Sophie waited for her mother to fall asleep in front of the television before she snuck from her house to meet Angel. The smarmy host of a nighttime talk show took the stage in his suit and tie, and Sophie stepped quietly through the flat, opening the front door with the teeniest click, flinching as she shut it with another tiny sound. None of it was as loud as the laugh track the TV barfed out, but Sophie was nervous. She didn’t really sneak out of the house, ever, and now it was two nights in a row she was acting like a juvenile delinquent.
Livia stayed behind, huddled in the shadows outside the open living room window, her orange eye on Andrea. If Sophie’s mother woke up, Livia would speed to the girl. The alibi was, Sophie was too hot to sleep in the sweltering house and was just standing out front, or taking a walk around the block. The poison ivy she’d gotten on her hands and wrists was keeping her awake and miserable, the calamine cooling it for a precious millisecond before the unbearable itch flared once more. Andrea had clucked and hissed at the sight of the angry rash, pissed at Sophie for being so foolish, playing around in the trees when she should have been working. This is what Sophie had told her, accepting her scolding with sheepish regret. But in her chest her heart pounded fearfully. It wasn’t poison ivy. It was her grandmother’s trailer greenhouse, and she had no idea why the plants had burned her skin so bad. She was anxious to get to Angel. Angel knew so much. Angel would have all the answers.
Angel lived with her mother on the second floor of a three-story house on Spencer Avenue. Sophie walked there quickly, cutting through parking lots, Giddy and Roy on her shoulders, Arthur leading the rest of the flock high above her head. She swung her arms as she walked, appreciating the coolness on her hands.
“Turn here,” Giddy said in her baby voice. “Turn here. Stop. This is the place.”
A glow on the second floor seemed like candles to Sophie, sort of orange, the way the flame flickered the light. Like breath, Sophie thought. Angel was waiting on the porch. She bounded down the stairs to receive Sophie and the birds. “Hello,” she said, moving in to give Sophie a hug, then thinking better of it with the pigeons balanced on her shoulders.
“Hello,” said Giddy, and Roy gave a coo.
“Is that where you live?” Sophie asked, nodding at the flickering window above.
“Yes,” said Angel. “My mother, she’s a curandera. A witch, basically. She’s been lighting candles for you, and for the pigeons, too.”
“Oh!” Giddy exclaimed. “Please thank her for us.” Humans offered few kindnesses to the pigeons.
“Wow,” Sophie marveled, thinking it must be so cool to have a witch for a mom. “Does she know everything?”
“Yeah, she’s known of your coming. Plus, she can read emotions, like we can. She’s a snoopy mother, you know, and I live with her. She could tell something was up. I had to tell her.”
“But your shield is so strong!” Sophie was shocked. “Your mother is so powerful, she can get through it?”
“Awww, she’s my moms,” Angel said, shy. “I don’t keep that wall up with her. It would be too exhausting. The thing about the wall—” Angel’s view swept up and down the street. “Come on, let’s go in the shed if we’re going to talk about this.”
The shed was a regular wooden storage shed built under the back stairs in Angel’s yard. The yard itself was spacious, ringed with slender juniper trees. Wrapped around the shed were lush viny shrubs, shrubs tipped with white blossoms and crimson berries. She thought of Kishka’s garden and blew on her fingers. The pigeons pushed off her shoulders with a kick of their strong legs. Chicken legs, Sophie thought affectionately, watching them tuck their spindly orange limbs into their bodies as their wings pulled them to the top of the shed. No, pigeon legs.
The inside of Angel’s shed was shelved with glass candles, which Angel lit with a long kitchen lighter. There were jars of herbs marked with pieces of masking tape, Spanish words labeling the contents. Sophie’s hands and wrists throbbed. She looked at them in the bobbing glow of a candle. The skin was laced with painful welts. “Angel,” Sophie started, suddenly overwhelmed by all she had to say and learn. “Uh, my grandmother has all these plants in her trailer, and I think I’m allergic or something.” She held out her arms.
“What?” Angel shook her head like she was clearing water from her ears. She wasn’t wearing her hat, Sophie realized. That’s why Angel looked different. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail at the back of her skull, and her choppy bangs were flung around her face. She didn’t wear heavy boots, just some sort of plasticky sandals. She seemed relaxed, Sophie realized. She started to peek into her, was shocked to find not the leaden wall but a certain space, maybe a feeling of alarm—yes, it was alarm, the sense of alarm you have when you recognize that something has spiraled beyond your control.
With a thud the iron wall came down, giving Sophie the sensation of having been shoved. “Don’t do that.” Angel shook her head. “Not now. I’ll let you later. What are you talking about? You went into Kishka’s trailer?”
Sophie shrugged a sheepish, guilty shrug. “I just wanted to see her. After everything, you know? I know she’s bad, but she’s my grandmother. I just wanted to see if she looked different to me now. If I could see the badness.”
“You can’t,” Angel said sternly. “You can’t see badness. She just looks like any old batty lady in Chelsea who needs to quit smoking. You went into her house? Sophie, you can’t—when you’re in someone’s house, snooping like that, they can feel it. If they’re a witch or whatever.”
“Is Nana a witch?”
“I don’t know what you want to call it. She’s got mad powers. My mother has powers too, but they’re simple, good powers, that’s what a curandera is. She knows things and can heal people with herbs and her prayers. I have it, too; that’s why I’m meant to help you. We have it in my family, the powers. Look.”
Angel lifted a picture from where it leaned against a candle.
“This is my great-great-grandmother, Teresita Urrea. She had the powers, big time. She was very righteous; she helped the indigenous people in Mexico.”
“What’s indigenous?”
“The people who were there first. Like, the Native Mexicans. They were there, and then Spanish people came from Spain and messed it all up, and all the Native people, like, Indians, they were enslaved by the government. The government was so bad.”
“Like…”—Sophie searched her mind for historic examples of bad governments—“Nazis in Germany?”
“Yeah, totally.” Angel nodded. “Or, you know, America with Native Americans. The Mexican president wanted to kill all the Indians, or use them as slaves, yeah. And Teresita really felt them. She would use her healing powers to help them, she did everything for free because she’d seen God and God had told her not to like, charge for her services. So she was this amazing curandera, and she inspired the Indians to revolt, to riot, right? And there were all these battles, and they did it in Teresita’s name. She inspired them, and empowered them with her powers. She was like Joan of Arc. You know her? They teach you about her in Catholic school?”
“A little,” Sophie said. She knew Joan of Arc was French, she heard voices, she got a bunch of people to go to war and then got burned at the stake.
“Teresita’s like the Mexican Joan of Arc. She got thrown out of the country and came to America and kept healing people. She opened a clinic for poor people. Her magic was so strong it gets passed down person to person, but it gets weaker, too. My mother’s magic is weaker than her mother’s, and I am not as powerful as my mother.”
Angel looked at Sophie, nodding her head. “You are like Teresita, and like Joan of Arc, and all those girls, you know, there are so many stories. Girls who knew things and had powers and a certain destiny.” Angel smiled. “It is very, very exciting to get to know and help you, Sophie.”
Sophie felt sick from the intensity of Angel’s admiration. She didn’t really deserve it. She didn’t know anything, actually; the pigeons knew more than she did. Sophie knew nothing, was waiting for everyone to tell her everything. As for her powers, they seemed not very special in the light of birds who could speak human English and the simple existence of mermaids.
“Are you going to teach me how to read minds better?” Sophie asked.
“It’s not reading minds.” Angel laughed. “It’s reading hearts. You want to read a mind, turn on the television. That’s what the mind is—chatter, thinking. Loopy, repetitive thinking. It’s like being in a birdcage with a bunch of angry parakeets. What we’re doing is reading hearts. Most people do it a little bit every day. You know how you can feel when someone is upset, or really sad, or if someone is happy it can make you feel happy, too?”
“Yeah, totally.”
“It’s really not that magical. We can all just feel each other. It’s how people fall in love, or have friends. It’s why I can’t block myself when I’m home with my mother. I want her to feel me a little.” Angel grabbed her ponytail and tugged it tighter to her scalp. “But most people can’t get inside like we can. It’s tricky business. My mother taught me respect and caution with it. It’s like reading someone’s diary, but worse. It invades people’s privacy. But it is important. Very powerful healers can peek into a heart and take out what sickens it. I think that is what you’re meant to do, Sophie.”
Angel turned to the shelves of jars behind her. Sophie watched as she took a dark powder from one, dried green leaves from another, and another. With her own spit she made a paste, and she motioned for Sophie to giver her her hands. Angel spread the paste across Sophie’s fingers and wrists, massaged it into her palms. Sophie smelled familiar smells—coffee, and pizza, smells she could eat. “Try not to move your hands,” Angel instructed.
“They feel like they’re in casts,” Sophie said. “Or, like, papier-mâché or something.”
“Is it helping?”
Sophie was thoughtful. “More than the calamine lotion,” she said, nodding. “Yeah, I think so.”
Angel’s face had a rueful look. “This is very bad news,” she said. “This garden. I guess it is good that we know there is something strange in her trailer—but it is so bad of you to have gone there, Sophie! Your grandmother must have felt you in her home. I’m sure she knows you were snooping. Who knows what else she knows? You don’t know how to protect yourself.” Angel sighed, grabbed an indigo mussel shell from the shelf and dunked it into a dense, gritty jar of salt and honey. She smeared it over Sophie’s hands. The sting of it felt good, and the smell made Sophie’s belly rumble. She realized she hadn’t eaten dinner—she had been so anxious for her mother to fall asleep that she hadn’t joined her in a bowl of dinnertime Cheerios. She brought her mouth down to the medicine and slurped some off her skin. The taste of salt, her favorite.
“Here,” Angel said, handing her the jar and the seashell. Sophie scooped the paste out and fed it to herself, rolling her eyes in pleasure at the sweet, salty goo.
“You are very strange,” Angel observed.
“I didn’t eat dinner,” Sophie explained. She wondered about what she’d heard in the trailer, a voice, if she should tell Angel. The voice and the way she couldn’t breathe. Maybe she had imagined it? She felt too sheepish to confess more to her mentor. She figured if Angel really needed to know she could barge into her brain and find out.
“You’ve got to take care of yourself,” Angel instructed. “You’re going to need your health and your strength.”
“My nana read my heart when I was in her trailer,” Sophie admitted, knowing the truth of the tickle she’d felt. “I could feel it.”
“That’s good,” Angel said. “It’s good that you know when it’s happening. That’s the first step to being able to protect yourself. Most people can’t feel anything. They are so up in their minds”—Angel tapped her temple—“they can’t feel what is happening to their hearts.”
Sophie ran her finger around the edges of the now-empty jar, sucking the last of the paste. She regarded the coat on her arm hungrily.
“Leave it,” Angel ordered. “Who knows what poisons you got? The salt will draw the posion out and the honey will keep the wound clean so it won’t be infected. And the other paste is coffee and basil and marjoram. It should heal you. Now, we have to get started.”
“What are you going to teach me?” Sophie asked. She arranged herself so that her posture reflected that of an eager, obedient student.
“First, protection. You need to learn to hide your heart. Then you’ll need to gain control of your power, so you don’t accidentally go invading someone’s heart and feeling all their feelings when you don’t want to. And you need to get stronger. If you’re as big of a deal as you’re supposed to be, you should be able to break through my wall. Let’s go.”
* * *
IN THE DARK shed that felt like a magical clubhouse—that was, Sophie realized, a sort of magic clubhouse—Sophie and Angel worked into the night, the candles burning low, sometimes sputtering out and filling the small room with waxy smoke. With Angel’s smooth voice to guide her Sophie went deep into herself and found her own bedrock, as if she were a planet with a molten, iron core. Sophie never knew she possessed such hardness.
At first it was a sort of lava rock, rough and curling, dotted with holes. “Too porous,” Angel said, her own eyes closed. “I can get right through. Plus, it’s like, absorbent or something. Here, feel this.” Angel thought of her mother, the curandera, and a liquid, warm affection surged through her body and leached into Sophie.
“Oh!” Sophie said. “You love your mother so much!” That’s what it feels like, Sophie thought. To have a mother you just wholly and simply love. Sophie felt a sad, flat envy. Angel felt it, too.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She lifted a bundle of dry, greenish sticks and twigs and dipped them into a candle, igniting it. She blew out the flames until a fragrant smoke fogged the little shed. “Let’s start over. You’re looking for hard stuff,” Angel repeated. “The hardest you can find. Mine is iron. Use that as a guide.”
Inside herself, Sophie went down, down, past the porous lava rock that seemed to smash like china as she tunneled through. She went deeper. She felt the iron, and recognized its lightly textured surface from her contact with Angel. But Sophie knew she could go even deeper. She seemed to be entering a place that had never seen light, a place perhaps older than light. There was something there to grab, though it didn’t feel like a thing as much as a place. She tried it anyway. She pulled it up and around her insides like a cloak. It was impossibly heavy, but Sophie could move it. She was scared as she felt it stretch across her feelings. Was she going to obliterate herself? The sensation of it, the incredible weight, felt like it could block herself off from her very own self, if such a thing was possible. Was it? Sophie was trembling, half from the effort of lifting the material, half from fear. What was this stuff? What if it cut her off from other people? What if it cut her off from the world?
“Yes!” Angel said, excited. “Yes, that, that whatever it is! What is it? Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. She was completely covered by the shield now. And she felt herself without change, her feelings still there, all of them, her fear and excitement, her affection for Angel, the dull thump of envy for her mother-love an echo in her heart. Sophie observed the symphony of her emotions. “Can you read me?” she asked. “Anything? I’m having so many feelings!”
Sophie could feel a sort of numb pressure, Angel peeking in on her. Sophie didn’t even try to repel her; her shield, brought up from some other place, made it simply impossible for Angel to get in.
“Nothing, I can’t get any read off you at all. That thing, your material—” Angel marveled at it, touching its edges with her heart and mind. “It’s like from outer space or something. Mine is just earth minerals, I think. This is, like—I feel like if I touch it too much it’s going to suck me into it, make me a part of your wall.” Angel pulled back with a shiver. “It’s scary. Good job. Not only can I not read you, I don’t want to.”
Angel had Sophie cast the wall away and bring it back again and again, until Sophie wanted to pull out her hair with boredom. She wanted some talking animals or a fabulous creature, a myth or story or a piece of magic sea glass. Her wall came down and Angel read her discontent without even trying.
“Get over it,” she said. “This is work. You’re going to, like, save the world or something.”
“From what?” Sophie demanded. “What am I even going to do with all this crap?”
“I’m not sure,” Angel said. “I don’t have that part of the story. I’m just here to help you with this.”
Next, Angel helped Sophie master control of the impulse to eavesdrop on someone’s emotions. “You don’t want to keep getting sucked into everyone’s feelings,” Angel told her. “There are a lot of people who feel really, really bad.”
Sophie remembered what it felt like to be Laurie LeClair, a dense, rotting misery. Or to feel her mother’s feelings toward her, so sad and angry and afraid. She wished she never felt that. “Okay, show me how to do it.”
Sophie became very still, noting the cues of her body, making time feel slow so she could sense how it felt right before she got tugged into the whirlpool of another person. She noticed there was a tremor, the air taking the hint of a liquid shiver, as if all its water was gathering in a thin fog. She felt a part of herself open toward Angel, and could feel Angel opening in response. Normally all of this happened at a level that neither Sophie nor the object of her attentions could feel. She stepped a little closer, beginning to feel Angel.
“Whoa,” she said.
“You got it?” Angel asked.
“Yeah, it’s like first the air, right, and then this feeling.” She put her hands on her heart.
“Yeah, like magnets, I always think.”
“Like warm, slow magnets,” Sophie agreed. It felt sort of nice at the start, but once you got inside the feelings it often wasn’t nice at all.
“Just cut it right when you feel that. Pull yourself back in.”
Sophie knew to do it. It happened in a snap, like elastic. She boomeranged back into herself, landing with a giggle. It all felt like some strange internal gymnastics, bouncing and flipping.
“Now for the hard part.” Angel smiled, pushing her bangs behind her ears. “Crack my shield.”
This took Sophie hours. They took many breaks, first so she could eat from a bowl of beans simmered with fat chipotle peppers. She wolfed it down without chewing, an animal. When she was sated Angel handed her a giant glass mug, water with bits of dried-up twigs floating inside it. “To keep you awake and focused.”
Later they took breaks so that Sophie could catch her breath and steady herself, for it felt like walking up to a mountain and trying to push through it with your hands. Her body shook with the effort, her face red as if she had been running. Eventually, they stopped so that Sophie could cry, with frustration and exhaustion and an angry sort of boredom. She hated this. Maybe it wasn’t worth it to be so special and see talking birds and mermaids if you then had to do this, whatever this was, a sort of psychic pummeling, like trying to lift the earth itself onto your back. It felt impossible, and Sophie spun out in a tantrum, kicking and smacking the smooth, iron wall of Angel’s heart.
“Hey, hey!” Angel could feel the blind, emotional slaps upon her surface. “Let’s take a break.” And Sophie burst into tears,
“I’m terrible at this!” she cried. “I can’t do it! No one could do it!”
“You’re not terrible at it,” Angel said. “I’m just awesome at staying protected. It’s very hard to break in. It’s not going to be easy.”
Sophie leaned against the rough wood wall of the shed with a sigh. She missed Ella, missed being a goon, just laughing, passing out, wasting time. What would she say if she spoke to her friend again? You know, I’ve just been chilling with a bunch of talking pigeons, hanging out in a shed with that chick Angel learning how to read her mind and shit. How’s the beach?
Sophie took a glug of the herbal water and focused on focusing. I don’t want to let Angel down, she thought. Or the pigeons, or the mermaid. A terrible thought shook fresh tears from her eyes—what if they were all mistaken, and she wasn’t the girl they thought she was? Somewhere else in Chelsea the true girl slept, ignored by talking pigeons and Polish mermaids, and so humanity would never be saved, or whatever. Help me help me help me, Sophie repeated inside her head, though she didn’t know who she was talking to.
Help her help her help her, Angel prayed in her mind to her great-great grandmother Teresita. I think she is like you, Angel spoke inside her heart. She thought of the woman who had helped free so many people from their enslavement, using her magic and her heart, her magic heart. I think Sophie has a magic heart, full of the good magic, the helping magic. Help her grow strong and sure inside it.
The two looked at one another, Sophie wiping the tears from face, gathering herself and smearing herbs and salt on her cheek. “One more time?” Angel suggested. It turned into two more times, then twenty, then fifty. On the seventy-eighth try, Sophie walked through the thick, iron wall and into Angel’s heart. She could feel Angel rooting for her there, how anxious she was for the girl to succeed, how much she believed in her. How good was Angel’s heart, pulsing a giant Hooray! in Sophie’s direction. Angel’s smile was so big it could crack her face in two. “You did it! You did it!” Sophie luxuriated in the excellent sensation of being Angel Barrera, until a wave of motion struck her and she was back on the other side of the dark stone wall. “Now, get out!” They fell into a fit of exhausted, laughter that, once started, they had a terrible time stopping.
“We’re done for now, but not forever,” Angel said, after they’d collected themselves. “You need to learn to stay there, even when someone is trying to kick you out.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Sophie said, not liking the thought of hanging out where she wasn’t wanted.
“It’s what you’re meant to learn,” Angel said. “It’s what you already know. You just need to get really, really good at it.” She took a clean rag damped with something that smelled like the earth, and wiped Sophie’s hands. Her skin was cool and pale, the angry welts gone.
“You did it!” Sophie cried with joy. Angel smirked and shrugged her shoulders, full of fake modesty.
“Of course I did.”
* * *
ANGEL REFUSED TO send Sophie home with only a flock of pigeons as her protectors. “No offense,” she said to the flutter of them rising and falling around her head. Arthur swam a crazy backstroke in the air before them, looking Angel right in the eye.
“Should trouble go down,” the bird began, “I am certain that the total of us, dive-bombing some chump’s head, is going to be a lot more effective than you trying to talk yourself out of a fight.”
“Death from above!” another pigeon shouted, spinning toward the ground, then arcing up sharply, tumbling in a loop-de-loop.
“Wow.” Sophie was impressed.
“Well, if, um, trouble goes down I will be your man on the ground,” Angel offered. “Safety in numbers.”
“Totally,” Giddy cooed, nestling into Angel’s shoulder. Roy settled onto Sophie’s, and they headed toward the square, turning down Heard Street, just short of the city’s center and all its late-night activity. Anyone out at this hour was up to no good, and anyone up to no good would head to Bellingham Square to find it. It did the trick of keeping the rest of town relatively safe and quiet until the sun came up, releasing hoodlum boys and girls into the streets.
They walked down Heard Street, passing the house with the glut of lawn ornaments spilling across the lawn, then the vacant lot with overgrown weeds springing from the busted concrete, finally stopping at Sophie’s house, the dark green house with mismatched, chipped lion statues resting on either side of the stairs. It faced the dark rails of train tracks a block away.
“This is where you live.” Angel looked around. She noticed the tracks. “Wrong side of the tracks,” she teased.
“There isn’t any right side of the tracks in Chelsea,” Sophie teased back, but serious questions nagged her. “Angel, how did you know that I was coming?”
“My mother told me,” she said. “She’d thought maybe you would come in her generation, and she prepared, and when you didn’t she taught me everything she could. I got hired at the dump as soon as I got old enough, and I’ve been waiting there for you.”
“For how long? How did you know I would come there?”
“I’ve been working for your grandmother for five years, since I was fifteen.” Angel shook her head. “And I’m not crazy. That’s how I know I got strong magic.”
“But how did you know I would come?”
“We knew you were Kishka’s granddaughter.”
“How, how did you know that?”
“Awww, Sophie.” Angel shifted uncomfortably. “I told you, I don’t know everything, I just know my part.”
Sophie rushed at Angel and got in before she knew it, before she could yank her iron wall up around her. It felt so different inside Angel than it had earlier; Sophie marveled at how quickly a person’s feelings could change. The love was still there, Sophie knew it was true, and that Angel had goodness in her heart, but now there was fear and discomfort, a claustrophobic feeling inside her, like the walls of her own self were closing in on her. It was an icky feeling, and Sophie could feel that Angel didn’t like it, either. It was the feeling of a lie.
“Stop it!” Angel yelled. Sophie could feel her pushing her out, the dense vibrations of the wall coming, but Sophie stayed. She went deeper. That’s how you stay, she thought. When they try to push you out, you go deeper. Sophie burrowed into Angel like a tick. “Ugh!” Angel twisted like there was an insect crawling up her back, just beyond her reach. It was true that many normal people had their psyches invaded all the time and didn’t even know it. But Angel was sensitive, attuned. Her walls were the strongest. She had never felt someone break inside and stay there. Her mother was probably powerful enough to do it, but she was too respectful. It felt terrible, like an ant had crawled into your brain, to feel this small, invading motion in your most tender parts. “Please!” she begged Sophie.
Sophie had been on the edge of learning something more about the lie Angel had told her. There were waves of information, shimmers, she only had to catch them, braid them together into the truth. There was mother, her mother, and salt. A baby. A terrible sadness, a sacrifice. She pushed for more, but Angel’s anguish at Sophie’s invasion grew, until all Sophie felt was her feeling of violation, her despair at not being stronger, able to protect herself. Angel had never felt so unprotected. It was a frightening feeling. Though she’d known that Sophie possessed incredible magic, it was hard to match that knowledge with the easily frustrated, sometimes bratty girl she’d been tutoring. Sophie’s strength, her fierce perseverance, stunned her.
When the understanding that she was hurting Angel became more painful than the feeling of being lied to, Sophie leapt back into herself, feeling the iron wall spring up behind her as she left. She was trying to pull her wall up that whole time, Sophie realized. She couldn’t do it. I’m stronger than her wall. And Sophie knew she had learned her final lesson, how to stay where she wasn’t wanted. That she had in fact known how all along, and even without Angel she would have figured it out, the way she had understood to pull back from Ronald and not enter his boozy, decrepit interior. The way she’d known she could send herself into Angel that day she first saw her at the dump. Was that yesterday? That was only yesterday.
Angel sat on Sophie’s front steps. She looked broken from the experience, her head hung, her bangs clumped to the sides of her face—wet, Sophie noted. Angel was crying.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie rushed to say. Whatever had happened, whatever lie Angel had told, there certainly was a reason for it. Angel was good, had been only good to her, and Sophie had hurt her. “I’m so, so sorry Angel. I didn’t—” Sophie started to say she hadn’t meant to do it, but she had. And maybe she hadn’t meant to hurt Angel, but once she did, she’d stuck around a while. Why? Because she could. Because she was pissed at Angel’s lie and wanted to know the secret of it.
“I don’t,” Sophie corrected herself. “I don’t like what happened. That I did that.” Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. There was something gross, Sophie thought, about crying while offering an apology. The tears gathered at the corners of Sophie’s eyes and dried there. Angel rubbed her wrist across her face and looked up at her student.
“I can’t be mad at you,” Angel said. “You are more powerful than me. I’ve known that all along, it was just really intense to feel it.” She stood up. “I guess our work is done,” she said. “That was my last lesson for you, but you know it. How to stay when someone is trying to make you leave. You just go deeper. There is no end to how deep you can go. You can go so deep in a person, even a person fighting you, that they stop feeling you’re there, they think you’re gone.” Angel shook her head, still stunned from Sophie’s invasion. “I knew you were the one and everything, but damn,” she said. “You just kicked my ass. You’re really, really powerful Sophie. I thought it would take a lot longer to teach you what I know but, you got it. That’s it.”
“Our work can’t be done!” Sophie cried. “I—I—there’s a lot I don’t understand, Angel. What if I go too deep and I can’t get out? Can I get trapped in a person?”
Angel shook her head. “No. They might begin to feel you again when you come out, there could be a struggle, but you can hold your own in a struggle. Jeez.” Angel tried to smile, to lighten the moment, but truthfully she didn’t feel light. She felt battered and exhausted, and sad. She had been training for this moment her whole life; she didn’t expect it to be over so soon. The girl knew everything she could teach her.
“Well, what about Teresita?” Sophie said, desperate. “You barely told me anything about her, she seems really important.”
“She is important.” Angel nodded. “Honestly, Sophie, I have thought that you might be her. You might be her, and Joan of Arc, and all those saints, those girls who had crazy magic and didn’t know what they were doing, who didn’t have helpers like you have, and the people of their time just punished them for it. I’ve even thought you could be, like, the big revolutionary heroes who spoke about love, you know? Like Jesus Christ or Gandhi. Maybe it’s the same spirit coming back again and again to try to help. Maybe this lifetime, it’s you.”
Sophie thought of the images she’d seen of the men Angel talked about. Fragile-looking Gandhi, too skinny, but he seemed cheerful, a happy man in his little glasses. Jesus Christ on the cross. She’d looked at him every day for eight long years of Catholic school. And Angel was suggesting she was him. In your face, Sister Margaret, she thought with a spiteful pride. Angel caught it.
“I shouldn’t be saying any of this to you,” Angel said. “This is not the story. This is not the prophecy, not at all. These are just my thoughts. Maybe it only means that you are part of a powerful lineage, Sophie. It is good for me to remember. Because when I see you, I see a young girl with snarls in her hair, and I need to remember your lineage.”
“What’s lineage?”
“Like ancestors. But, it’s like you’re part of a bigger family than the one you have here on earth. Anyway, it’s good for me to think like this.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get out of you when you wanted me to,” Sophie said.
“It’s okay. Please don’t do it again. I hope to never give you a reason to.”
“But Angel—” Sophie started, stopped. “Why did you lie? What won’t you tell me?”
“Someone else should tell you these things. It is not my work to explain everything to you.”
“Hennie,” piped Livia, who, like all the pigeons, had been watching them quietly. “Hennie will tell you more; go to her when you can.”
“Okay,” Sophie said. She wanted to look at Angel but felt she might cry. “We’ll still hang out at the dump, right? Smashing glass and stuff?”
“Sophie,” Angel was shaking her head. She busied herself pulling her hair from its ponytail, then roping it back into a ponytail. She fussed with her bangs. “Sophie, I have been waiting to quit the dump for years. I was only there to wait for you. I can’t keep working with your grandmother, in that smell, watching how she treats Ronald— she’s killing him, giving him all that alcohol, she might as well give him rat poison. Having to keep my wall up all day in case she comes snooping, having her think I’m a guy all the time—I can’t do it. It’s really stressful.”
“Well, what will you do?” Sophie cried. She couldn’t picture Angel anywhere but the dump, smashing old jars in her goggles, harvesting gleaming beads of perfect glass from the tumbler.
“I want to help kids,” she said. “I want to be a juvenile drug counselor. It bums me out, seeing so many kids in Chelsea messed up like that. There’s a program at that college that just opened a campus right here in town, in the old post office. I bet I could get financial aid, I think I could do it.”
Sophie thought about Angel counseling drug addict kids, her ability to go inside them, her ability to keep them outside of her. It seemed perfect. “You’re a really good teacher,” Sophie said shyly. “It would be kind of like teaching, wouldn’t it be?”
“Maybe.” Angel nodded. “So… I won’t be at the dump tomorrow. I’m sorry to leave you there. The pigeons will be with you, but you have to steer clear of your grandmother as much as possible. Okay?”
“Okay.” Sophie hurled herself impulsively at Angel, gripping her in a clutching hug. “Can I please come visit you sometimes? What if I need you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Angel said. “Of course, if you ever need me, come find me. You know where I live. My mother will always be home, she would always be happy to see you, okay?”
“Can I just come and, like, hang out sometimes?”
Angel laughed. “Yeah, sure. In all your free time. When you’re not, like, saving the world, come by and I’ll tell you the whole story of Teresita.”
“Okay, great,” Sophie felt relieved. Angel handed her a paper bag she’d brought along.
“One white candle, dressed by my mother. Light it and pray to Teresita. Make an altar. It will help you stay focused and strong, and it will call help to you.” Angel kissed Sophie on her forehead. “I will be praying for you all the time, always know that Sophie.”
Sophie clutched the paper bag to her chest and watched Angel walk away. A sweet fragrance, like lilacs and peonies, floated up fro the sack. One of the pigeons, a bird named Bix, settled onto her shoulder and lifted his feather to soak up her tears. “ ‘Parting is all we know of heaven,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘And all we need to know of hell.’ That’s Emily Dickinson. She was a poet, perhaps you’ve heard of her?”
“Don’t start with the poetry crap,” Arthur bellowed. “She’s having a moment, let her have her moment.”
“I find that poetry aids the having of such moments, greatly,” Bix sniffed.
“Thank you, Bix,” Sophie said. Together with the pigeons she watched Angel move up Heard Street, unti she was around the corner and gone.
“Who will put out water for us to bathe in?” Giddy asked sadly.
“I will,” Sophie promised. “If you guys promise to stop taking dumps on my mom’s car.”
“You drive a hard bargain, lady,” Arthur said. “But you got us over a barrel. We need a bath. It’s a deal.”
“I would offer to clean it for you,” Bix offered generously. “But we do not possess the appendages for such a task.”
The pigeons took off into the sky, the tail-whistles of Livia and the others like audible streamers in the night. Sophie waited at her door until she could no longer hear them, then pulled her house key from her shirt and let herself in.
