by Cynthia Hand
“I think I need you to tie up the corset before I put the rest on,” I say.
She jumps up to help me. That’s one thing about Angela: She never does anything halfway. She yanks the laces.
“Not so tight! I still have to breathe, remember?”
“Quit whining. You’re lucky we couldn’t find any real whalebone for this thing.”
By the time she slides the dress over my head I feel like I have on every item of clothing at the Garter. She walks around me pulling on the pieces underneath to make sure they look right. She steps back.
“Wow, that is good. With the makeup and the hair right, you’ll look exactly like Queen Elizabeth.”
“Great,” I say without enthusiasm. “I’ll look like a pasty-faced tart.”
“Oh, I forgot the ruffs!”
She hops down from the stage and runs over to a cardboard box on the floor. She pulls out a stiff round collar that looks like the things you put on dogs to keep them from licking themselves. There are two more for the wrists.
“No one said anything about ruffs,” I say, backing away.
She jumps toward me. Her wings come out with a flash and beat a couple of times, carrying her easily to the stage, then disappear.
“Show-off.”
“Hold still.” She puts the final ruff on the end of my sleeve. “My mom’s a genius.”
As if on cue, Anna Zerbino comes in from the lobby with a stack of table linens. She stops in the aisle when she sees me.
“So it fits,” she says, her humorless dark eyes looking me up and down.
“It’s great,” I say. “Thank you for all your hard work.”
She nods.
“Dinner’s ready upstairs. Lasagna.”
“Okay, so we’re done with the fitting,” I say to Angela. “Get me out of this thing.”
“Not so fast,” whispers Angela, glancing at her mom over her shoulder. “We haven’t done much of our other research.”
She’s so predictable. Always with the angel research.
“Come on,” I whisper back. “Lasagna.”
“We’ll be right up, Mom,” says Angela. She pretends to fiddle with my collar until her mother leaves the theater. As soon as we’re alone again, she says, “I figured out something good, though.”
“What is it?”
“Angels — full-blooded angels, I mean — are all male.”
“All male?”
“There are no female Intangere.”
“Interesting. Now help me get out of this dress.”
“But I think that angels could appear female if they wanted to. I believe they can change form, like shape-shifters,” she says, her golden eyes dancing with excitement.
“So they can become cats and birds and stuff.”
“Right, but more than that,” she says. “I have another theory.”
“Oh, here we go,” I groan.
“I think that all the stories about supernatural creatures, like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, mermaids, aliens, you name it, could all be angel related. Humans don’t know what they’re seeing, but it could all be angels taking on other forms.”
Angela has some wild theories, but they’re always cool to consider.
“Awesome,” I say. “Now let’s eat.”
“Wait,” she says. “I also found something about your hair.”
“My hair?”
“The blaze thing you told me about.” She walks over to the table and grabs her notebook, flips through it. “It’s called comae caelestis. The Romans used the phrase to describe ‘dazzling rays of light emanating from the hairs of the head, a sign of a heavenly being.’”
“What, you find that on the internet?” I ask with a stunned laugh. She nods. As usual, Angela has taken the nugget of information I’ve given her and turned it into a gold mine.
“I wish it would happen to me,” she says, twisting a strand of her shiny black hair around her finger wistfully. “I bet it’s awesome.”
“It’s overwhelming, okay? And you’d have to dye your hair.”
She shrugs like that doesn’t sound so bad to her.
“So what do you have for me this week?” she asks.
“What about the concept of purpose?” This is a big one, something I probably should have gotten into a lot earlier, only I didn’t especially want to talk about purpose, because then I’d have to talk about mine. But now I’ve literally told her everything else I know. I even broke out the angel diary and showed her my old notes. Secretly I hope that she, in her infinite wisdom, already knows all about purpose.
“Define purpose,” she says.
No such luck.
“First get me out of this thing.” I gesture to the dress.
She moves around me quickly, loosening and unfastening all the laces and ties. I go into the dressing room and change back into my normal clothes. When I come out, she’s sitting at one of the tables drumming her pencil on her notebook.
“Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
I take a seat across from her.
“Every angel-blood has a purpose on earth. Usually it comes in the form of a vision.”
She scribbles furiously into her notebook.
“When do you see this vision?” she asks.
“Everybody’s different, but sometime between thirteen and twenty, usually. It happens after your powers start to manifest. I only got mine last year.”
“And you only receive one purpose?”
“As far as I know. Mom always says it’s the one thing I was put on this earth to do.”
“So what happens if you don’t do it?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“And what happens after you complete it? You go on to live a normal, happy life?”
“I don’t know,” I say again. Some expert I’m turning out to be. “Mom won’t tell me any of that.”
“What’s yours?” she asks, still writing.
She looks up when I don’t say anything. “Oh, is it supposed to be a secret?”
“I don’t know. It’s just personal.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me.”
But I want to tell her. I want to talk about it with someone other than my mom.
“It’s about Christian Prescott.”
She puts her pencil down, her face so surprised I almost laugh.
“Christian Prescott?” she repeats like I’m about to hit her with the punch line to a very silly joke.
“I see a forest fire, and then I see Christian standing in the trees. I think I’m supposed to save him.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
She’s quiet for a minute.
“That’s why you moved here?” she asks finally.
“Yep. I saw Christian’s truck in my vision, and I read the license plate, so that’s how we knew to come here.”
“Wow.”
“You can stop saying that.”
“When is it supposed to happen?”
“I wish I knew. Sometime during fire season is all I know.”
“No wonder you’re so obsessed with him.”
“Ange!”
“Oh, come on. You eye-hump him all through British History. I thought you were just enraptured, the way everyone else at school seems to be. I’m happy to find out that you have a good reason.”
“Okay, enough angel talk,” I say, getting up and heading for the door. I’m sure I’m beet red by this point. “Our lasagna’s getting cold.”
“But you didn’t ask me about my purpose,” she says.
I stop.
“You know your purpose?”
“Well, I didn’t know until now that it was my purpose. But I’ve been having the same daydream thing, over and over again, for like three years.”
“What is it? If you don’t mind me asking.”
She looks serious all of a sudden.
“No, it’s fine,” she says. “There’s a big courtyard, and I’m walking through it fast, almo
st running, like I’m late. There are lots of people around, people with backpacks and cups of coffee, so I think it’s like a college campus or something. It’s midmorning. I run up a set of stone steps, and at the top is a man in a gray suit. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he turns.”
She stops talking, staring off into the darkened theater like right now she’s seeing it play out in her mind.
“And?” I prompt.
She glances over at me uncomfortably.
“I don’t know. I think I’m supposed to deliver a message to him. There are words, there are things I am supposed to say, but I never can remember them.”
“They’ll come to you, when the time is right,” I say.
I sound just like my mom.
* * *
What’s comforting about Angela, I think as I get ready for bed that night, is that she reminds me that I’m not alone. Maybe I shouldn’t feel alone, anyway, since I have Mom and Jeffrey, but I do, like I’m the only person in the world who has to face this divine purpose. Now I’m not. And Angela, in spite of her know-it-all nature, doesn’t know what her purpose means any more than I do, and no amount of research or theorizing can help her. She simply has to wait for the answers. It makes me feel better, knowing that. Like I suck a smidge less.
“Hey, you,” says Mom, poking her head in my room. “Did you have a good time with Angela?” Her face is carefully neutral, the way it always is whenever the topic of Angela comes up.
“Yeah, we finished our project. We’re doing it tomorrow. So I guess we won’t be hanging out as much now.”
“Good, we’ll have some time for flying lessons.”
“Awesome,” I deadpan.
She frowns. “I’m glad about Angela.” She comes into my room and sits next to me on the bed. “I think it’s great that you can have an angel-blood friend.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely. You need to be careful, that’s all.”
“Right, because everyone knows what a hooligan Angela is.”
“You feel like you can be yourself around Angela,” she says. “I get that. But angel-bloods are different. They’re not like your normal friends. You never know what their real intentions might be.”
“Paranoid much?”
“Just be careful,” she says.
She doesn’t even know Angela. Or her purpose. She doesn’t know how fun and smart Angela is, all the cool things that I’ve learned from her.
“Mom,” I say hesitantly. “How long did it take you to get all the pieces for your purpose? When did you know — for absolute certain — what it was that you had to do?”
“I didn’t.” Her eyes are mournful for a few seconds, and then her expression becomes guarded, her body going stiff all the way up to her face.
She thinks she’s already said too much. She’s not going to give me anything else.
I sigh.
“Mom, why can’t you just tell me?”
“I meant,” she continues like she didn’t even hear my question, “that I didn’t ever know for absolute certain. Not absolute. The whole process is usually very intuitive.”
We hear a blast of music as Jeffrey comes out of his room and tromps his huge feet down the hall and into the bathroom. When I look at Mom again she’s her usual sunny self.
“Some of it you have to take on faith,” she says.
“Yeah, I know,” I say resignedly. A lump rises in my throat. I want to ask so many questions. But she never wants to answer them. She never lets me into her secret angel world, and I don’t understand why.
“I should sleep,” I say. “Big British History presentation tomorrow.”
“All right,” she says.
She looks exhausted. Purple shadows under her eyes. I even notice a few fine lines in the corners I’ve never seen before. She might pass for mid-forties now, which is still good considering that she’s a hundred and eighteen years old. But I’ve never seen her look so worn out.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I put my hand over hers. Her skin is cool and damp, which startles me.
“I’m fine.” She pulls her hand out from under mine. “It’s been a long week.”
She gets up and goes to the door.
“You ready?” She reaches for the light switch.
“Yeah.”
“Good night,” she says, and turns off the light.
For a moment she stands in the doorway, silhouetted in the light from the hall.
“I love you, Clara,” she says. “Don’t forget that, okay?”
I want to cry. How did we get so much space between us in such a short time?
“I love you too, Mom.”
Then she goes out and closes the door, and I’m alone in the dark.
* * *
“One more coat,” says Angela. “Your hair is so. aggravating!”
“I told you,” I say.
She sprays another toxic cloud of hair spray at my head. I cough. When my eyes stop watering I look into the mirror. Queen Elizabeth stares back. She does not look amused.
“I think we might actually land an A.”
“Was there ever any doubt?” says Angela, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “I’m doing most of the talking, remember? You just have to stand there and look pretty.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I grumble. “This getup must weigh a hundred pounds.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Wait a sec,” I say. “When did you get glasses? You have perfect vision.”
“It’s my costume. You play the queen. I play the studious straight-A student who knows everything there is to know about the Elizabethan age.”
“Wow. You’re sick, you know that?”
“Come on,” she says. “The bell’s about to ring.”
The other students part to let me pass as I follow Angela down the hall. I try to smile as they point and whisper. We stop right outside the door to British History. Angela turns and starts to fiddle with my dress.
“Nice ruffs,” she teases.
“You so owe me.”
“Wait here.” She looks the tiniest bit nervous. “I’ll announce you.”
After she slips into the classroom, I stand in the hall listening, waiting, my heart suddenly beating fast. I hear Angela speaking, and Mr. Erikson answering. The class laughs at something he says. I peer through the tiny rectangular window in the classroom door. Angela is standing at the front of the class, pointing to the poster we whipped up with a timeline of the life of Queen Elizabeth. She’s going to announce me after the death of Queen Mary. Any minute now. I take a deep breath and stand up as straight as I can under the crushing weight of the gown.
Christian is in there. I can see him through the window, sitting in the front row, resting his head on his hand.
Christian has the nicest profile.
“So without further ado,” says Angela at last, loudly, “I give you Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth the first of the house of Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland.
Tucker, get the door.”
The door swings open, and I step inside the classroom with as much poise as I can manage. Careful not to trip on the massive dress, I sweep to the front of the room to stand beside Angela. The class seems to take a collective breath.
Of course we weren’t able to completely replicate any of the actual gowns from the portraits of Elizabeth we printed off Wikipedia, the ones encrusted with emeralds and rubies and made from yards and yards of expensive fabrics, but Angela’s mom did a bang-up imitation. The gown is a deep gold color with a silver brocade pattern and a white silk undershirt that pokes through at the sleeves. We hot-glued fake pearls and glass jewels all around the edges. The corset cinches me into a little triangle in front; then the skirt flares out and down to the floor. The ruffs at my neck and wrists are made of stiff white lace, also decorated with faux pearls. To top it off, my face is painted nearly white, something that’s supposed to represent Elizabeth’s purity, with red lips. Angela parted my hair down the midd
le and rolled it into an elaborate braided bun in the back, then pinned on a small crownlike headpiece made out of wire and pearls, with a tiny pearl that dangles right in the middle of my forehead, and a long piece of white velvet hangs off the back like a bride’s veil.