by Unknown
But then yesterday she awoke gasping from a nightmare in which he was strangling her, his face nearly touching her own, and her anger was so total, so visceral, that she paced her room until morning, when she announced she was moving in with her dad and grandmother. Her mother had driven her here in silent fury, the muscle along her jaw pulsing, while Angel’s heart skittered.
“No one’s here,” Angel said, dismayed, when her mom pulled into the empty driveway.
“So what, you want to stay or go home? I’m not waiting around for your dad to get back from wherever the fuck.” Marissa’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Didn’t you call? You haven’t been here in how long and you didn’t even call?”
Angel heaved herself out of the car and tried knocking, leaving the car door open wide so her mother couldn’t pull away. She texted both her dad and her grandmother, but no one replied. How hard was it to have one single damn thing work out in her favor?
“I’m staying.” Angel retrieved her duffel from the backseat, then leaned in the passenger side, but Marissa didn’t look at Angel. When she spoke again, she couldn’t keep the desperate hitch from her voice. “Bye, Mom.”
“Bye,” Marissa said, shifting into reverse, waiting for Angel to shut the door. She hasn’t even called to make sure someone eventually came home and let Angel in. For all Marissa knows, Angel could have been kidnapped that afternoon. Murdered. Her womb scooped from her belly like the seed from an avocado.
When Angel was in middle school, she and her mother used to have big weeping fights about who should vacuum or who was responsible for the clutter on the kitchen table. Sometimes, after, they would lean against each other on the couch, exhausted, her mother gently scratching Angel’s head with her nails, but mostly the fights left Angel feeling alone, disturbed to see her mother so destroyed by emotion, as destroyed as Angel herself felt.
But this silence is worse. She wonders whether her mother intends to teach her a lesson or if she truly hates Angel or if she’s already completely forgotten Angel’s existence.
Now here she is in Las Penas, with only a duffel bag. Angel used to be a collector: Beanie Babies, plastic pigs, little pom-poms with hats and googly eyes stuck on. She liked arranging her collections on shelves, liked having the manufacturer’s checklist before her, ticking off the ones she had, circling the ones she didn’t. She liked the search for completeness. But just before she announced she was leaving, Angel bagged up all that stuff and shoved it in the green trash bin outside. Better to be unencumbered. Better to be light and free, so she can, if need be, jump and fight and run.
Partially she trashed it all to wound her mother, who encouraged these collections. Marissa herself collects Disney stuffed animals. Angel imagined her mother pausing in the doorway, her shock at the bare walls and cleared shelves. Angel knew from posters at school that one of the warning signs of suicide was giving away treasured belongings, and Angel liked the idea of her mother’s distress. Probably, though, Angel thinks now grimly, her mother isn’t even aware of the warning signs of suicide. Probably her mother can’t wait to move in her hoard of Disney characters, let them colonize Angel’s bed and shelves with their creepy grins and plastic eyes and solid, oversized heads. Or worse, give Angel’s room to Mike for a home office, let him turn it into an altar to his own anal-retentiveness, with his rolls of blueprints and fussy metal protractors and the expensive Japanese pens that no one’s allowed to use even to take one tiny telephone message.
The road makes its gentle curve, and now the village is in sight. Las Penas consists largely of abandoned buildings, blank sockets where windows used to be. In front of the locked church, there are a few nearly intact squares of sidewalk stamped WPA. All around is evidence of better times and failed enterprise: boarded-up windows, painted letters barely visible on the broken plaster. Grocery. Cash Store. Hamburger.
Las Penas in the Ass, her mother calls it, but she means Amadeo and not the town itself. Even on the full-sized New Mexico state map her grandmother got from AAA, Las Penas is marked in the tiniest font imaginable. Most everyone works in Española or Los Alamos or, like her grandmother, in Santa Fe. Anything that needs doing can be done better elsewhere.
Angel hasn’t spent much time here—usually when she sees her grandmother they get dinner in Española—and most holidays are spent with her mother’s parents, Ramon and Lola, who have been so disapproving of Angel’s situation that you’d think they’d forgotten that their own daughter was once in the same boat. Rather, Grampa Ramon has been disapproving; Gramma Lola is so out of it, she doesn’t even recognize Angel. Angel has been avoiding them because, frankly, she doesn’t need that kind of energy in her life.
The Idle Hour Cantina is her turnaround point. It’s five thirty now, and the sun is slipping down the sky. Angel walks briskly back down the length of the village. She’ll make dinner—she needs to tell her dad they’re low on vegetables—and she’ll do her homework. She’ll stick a star into her planner.
At the curve, her phone vibrates in her pocket. She is filled with that buoyant fizz she always gets when someone tries to reach her. It has to be her grandmother. But, no, even better: it’s Lizette from school.
What u up 2
She smiles. Lizette Maes is a year older and significantly more badass than any of Angel’s old friends at Española Valley High School, yet for some reason Angel cannot divine, she’s decided she approves of Angel. As far as Angel knows, Lizette is an orphan, and has lived with her brother and his girlfriend ever since her mother OD’d three years ago, but she never seems to feel sorry for herself, doesn’t even seem to care. This makes Angel feel babyish, because if she were an orphan, she’d always be thinking about it. Look at her now: both parents alive and still she spends half her time feeling neglected and unloved.
Angel replies to the text hungrily, like a castaway snatching at any hope for communication. Nothing much. You? Last week Brianna had a mini breakdown over some text-speak that had made it into a few of their reading responses, and ever since Angel’s been trying to spell and punctuate her texts properly, but it’s hard to do without looking uptight, and Angel especially doesn’t want to appear uptight to Lizette. Bored lol, she adds.
Angel keeps her phone out, waiting for Lizette’s reply, but there isn’t one. She shouldn’t take it personally—Lizette is, if anything, undependable. But why ask what someone’s up 2 if you don’t actually care? Then Angel wonders if that text had even been intended for her. Just because Angel no longer has friends outside of Smart Starts! doesn’t mean Lizette is equally pathetic. She probably has tons of friends. Maybe she’s going out tonight. The thought makes Angel feel even lonelier.
In the last month, she hasn’t called or texted one single person she used to hang out with. Why would she? She’s zitty and bloated, and their lives have moved on.
“Sex complicates things, both practically and emotionally,” Brianna told them in class yesterday, and boy, is she right on that first count. But for the first few months of her sexual career, emotionally, at least, things were pretty simple for Angel. Her crushes were light and transient, swiftly extinguished.
Even when Ryan Johnson from her geometry class asked her to be his girlfriend last spring and again in the fall—actually phrased it that way—and seemed truly sad when she rejected him, Angel hadn’t, herself, felt any complication at all.
Angel isn’t like the knocked-up teens in movies whom audiences can sympathize with because they’ve had sex once and even then it was with their best guy friend or some jerk taking advantage. Angel enjoyed letting it be known around school that she was doing it—that she was active, as Brianna would say. It made her feel voluptuous and powerful and musky and mysterious.
Angel has never been, strictly speaking, boy crazy. Not like Priscilla, her best friend since fourth grade—former best friend—who’s been dying for a boyfriend forever, even, last year, spent part of her birthday money on a subscription to a bridal magazine.
“A bridal magazine? Are you joking me?” Angel asked, lounging on Priscilla’s bed and flipping through the glossy pages. “Don’t you still get Highlights?” She didn’t, and Angel knew that because when they were younger Priscilla had always passed her back issues on to Angel, who loved the Hidden Objects feature and whose mother would never waste money on a magazine except People, which was practically a necessity for any informed citizen. “You don’t even talk to Kevin Gabaldon, Cilla. Don’t you think you should, like, say hi before you order the cake?”
Priscilla pressed her already thin lips almost out of existence. “Just ’cause your mother didn’t value marriage. Ever heard of thinking about the future, Angel? It can take, like, four years to plan a good wedding, and if I have all the dresses and decorations picked out, I’ll have a head start.” She leaned over Angel, placing a finger on a page featuring a blond bride running through a lush garden, lifting her skirts and laughing over her bare shoulder, looking ever so slightly demented, the quarry in some hilarious chase. “Plus, I like the pictures.”
Angel nearly pointed out that dress styles were likely to change between now and whenever Priscilla found someone to marry her, but then, turning another page, reflected that the dresses all looked basically the same, so maybe not.
But even without an interest in a real, honest-to-goodness boyfriend, Angel enjoys—enjoyed—sex. Or rather, she enjoyed what sex did, the way it established an invisible connection between her and the guy, a secret knowledge. She remembers after the first time, last summer, when she’d been eager to transform herself and get this part of high school over with, she couldn’t believe how easy and unremarkable it had been. So much hoopla over that? It didn’t even feel like a sin. But after, she’d see the guy around school, and she’d know certain things about him: his secret sounds, his self-conscious laugh. She felt powerful, getting these guys—who’d once been so swaggering—naked, with their zitty backs and needy, nosing penises. They were pathetic in their grunting urgency and in those slack, defenseless minutes after.
“You’re lucky,” complained Priscilla as they walked through the briny-smelling halls of the school when it started up in August. “People know who you are now.”
“They know who you are, too,” Angel said kindly, but Priscilla was right: once you’d proven that you were desirable, you actually became more desirable. Older kids called out to Angel in the parking lot. They invited her to parties. With Priscilla and among their friends, Angel became both an expert and worthy of discussion. Soon she pitied these other girls their hopeless innocence.
Eventually, at least in her relationship with her best friend, things did become emotionally complicated. Priscilla is skinny and tough and sometimes not very nice, and as the fall semester wore on, she got nastier.
“It’s crazy that you became such a slut,” Priscilla told her as they fixed their makeup at the trough-like bathroom sinks. “Not in a bad way. But it’s not like you’re as pretty as, like, Kylie or Sabrina.” The Española Valley High School bathrooms could be in a prison. There were no doors. Instead of mirrors, which could come in handy in a riot, smeared steel plates were screwed to the walls. The whole architecture of the place put you in mind of mutiny, escape.
Angel peered at her blurry, distorted reflection. “So? I’m okay-looking.”
“I just never would have guessed it in middle school. Remember what a nerd you were? Also, isn’t it kind of rare for a fat girl to become a slut?”
“I’m not fat,” said Angel, and she wasn’t, just didn’t happen to be a skinny old bone bag.
So it felt good when, after Priscilla had called her fat for the millionth time, Angel found herself drunk at a party and talking to surly Kevin Gabaldon with his stupid patchy upper lip, whom Priscilla had liked since seventh grade without ever actually making a move. And it was so easy to make him smile, then to step closer, to go from talking to kissing to the urgent press in the dark laundry room of the apartment complex. Angel loved that urgency, garment after garment dropping away as though they’d always been extraneous.
Priscilla was mad enough when she heard about Kevin that she texted around the school a headless naked picture claiming it was Angel. Angel had seen the pic and the text, thanks to Ryan Johnson, who intercepted her in the library after school.
“Hey,” Ryan Johnson said, and shifted his weight uncomfortably from one Converse sneaker to the other.
Angel looked up from her math notebook and rolled her eyes. “What do you need?” He’d already asked her out again twice this year and she’d declined nicely, but her patience was wearing thin. The guy couldn’t get it through his knobby head that a hookup was just a hookup. He’d been trailing her like a lost fawn.
Ryan palmed his thin blond hair and bit his cracked bottom lip. Hadn’t he ever heard of ChapStick? “Um,” he said, then shoved his phone at her.
It was all pretty laughable. Look what someone sent me poor angel!!!! I feel so bad!!!! The person in the photo had a body twenty times better than Angel’s, a body that was at least semiprofessional, given the spherical breasts and the blond landing strip between her spread legs.
“That’s not me,” Angel made herself say. She felt very cold and sick with the sense that her life was on a precipice and that everything would soon become very, very horrible. The library was mostly empty except for three girls on yearbook conferencing in the far corner, but still Angel covered the screen with her hand. “That’s not me,” she said again, voice hoarse.
“I know that.” Ryan blushed.
“No you don’t. Delete it.”
“Of course. I just thought you should know. See? I’m deleting it.” And he did, right in front of her, which was pretty considerate of him, except that it was also the bare minimum of human decency.
If Priscilla had been hoping the pic would go viral, she was disappointed, because all the people she’d implored not to show anyone hadn’t shown anyone, which, when you think about it, kind of makes you feel good about the teens of today.
Angel was nonetheless humiliated. Every one of the recipients of the text—maybe about twenty people, Angel’s classmates and friends—must have imagined Angel naked, must have compared the image in their heads to the image on their phones. Every one of them must have wondered if posing in such a way was, indeed, something Angel might do. And it scared Angel to think, given how easily she’d hooked up with guys she hardly knew (mostly with protection), that maybe she might actually have allowed herself to be photographed or filmed—or, even scarier, how easily she might have been photographed or filmed without allowing it at all. She’d seen how swiftly girls’ lives got ruined. It took a fraction of a second.
Even now, thinking about what might have happened, Angel feels the heat of humiliation spread through her. Priscilla denied originating the image—“Don’t play like that! We’re best friends!”—and Angel pretended to believe her red-faced denial, but who else could it have been? At any rate, when Angel discovered she was pregnant, it was an easy choice to drop out of school and deactivate her social media accounts and flee. She even felt grateful; if she had to be punished, pregnancy was preferable to showing up on the internet.
“By the way, Cilla,” Angel said as a parting shot, on that last day at school, her belly already swelling beneath her sweater, “you should probably know that Kevin’s the father.”
Kevin wasn’t the father—they hadn’t even had full sex, just some groping—but Angel said it to ruin Kevin for Priscilla. No, the father is Ryan Johnson, oblivious Ryan Johnson, and only Angel knows this fact.
Even before the Kevin episode, even before she found out she was pregnant, Angel had had moments when she really did feel kind of filthy and used. Certainly, in a few instances, it was tricky to tell who was using whom. Is it possible that Angel got so carried away with her own power that she actually did give something up—not her virginity or (she touches her belly) her freedom, because, yes, obviously those are long gone—but something hard to articulate betw
een desire and dignity and choice?
One night last summer at a party, a senior girl who must have heard of Angel’s reputation brought her into the pink-tiled bathroom and gave her three condoms from her purse. “You don’t have to do it, you know. Only do it if you want to,” the senior told Angel, and Angel was so touched by the concern that she blushed. Then the older girl offered her heroin, waggling a little baggie, and, when Angel declined, smiled and shrugged and gestured to the door with her chin.
She was a little fool, Angel understands now. She’d felt chosen and desired, granted access to a rarified world. But all that time, she’d actually been excluding herself, incrementally and irrevocably, from the life of school and friends and teenage concerns.
And now here she is in Las Penas, wedged up in the mountains, cut off forever from that life. All around: piñon and juniper and crumbly pink dirt. She’s so far out here that no future could find her even if it came GPS-equipped. Again she scrolls through her texts to see if she missed one from her mom. Not one single person knows where she is right now. Angel is a minor! Shouldn’t someone be keeping an eye out for her?
The clouds behind her grandmother’s house are blush pink, reflecting the sunset. Deep blue shadows gather under the juniper, and in the falling light, everything seems very defined and clear and sad. Through the barred window, Angel can see her father moving around the kitchen. If she’s alone for one more second, she’ll cry, so Angel jogs down the driveway toward him.
Amadeo is on the couch with a Coke and the remote balanced on his thighs when his daughter comes in. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s sweating at her temples.
“Hey, don’t worry about me,” she says lightly. “I got a ride home from school.”
“It’s a busy time, Angel. I told you that.” Amadeo chews his lip. “Did Tío Tíve say anything about me?”
“Like what?”
“Did he mention anything about—” He glances at her stomach.
Angel widens her eyes pointedly. “So I’m guessing you had work and that’s why you couldn’t drive me? Where you working now?”