fast to a normal hue and there wasn’t any tingling or pain.
Grandpa Jack had arranged with Barney to go fishing together this weekend. They’d even extended an invitation for me to go along. I couldn’t think of anything more boring than sitting on a shore at some lake in the wilderness hoping for a nibble on the line. What was the point of fishing when you could just buy fish at the store? I blamed too much homework for having to say no, and once we were through with breakfast, we got into the old mail truck so I could drop off Grandpa Jack and have a vehicle for the weekend. Barney was going to bring him home Sunday evening.
It killed me how he didn’t lock the doors or windows when we left the house. Since I was going to be home alone tonight, I would make sure everything was locked. Actually, as soon as I got back to the house, I was going to have to check over both floors to make sure no one had been there in our absence or, more frighteningly, was still there. It was too easy to attribute some benign creaking to a footstep, and I wanted to be able to rel
ax with the television and know I was secure. Spooner wasn’t a crime-ridden place, but all it took was one crazy person to change that.
Grandpa Jack shook his head when we drove over the faint tracks my scooter had made on its way over the side of Sutter. “That was a ruddy miracle.”
You have no idea, I thought. He craned his neck to peer down the side. “Can’t even see what you would have held onto.”
“I caught the edge as the scooter flew off,” I lied. “Sorry you got that for me and it didn’t even last a week.”
“Rather have my granddaughter survive an accident than a scooter,” Grandpa Jack said with indignation. “You want another one?”
The last thing I wanted was another scooter. “No, I’ll just use the mail truck. It feels safer in here.”
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Grandpa Jack, who was now looking through the mirror back to the scene of the accident. “We’ve had our mishaps on this road, usually drunks on their last tipple who go for their last topple. Fifteen years ago now, two kids your age died here. Thought this would be a great road to race on. Bet they wish that they’d thought a little harder as they went zooming over the side. Found them in the car below. Oh, and that biker.”
“What happened?” I asked, even though I didn’t really want to know.
“This isn’t a road for bicycling, as I’m sure you can see. No guardrail, barely a shoulder, full of potholes and hairpin curves and this foolish tourist group from somewhere decided to bike it. One got pegged with a mirror as a car tried to pass and she went flying. Her bike lived. She didn’t. That was quite a case in the news.”
“Poor woman,” I said. I knew exactly how she had been feeling to go down.
“Truth be told, I felt more sorry for the driver,” Grandpa Jack said. “He’d been stuck behind them for ages. They were riding four abreast in the lane, weaving everywhere and never turning into the rest areas to let him pass. When he honked his horn, they flipped him off and just kept ambling along like this is a path through a park. So he tried to go around. Got nailed for negligence and the cops told that tourist group not to come back. Not that they planned to with getting the pants sued off them by that woman’s family.”
Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) Page 13
