Mr. Phibbs, my teacher for AP English, which happens to be—thank God!—my last class of the day, immediately gets us started on our first “College English” assignment, a personal essay on where we see ourselves in ten years.
I take out a notebook, click my pen to the write position. And stare at the blank page. And stare. And stare.
Where do I see myself in ten years?
“Try to visualize yourself,” Mr. Phibbs says, like he’s spotted me back here in the corner and knows that I’m floundering. I always liked Mr. Phibbs; he’s kind of our own personal Gandalf or Dumbledore or somebody cool like that, complete with round, wire glasses and long white ponytail sticking out of the back of his collar. But right now he’s killing me.
Visualize myself, he says. I close my eyes. Slowly, a picture starts to materialize in my mind. A forest beneath an orange sky. A ridge. Christian, waiting.
I open my eyes. Suddenly I’m furious.
No, I think at no one in particular. That is not my future. That’s past. My future is with Tucker.
It’s not hard to imagine it. I close my eyes again, and with a bit of effort I can see the outline of the big red barn at the Lazy Dog, the sky overhead empty and blue. There’s a man walking a horse in a pasture. It looks like Midas, a beautiful glossy chestnut. And there’s—this is the part where the breath suddenly hitches in my throat—a small boy riding the horse, a tiny dark-haired boy giggling as Tucker—the man is definitely Tucker; I’d know that butt anywhere—leads him around the pasture. The boy sees me, waves. I wave back. Tucker walks the horse over to the fence.
“Look at me, look at me,” says the boy.
“I see you! Hi there, handsome,” I say to Tucker. He leans over the fence to kiss me, taking my face between his hands, and that’s when I see the glint of the plain gold band on his finger.
We’re married.
It’s the best daydream of all time. I know somewhere deep down that it’s only a daydream, the combination of my active imagination and wishful thinking. Not a vision. Not the future that’s been set for me. But it’s the one I want.
I open my eyes, tighten my fingers around my pen, and write: “In ten years, I will be married. I will have a child. I will be happy.”
I click the pen closed and stare at the words. They surprise me. I’ve never been one of those girls, either, who dreamed of getting married, never forced a boy to say vows with me on the playground or dressed up in bedsheets and pretended to walk down the aisle. When I was a kid I fashioned swords out of tree branches, and Jeffrey and I chased each other around the backyard yelling, “Surrender or die!” Not that I was a tomboy. I liked the color purple and nail polish and sleepovers and writing my crush’s name in the margins of my notebooks at school as much as any other girl. But I never honestly considered being married. Being Mrs. Somebody. I guess I assumed that I’d get married eventually. It just seemed like it was too far away to worry about.
But maybe I am one of those girls.
I look at the page again. I’ve got three sentences. Wendy is obviously writing an entire book on how awesome her life is going to turn out, and I’ve got three sentences. I have a feeling they’re not the kind of sentences that Mr. Phibbs is going to appreciate.
“Okay, five more minutes,” says Mr. Phibbs. “Then we’ll share.”
Panic sets in. I’m going to have to make something up. What should I want to be? Angela’s going to be a poet, Wendy’s a vet, Kay Patterson over there is head of a sorority house and marries a senator, Shawn is an Olympic-gold snowboarder, Jason’s one of those computer programmers who makes a gazillion dollars coming up with some new way to Google, and I’m—I’m—I’m a cruise ship director. I’m a famous ballerina for the New York City Ballet. I’m a heart surgeon.
I go with heart surgeon. My pen flies across the page.
“Time’s up,” says Mr. Phibbs. “Finish your sentence and then we’ll share.”
I read back over what I’ve written. It’s good stuff. Completely bogus, but something. “There’s nothing more inspiring than the complexity and beauty of the human heart,” I write as my last sentence, and I can nearly make myself believe it. The daydream about Tucker has almost faded from my mind.
“Heart surgeon, huh?” says Angela as we walk together up the boardwalk on Broadway in Jackson.
I shrug. “You went with lawyer. You really think you’re going to be a lawyer?”
“I’d make an excellent lawyer.”
We step under the archway that says PINK GARTER, and Angela fishes out her keys to unlock the door. As usual for this time of day, the theater looks completely deserted.
“Come on.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and pushes me through the empty lobby.
For a minute we stand there in the dark. Then Angela slips away, disappearing into the black, and a moment later a halo of light appears on the stage, which is still decked out with the set of Oklahoma!, a fake farmhouse and corn. I wander reluctantly down the aisle, past the rows of red velvet seats and up to the line of clean white tables in front of the orchestra pit, where all last year Angela and I sat with Angela’s notebooks and stacks of dusty old books and talked angels, angels, angels until sometimes I thought my brain would melt.
Angela practically skips up to the front of the theater. She climbs the stairs at the edge of the stage and stands looking out, so she can get a clear view of anybody coming in. Under the lights her long black hair glows a shade of deep blue that isn’t entirely natural. She sweeps her bangs behind her ear and looks down at me with this super-pleased-with-herself expression. I swallow.
“So what’s this all about?” I ask, trying to sound like I don’t care. “I’m dying to know.”
“Patience is a virtue,” she quips.
“I’m not that virtuous.”
She smiles mysteriously. “You think I haven’t guessed that already?”
A figure appears in the back of the theater, and I get that panicky tightness in my chest. Then the figure comes into the light, and my breath catches for a different reason.
It isn’t Christian. It’s my brother.
I glance up at Angela. She shrugs. “He deserves to know everything we know, right?”
I turn back and look at Jeffrey. He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
Jeffrey’s been hard to figure out lately. Something is definitely up with him. First, there was the night of the fire, when he came tearing out of the trees like the devil was chasing him, his wings the color of lead. I don’t know if that means anything, the state of his spiritual well-being or whatnot, since my wings at that time were pretty dark too, on account of the soot. He said he was out there looking for me, which I don’t buy. But one thing’s for sure, he was out there. In the forest. During the fire. Then the next day he was glued to the television, watching every minute of the news. Like he was expecting something. And later we had this conversation:
Me (after spilling the beans about finding Christian in the forest and him being an angel-blood): “So it was kind of a good thing that I saved Tucker instead.”
Jeffrey: “Well, what were you supposed to do, if your purpose wasn’t about saving Christian?”
The million-dollar question.
Me (miserably): “I don’t know.”
Then Jeffrey did the oddest thing. He laughed, a bitter laugh, false, which instantly rubbed me the wrong way. I’d just confessed that I’d messed up the most important thing I was ever supposed to do in my life, my reason for being on this earth, and he laughed at me.
“What?” I barked at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Man,” he said. “This is like a freaking Greek tragedy.” He shook his head in disbelief. “You saved Tucker instead.”
I may have called him a jerk-face or something. But he kept laughing, until I seriously wanted to smack him, and then Mom caught wind of the impending violence in that uncanny way she has and said, “Enough, both of you,” and I’d stalked off to my room.
Just thinking about it now makes me want to slug him.
“So what do you think?” Angela asks. “Can he join us?”
Tough call. But mad or not, I’m pretty curious to find out what exactly he knows. Since we don’t seem to be communicating well these days, this might be the best way. I turn to Angela with a shrug. “Sure. Why not?”
“We have to make this quick,” Jeffrey says, slinging his backpack down onto one of the chairs. “I’ve got practice.”
“No problem.” Angela suppresses another smile. “We’re just waiting for—”
“I’m here.”
And there is Christian, striding down the aisle with his hands in his pockets. His eyes roam over the theater like he’s considering making an offer on the place, inspecting the stage, the seats, the tables, the lights and riggings in the rafters. Then his gaze lands on me.
“So let’s do this,” he says. “Whatever it is.”
Angela doesn’t waste any time. “Come join me up here.”
Slowly we all make our way onto the stage and stand in a circle with Angela.
“Welcome to Angel Club,” she says melodramatically.
Christian does his laugh/exhale thing. “First rule of Angel Club, you do not talk about Angel Club.”
“Second rule of Angel Club,” chimes in Jeffrey. “Do not talk about Angel Club.”
Oh boy. Here we go.
“Hilarious. You’re bonding already.” Angela is not amused. “Seriously, though. I do think we should have rules.”
“Why?” Jeffrey wants to know. Always with the attitude, my sweet little brother. “Why do we need rules for a club?”
“Maybe if we knew what the point of the club was,” adds Christian.
Angela’s eyes flare in a way I’m familiar with—this is not going according to her carefully constructed plan. “The point,” she says in a clipped tone, “is to find out all we can about this angel-blood stuff, so we don’t like, you know, end up dead.” Again with the melodrama. She claps her hands together. “Okay, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. Last week our girl Clara here stumbled upon a Black Wing in the mountains.”
“Crashed is more like it,” I mutter.
Angela nods. “Right. Crashed. Because this guy puts out a kind of toxic sorrow, which, because of all Clara’s touchy-feely skills, took away the lightness she needed to fly, so she fell, dropped out of the sky, right where he wanted her.”
Jeffrey and Christian are looking at me.
“You fell?” asks Jeffrey. I must have left out this part of the story when I told it at home.
“Touchy-feely skills?” asks Christian.
“I have a theory that Black Wings are incapable of flight, by the way,” Angela continues. Clearly this is not the question-and-answer part of this event. “Their sorrow weighs them down too much to get airborne. It’s only a theory at this point, but I’m kind of liking it. It means, if you ever came across a Black Wing, you might be able to escape by flying off, because he couldn’t chase you.”
What she needs, I think, is a chalkboard. Then she could really go to town.
“So Clara was incapacitated simply by being in the presence of a Black Wing,” she says. “We should learn if there’s anything we can do about that, some way to block the sorrow out.”
I’m definitely on board with that idea.
“And since Clara and her mom defeated the Black Wing using glory, I think that’s our key.”
“My uncle says glory takes years to be able to control,” Christian says then.
Angela shrugs. “Clara did it, and she’s only a Quartarius. What level are you?”
“Only a Quartarius,” he replies with a hint of sarcasm.
Angela gets this glint in her eye. She’s the only Dimidius in our group, then. She has the highest concentration of angel blood. I guess that makes her our natural leader.
“Okay, so where was I?” she says. She ticks it off on her fingers. “Objective one, find a way to block the sorrow. That’s mostly a job for Clara since she seems to be extra sensitive to it. I was with her when we saw the Black Wing at the mall last year, and I didn’t get anything from him but a mild case of the creeps.”
“Hold up,” interrupts Jeffrey. “You two saw a Black Wing at the mall last year? When?”
“We were shopping for prom dresses.” Angela heaves a meaningful look at Christian, as if the whole incident was his fault somehow because he was my date.
“And why did I not hear about this?” Jeffrey asks, turning to me.
“Your mom said it would put you in danger, knowing about them. According to her, when you’re aware of Black Wings, they become more aware of you,” Angela answers for me.
He looks skeptical.
“So she must think you’re all grown-up, since she told you about them now, right?” Angela offers helpfully.
I think about the stony look on Mom’s face the morning after the fire, when she told Jeffrey about Samjeeza. “That, or she thought it might be necessary for Jeffrey to have a clue about Black Wings in case one of them shows up at the house wanting revenge,” I add.
“Which brings us to objective two,” Angela segues smoothly. She glances at me. “Did you finish the book I gave you?”
“Ange, you just gave it to me at lunch.”
She sighs and gives me a look that conveys what an amateur she thinks I am. “Can you get it, please?”
I hop down to fetch the book out of my backpack. Angela decides that maybe a table would be more comfortable to get down and dirty with the research, which she evidently means to jump right into. We reconvene around a table, and Angela takes The Book of Enoch from me.
She flips through the pages. “Listen to this.” She clears her throat. “It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful. And when the Watchers, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamored of them, saying to each other, ‘Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.’”
“Okay. Enter angel-bloods,” I comment.
“Just wait for it. I’m getting to the good part. . . . Then their leader, Samyaza, said to them, ‘I fear that you perhaps may be indisposed to the performance of this enterprise; and that I alone shall suffer for so grievous a crime.’ Does that name sound familiar?”
A shiver zings its way down my spine.
“That’s him, then, Samjeeza? The angel who attacked Mom and Clara?” Jeffrey asks.
Angela sits back. “I think so. It goes on to talk about how they married the human women and taught mankind how to make weapons and mirrors, and showed them sorcery and all kinds of taboo stuff. They had tons of kids, which the book describes as evil giants—the Nephilim—who were abominations in the sight of God, until there were so many of them and the earth became so evil that God sent the flood to wipe them all out.”
“So we’re evil giants,” repeats Jeffrey. “Dude, we’re not that tall.”
“People back then were shorter,” Angela says. “Poor nutrition.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I say. “How could we be abominations? How is it our fault if we’re born with angel blood in our veins? I thought the Bible describes the Nephilim as heroes.”
“It does,” Angela answers. “The Book of Enoch isn’t in the Bible. I have a theory that it might be some kind of anti-angel-blood propaganda. But it’s interesting, right? Worth looking into. Because this Samjeeza fellow is right in the middle of it. He’s the leader of this group of Black Wings called the Watchers, which, according to some other research I’ve been doing, is a band of fallen angels whose basic job is to seduce human women and produce as many angel-bloods as possible.”
Fabulous.
“Okay, so objective two is finding out more about Samjeeza,” I say. “Roger that. Are there any more objectives?”
“One,” Angela says lightly. “I thought one objective of Angel Club should be to help each other figure out our purposes. I mean, you two have had yours, but didn’t fulfill them. So what does that mean?” she says, glancing at Christian and me. “And Jeffrey and I still have ours coming. Maybe if we all put our heads together, we can understand this whole purpose concept better.”
“Great. Hey, look, I’ve got to go,” Jeffrey says abruptly. “Practice started ten minutes ago. Coach is going to have me running laps until I drop.”
“Wait, we haven’t got to the rules part yet,” Angela calls after him as he books it for the door.
“Clara can fill me in later,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Or you could make, like, stone tablets or something. Angel Club ten commandments.” Then he’s gone.
So much for finding out exactly what he knows.
Angela looks at me. “He’s funny.”
“Yeah, he’s a barrel of laughs.”
“So. The rules.”
I sigh. “Lay them on us.”
“Well, first, and this one’s a no-brainer, no one tells anybody about this. We’re the only ones who know about Angel Club, okay?”
“Do not talk about Angel Club,” says Christian with a smirk.
“I mean it. Don’t tell your uncle.” Angela turns to me. “Don’t tell your mom. Don’t tell your boyfriend. Got it? Second rule: Angel Club is a secret from everybody else, but we don’t keep secrets from each other. This is a no-secrets zone. We tell each other everything.”
“Okay . . . ,” I agree. “What are the other rules?”
“That’s it,” she says.
“Oh. One per stone tablet,” I joke.
“Ha. Ha.” She turns back to Christian. “What about you? You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time. You’ve got to swear too.”
“No, thank you,” he says politely.
She leans back in her chair in surprise. “No, thank you?”
“To the rules. I won’t go blabbing about this thing to my buddies on the ski team. But I tell my uncle everything, and I’m going to tell him about this.” His eyes seek mine, pin me. “It’s stupid not to communicate what you know to the adults. They’re only trying to protect us. And as far as the no-secrets zone, I can’t agree to that. I don’t even really know you guys, so why would I tell you my secrets? No way.”
Angela’s speechless. I find this kind of funny.
“You’re right,” I say. “We ditch the rules. There are no rules.”
“I think it’s great, though,” he says as a way of soothing Angela. “Meeting and finding out what we can do, trying to figure things out. Count me in. I’ll be here, whenever, until it snows and then I have ski team, but maybe then we can move this to Sunday afternoons, which would work for me.”
Angela recovers. She even whips up a smile. “Sure, that’s doable. Probably better for Jeffrey’s schedule, too. Sundays. Let’s do Sundays.”
There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“Okay then,” Angela says finally. “I think this meeting is adjourned.”
It’s almost dark when I leave the theater. Storm clouds are brewing overhead, churning like a grumbling stomach. I guess I should be grateful for the rain, since the storm put out the fires, which in the end probably saved people’s lives and homes. It’s only weather, I remind myself, but sometimes I wonder if this particular weather’s been sent to bother me personally, a punishment, maybe, for not doing my job, for failing at my purpose, or some other sort of ominous sign.
I try for a quick, casual good-bye to Christian at the corner, but he puts his hand on my arm.
“I still want to talk to you,” he says in a low voice.
“I have to go,” I manage. “My mom will be wondering where I am. Call me, okay? Or I’ll call you. One of us should definitely call the other.”
“Right.” His hand drops away. “I’ll call you.”
“I gotta run. I’m late.”
And then I’m off in the opposite direction.
Coward, says the nagging voice inside my head. You should talk to him. Find out what he has to say.
What if he says we belong together?
Well, then you’ll have to deal with that. But at least you won’t be running away.
I think it’s more of a brisk walk.
Whatever.
I’m having an argument with myself. And I’m losing.
So not a good sign.