by Cynthia Hand
“I can’t love you,” he says firmly, and she flinches. “I can’t protect you, Angela. You should not have told me. You shouldn’t tell anyone else.”
“Phen,” she pleads. She reaches into her pocket to pull out the ultrasound, like a picture of the baby might make him change his mind, but he catches her hand in his and closes her fingers around the paper before she can open it. He gazes up into her eyes, lifts his other hand to her face, his fingers brushing her cheek, and for a split second he looks torn.
Then he disappears. No good-bye. No Sorry, but you’re on your own, honey. He’s just gone.
I rush up the stairs as Angela sinks to her knees.
“It’s okay,” I’m saying over and over again, like saying it will make it true.
She gazes at me with unshed tears in her eyes. Her hands are shaking when I help her to her feet, but she won’t let me support her. She’s acutely aware of other students watching us, so she lifts her head and starts to walk in her awkward way back the way we came. I try to put my arm around her, to help take some of the weight, but she shakes me off.
“I’m fine,” she says then, in almost a monotone. “Let’s go.”
Back at Roble she moves around like a zombie, taking her clothes off and dropping them on the floor until she’s only wearing her camisole and panties.
Amy comes in, bearing an armload of books. I grab her by the arm and turn her around, push her back out into the hall. “You should come back later,” I tell her.
“But I have to—”
“Like maybe tomorrow. Get out.”
Amy looks horribly offended. I shut the door and turn to Angela.
Suddenly she laughs as if this whole thing is terribly funny, like Phen has played some hilarious trick on her. She brushes her bangs out of her face, smiles the most awful, heartbroken smile. “Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would.”
“Oh, Ange.”
“Let’s not talk about it. I’m fine.”
She gets into bed and pulls the covers up to her chin. Outside, the birds are still singing, the sun is still shining, but inside her I feel everything go dark. I sit at the edge of her bed. I don’t say anything, because everything I think of sounds completely stupid.
“We agreed from the beginning that we weren’t going to talk about love.” She rolls over and puts her back to me, to the wall. “I should have remembered that,” she adds, her voice thin, straining with the force of acting like this isn’t killing her. “It’s fine. I’m fine with it. I understand.”
If she says the word fine any more, I think my head will explode. I stare at her back, where her shoulders are all tensed up.
“No. It’s not fine,” I say. “This is his responsibility too. He should be there for you. He should have stepped up.”
“He’s an angel,” she says, already making excuses for him. “It’s the same thing as what happened with your dad. I see that now. He can’t be with you all the time. He can’t protect you. It’s the same.”
It is so not the same, I think. My dad married my mother. He was there for my birth, my first steps, my first words. He took care of us, even if it was only for a little while. But I don’t say that.
“Ange.” I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” she says sharply. “Please … I don’t want you to read me right now.”
She starts to cry. There’s no shutting it out. Her humiliation hits me like a punch to the gut. Her embarrassment. Her fear. Her misery. Of course he doesn’t love me, she thinks. Of course he doesn’t.
I lie down beside her and put my arms around her, hug her awkwardly from the back as she sobs. Tears run down my face as I feel it with her. For a minute I can’t breathe, I can’t think—I just hang on.
“It will be okay,” I tell her shakily, and I mean it. It hurts her now, but it’s better this way, I think. “You’re better off without him.”
She sits up, pulling away from me, and takes a deep, shuddering breath, then uses the sheet to wipe her eyes. As quickly as she lost it, she collects herself.
“I know,” she says. “It’ll be fine.”
After a while she lies back down. My heart aches for her, but I don’t dare reach out again. I listen to her breathing become steadier, deeper, until I think she’s fallen asleep. But then she speaks.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she says. “I want to go home.”
12
THE RIGHT ROAD LOST
The next day Angela Zerbino officially drops out of Stanford University. Her mom shows up two days later and packs her stuff in boxes, which I help load in the car, and I stand on the sidewalk watching them drive off. Angela rests her head against the window, closes her eyes, and rides away. She doesn’t look back.
The visions start coming more often after this, all through February and the beginning of March, at least once or twice a week. I split my time between studying for school and preparing myself, in whatever capacity I can, to go into the dark room and whatever fate awaits me there. I buy a notebook and start to document each vision when I see it, trying to get the details down, but I don’t get much other than the shock and the terror, the juxtaposition of dark and light, the silhouette of Christian ablaze with glory, shouting at me, “Get down!” and fighting off the black shapes that mean to kill us, and almost every time now I run up against the moment where I know I should help him, I must draw my own sword and fight my own fight. That’s my moment of truth, my purpose, but I never stay in the vision long enough to know how I handle it.
I guess that’s still to come.
Things between Christian and me are strained, but we’re back to meeting every morning on a path that circles Lake Lag and running up to the Dish, an enormous radio telescope that juts out from the foothills. It’s a nice trail, pretty, through small wooded glades and rolling green hills, up to a spot where on clear days we can see all the way to San Francisco Bay. We understand that there is something going on that is larger than us, and we talk, all business at first, about Angela and our visions, but slowly our conversations give way to our thoughts on the freshman scavenger hunt or articles in the Stanford paper, my medicine and his building designs. And things get better between us.
One morning we cross paths with a mountain lion on the trail. It stops and stares at us with wide golden eyes, a deep rumble coming from somewhere inside, a surprise and anger I can feel from ten feet away.
“Go away,” I tell it sternly in Angelic, like Shoo! and it turns right around and disappears into the high grass.
“How’d you know to do that?” Christian asks me, astonished, laughing, and I tell him how I happened upon a grizzly bear with two cubs once, and all it took was Angelic and a little bit of glory to turn her away. I don’t tell him that I was with Tucker when it happened, and that it was the incident that convinced Tucker that I was indeed something supernatural. Which led to our moment in the barn, and the first time we ever kissed.
I like you, Clara, Tucker said. I really like you…. I just wanted you to know…. I don’t think you want to be with Christian Prescott…. He’s not your type.
Oh, and I suppose you’re my type, right?
I suppose I am.
I clamp down on the memory, the words and the way he said them, all rough-edged and cocky, reeling me in like a fish on his line. I close myself off so that Christian doesn’t look into my head and see Tucker. I put him out of my mind.
“That’s amazing,” Christian says. “You’re an animal whisperer.”
I nod, smiling. I can tell by looking at his face that he didn’t catch me thinking about Tucker.
It feels like a small victory in the war between me and myself.
In March I go to see my brother. I haven’t seen him since that first day back from winter break. I miss him. I stand for five minutes sneaking peeks at him through the window of the pizza place on Castro. He looks unhappy, I decide, watching him move between tables, stack the dirty plates, slide a dishcloth over th
e tables, and reset the silverware. He hardly seems awake, shuffling from one table to the next, not looking up, just: stack the dishes, put them in a tub, carry the tub back to the kitchen, wipe the table, reset.
I might have sneaked back to Palo Alto right then, content to know where he is and that at least he isn’t in the clutches of a Black Wing, when a girl with long dark hair brushes by me on the street and goes into the restaurant, and something about her makes me pause. She says Jeffrey’s name, and he looks up at her and smiles—holy crap, really smiles, something I haven’t seen him do since the day Mom admitted she was dying.
This must be Lucy, the girl who’s stolen my little brother’s wounded heart.
Of course now I have to stay and watch them.
She slides into an empty booth in the far corner, puts her back against the wall, and tucks her legs under her like this is her preordained spot. She’s pretty, maybe part Asian or Polynesian, with straight black hair that falls down her back in a single shiny sheet, delicate eyebrows, and dark, heavily lined eyes. Jeffrey immediately picks up the pace and finishes the remaining tables. Then he disappears into the kitchen for a minute and returns with a tall dark glass of what looks to be iced tea. She smiles at him. He wipes his hand on his white apron and slides into the booth across from her.
I wish I could hear what they are saying. But I can’t, so I make it up.
“Oh, Jeffrey,” I say out loud for Lucy as I watch them talk. “You look so strong when you lift those dish tubs. Your muscles are so spectacular.”
“Well, thank you, little lady. I do have fantastic muscles.”
She reaches across the table and touches his arm. “Can I feel your bicep? Ooh. So manly.”
“I also happen to think you’re hot. And cool. You’re a walking contradiction, baby,” I say for him. A man passes behind me on the sidewalk, and I clear my throat and step away from the window. When I look up again, they’re holding hands across the table. Jeffrey’s laughing, really laughing, his face all flushed, his silver eyes bright.
Aw. She makes him happy. The job might make him miserable, but this girl makes him smile.
He’s all right. I should go.
But as luck would have it, right at that very moment a family in the restaurant gets up to leave, and Jeffrey glances over, past them, and those bright eyes spot me before I can duck out of the way. His mouth opens, and then Lucy turns to look at me, too, and through the glass I catch the word sister, and the word annoying, and he jumps to his feet.
I take off down the sidewalk toward my car.
“Hey, Clara!” Jeffrey calls before I get there. “What are you doing?”
I spin back around. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You haven’t called in months.”
He stops a few feet away from me and crosses his arms over his chest like he’s cold.
“I keep telling you, I’m fine.” Something flickers in his eyes: a decision, albeit a reluctant one. “Do you want to come back with me? I can scrounge you up some free pizza.”
“Well, you know I can’t say no to free pizza.”
“My girlfriend’s in there,” he tells me as we walk back to the restaurant together.
“She is? I didn’t notice,” I say with mock innocence.
He rolls his eyes. “Don’t humiliate me, okay? No stories about me as a kid. Promise.”
“All right,” I say, with a little pout. “No stories about how when you were three you pooped on the neighbor’s lawn.”
“Clara!”
“I’ll be good.”
He opens the door for me. Lucy is still sitting where she was, her eyes curious. She smiles as we approach the table.
“Luce, this is my sister, Clara,” Jeffrey mumbles by means of a formal introduction. “Clara, Luce.”
“Hi,” I say, and give her a little wave, which makes Jeffrey give me a warning look like I’m already making him look bad.
“Jeffrey’s told me a lot about you,” Lucy says as I slide into the booth and Jeffrey gets in beside me.
“Good things, I hope.”
She raises a perfectly defined eyebrow at me and her smile becomes something sassier. “For the most part,” she says.
“Hey, I gotta work,” Jeffrey says, and hops up. “Moroccan pizza?” he directs at Lucy.
“You know what I like,” she says.
He smiles, all sheepish, and goes off to the kitchen. Then it’s just me and the new girlfriend.
“Jeffrey told me you go to Stanford,” she says.
“Yep. Guilty as charged.”
“That’s hard-core,” she says. “I never liked school. I was so happy when I graduated.”
“Graduated?” I’m unable to keep the surprise out of my voice. “When did you graduate?”
“Two years ago,” she answers nonchalantly. She shudders. “I was so glad to get out of that hellhole.”
That would make her what, twenty?
“So, do you live around here?” I ask, while I ponder how weird it feels that my brother’s girlfriend is older than me.
“Yes and no,” she says. “My father owns a tattoo parlor on El Camino, and I like to hang out there, and the guys who work there have a pizza thing, so I come by here fairly often.”
“Wait, I thought Jeffrey said that your dad owned a club.”
“That too.” She smiles. “He has his fingers in a lot of pies.”
I’ve never understood that expression. It has always seemed vaguely disgusting to me.
“So there’s a tattoo parlor in Mountain View? I don’t think I remember that from when I lived here,” I say.
“He opened it few years ago,” she says. “Business is good. People are more open now to the idea of ink as a way of expressing themselves.”
I scan her for tattoos. She’s wearing a metallic-silver shirt/dress and black leggings, black boots, dangly silver earrings. No tattoos, though. She does have a very interesting ring, a silver snake with ruby eyes curled around her right index finger. There’s something about her that reminds me vaguely of Angela—maybe the eyeliner or the dark nail polish.
Jeffrey returns to the table and sits by her side, scans both of our faces before he asks, “So what were you talking about?”
“I was telling her about my dad’s tattoo shop,” Lucy says.
He looks at her adoringly. “That place is awesome.”
She nudges his shoulder. “Show her what you got.”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“You got a tattoo?” I say, my voice a little louder than usual.
“Show her,” Lucy urges.
He grunts and rolls up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a line of Sanskrit characters circling his forearm.
“That is so hot,” Lucy says, and Jeffrey beams. “It says—”
“‘I control my destiny,’” I read off his skin, then close my eyes briefly. Whoops. She’s probably going to think it’s odd that I can read Sanskrit.
“The words were her idea,” Jeffrey says. “I’m saving up for some real art next time.”
“Next time?” I’m trying to stay calm here. No high school diploma and a bunch of ink already. Sweet.
“Yeah, I’m thinking a bird on my shoulder, like a hawk or something.”
“Maybe a raven,” she suggests.
I fake-check my watch. Time to retreat and recoup, figure out how to handle this. “You know, actually, I should go. I have finals coming up, and I have to seriously cram.” I slip out of the booth, extend my hand to Lucy. “It was great meeting you.”
“Likewise,” she says. Her hand in mine is cool and soft, perfectly manicured, and her mind is playful, full of a kind of gleeful mischief. She’s enjoying that she’s got me off balance.
I pull my hand away. “Walk me to my car?” I ask Jeffrey.
“I really shouldn’t—”
“It will take two minutes,” I insist.
We make our way down the street in silence until we reach my car. I turn to face him. Stay calm, I te
ll myself. Keep it cool. Don’t freak out on him yet.
He sees the look on my face. “Clara, don’t be mad.”
“You got a tattoo?”
“It’s fine.”
“God, I hate that word. This is anything but fine. You’re going to clubs, getting tattoos, drinking, and hanging out with an older girl.”
“She’s not that much older,” he protests.
“It’s illegal!” I am light years away from cool. I close my eyes and rub my forehead, take a breath, open them. “All right, Jeffrey, enough’s enough. You should come home now.”
“You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve told you, have you?” he says. “I was never home in Wyoming. Never.”
I stare at him wordlessly, stung by the idea that home wasn’t where we were. Where I was.
“I am home,” he says. “Here.”
I’m struck by the horrible feeling that I’ve lost him and that there’s no way for me to ever get him back. Not without Mom.
“Did you tell Lucy that you’re a …” My voice wavers. “T-person?”
His chin lifts. “I told her everything. It’s okay. I can trust her.”
I start screaming at him again—another epic fail in the keeping-it-cool department. “Didn’t you learn anything from Kimber?”
He shakes his head. “Lucy’s not like that. She’s good with the paranormal stuff. She accepts me for what I am. We even talk about religion sometimes. She’s so smart, and she’s read all these books … if you’d step off with the judgment, you’d see that she’s the perfect girl for me.”
“So she’s where you’re getting all this crap about there being no God and—”
“It’s not cr—”
“You are such a tool! This is reckless, even for you. You’re putting us all in danger. Don’t you get that? Don’t you understand that people could get hurt, maybe even killed, if you don’t keep what you are a secret?”
His eyes blaze in a way that reminds me of Dad.
“You’re not my mother,” he says.
“Don’t you think I know that? Mom would freak—”
“So quit trying to act like her,” he jabs at me. “I have to go back.”