A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  “Hey,” she said. When I didn’t look up she pushed my shoulder. “Hey!”

  “What?” I said.

  “What?” she said, imitating my voice but making me sound like a retard. “Thanks for coming to my party last night. Too bad you ruined it by being the Antichrist.”

  “Whatever,” I said. After the Ouija game I had left, though Cindy asked me to stay, and made a big joke of the whole thing by taking the planchette and pointing it at people, and saying things like “You’re Ronald Reagan” and “You’re the pope” and “You’re a double-penised huffalump!” But I felt like it had been a mistake to come. I went home and felt that way for the rest of the night. “I usually don’t go to parties. Something stupid always happens to me at parties.”

  “Not that it’s bad. I wouldn’t mind meeting the Antichrist. I have a lot of questions for him, because he’s somebody in the know. Right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, think about it. He’d know more than us, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “I used to be into all that shit, back in junior high. Black candles and secret piercings and praying in your fireplace and being, like, Satan is my master! I had black hair back then and hung out with Susie Freep. Did you ever know her? She goes to Trinity now.”

  “No,” I said, still trying to read.

  “Good thing. She was a bad influence. My mom practically had to send me to a deprogramming camp to get me away from her. She was like our high priestess or something. She gave it up, though. Now she’s in Young Life. How about that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then she was quiet for a moment, but it was too dark to read. The sky was still bright pale blue, but shadows had come over the grass and I couldn’t make out letters anymore. Cindy leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. “It’s going to be a beautiful evening,” she said.

  “I like the fall,” I said, not moving.

  “It’s my favorite season,” she said. “Still, even with September and shit. Hey, my mom and my sister are going to be gone until Friday. You should come over and watch a movie or something.” She was quiet a little while longer, and I was wondering where the bus could be, when she said, “Last night I dreamed I was having sex with my father.”

  “Everybody has that dream,” I said, which is true, if a therapist saying so makes a thing true. Cindy took her head off my shoulder and when I turned to look at her she threw water in my face.

  “Jesus,” I said. “What was that for?”

  “Does it burn?” she asked. “Does it hurt you?” And even though the water was in a regular squirt bottle I knew it was holy water.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” I said, grabbing it away from her and taking a long swig of it. It was very warm, and I thought as I drank it that she must have been keeping it close to her body all day. I threw the bottle down. “How’s that?” I asked. “Now will you lay off? Now will you just leave me alone? I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t know shit.” And I picked up my bag and my stick and walked off.

  “It was just a joke!” she called out. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride!” But I kept walking all the way home.

  I was mad all through dinner, so I barely talked at all when my mother asked me questions about the party. She said she was sorry if it wasn’t very fun, and told me I shouldn’t judge all parties by one party, and that to give up on all on account of the one would be like giving up on people just because my father was a boor and a cheat. Then she told me stories about parties she had gone to in high school, and about the prom, when she’d nearly died in a boating accident, except that the natural buoyancy of her dress saved her. I had heard the stories before. I hardly ate anything before my stomach started to hurt. I kept thinking it was being so mad that gave me the stomachache.

  I was nauseated later, but didn’t throw up until close to midnight, just after I fell asleep. I woke up to it—a horrible burning stab in my belly, and then a feeling of fullness, and then I was throwing up right in my bed. When I turned on my light I saw that it was bright blood that had come up. It covered my sheets and my pillow, so I changed them, thinking that was all that was going to happen, and even feeling a little better, but then the burning came again, and though I made it to the toilet this time, I had barely finished throwing up before I had to sit down and shoot black blood out of my ass. I sat there for a little while, shaking and cold, before I got dressed and knocked on my mother’s door.

  “Mom,” I said, “I need to go to the hospital.” I knocked again, and called out again. The dog barked, but there wasn’t any other answer. So I drove myself.

  “I hate social workers,” Cindy said. She came to visit me in the hospital, though I didn’t want any visitors. She showed up with my homework and a bunch of homemade cards, and I had thought that the art teacher had made everybody draw a card for me, like we used to do in grade school when a kid got sick or their dog died, but when she gave them to me I saw that she had made them all. “One of them kept coming to our house. This Red Cross lady. I don’t even know how she found us, but she kept showing up and my mom kept letting her in, and they would sit around having tea, and then she would talk to each of us in private. Like my mother didn’t already have a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist before my dad died. ‘It’s hard to lose your father,’ she told me, ‘but it’s even harder when it’s a national tragedy and not just a personal one.’ I told her that was very wise, but I said it like, wise, you know? Like you could tell by the tone of my voice how I thought she was clueless. But she thought I was complimenting her and she told me I was very mature for my age. So when she came again, when we were alone, I leaned over to her, and guess what I said?”

  I was staring out the window at the perfect fall day. I wanted to be at practice.

  “Guess what I said?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The hospital social worker had just finished talking to me when Cindy came in, asking me again about why my mother couldn’t bring me to the hospital. When I said again that she’d been sick, she asked again with what, and I said she should talk to my mother about that. She’s better about lying in that way than I am—she can make up a whole story in the time it takes to tell it. I knew I would screw things up by talking too much so I just stared at the lady and told her my stomach was starting to hurt again, so she left.

  “I said, ‘I’m not a fucking disaster area.’ And she said, ‘You must be very angry. I understand your anger.’ I hate social workers.”

  “Somebody has to do the social work,” I said.

  “But I bet it really knocked her for a loop when you told her you were the Antichrist. There’s a rehab job none of them could resist.”

  “We didn’t talk about that.”

  “He is the son of the Devil but I think that with the right role models he could be a very productive member of society.”

  “Very funny,” I said. She got out of her chair and sat down next to me on the bed, and took my hand. I didn’t pull away, and she didn’t say anything. We just sat like that for a while. A nurse came in to put some medication in my IV. They were treating me for an ulcer in my duodenum, the part of the small intestine that comes right after the stomach. The doctor kept asking me if I was worried about something, because this is the kind of ulcer you get from worrying very intensely.

  “Do you think people are forgetting already?” she asked, after the nurse was gone. “About my dad, I mean.”

  “It’s hardly been two months,” I said.

  “Long enough,” she said. “People usually forget about shit like this in a couple days. I mean, imagine if it hadn’t been . . . how it was. If he just died drunk driving or something. Nobody would have remembered in a week. I almost liked it, before, how people kept saying that nothing was ever going to be the same. Because it wasn’t—not for me. And I wanted it to not be for anybody else, either.”

  “It never gets back to normal,” I said.

  “Not for me,” she said. “But I mean for them.
You know, I liked it, when they kept playing the footage over and over again. My mom kept turning off the television but I kept it on in my room. And I kept saying, ‘Yes, do it again. Show us every fucking morning so nobody ever forgets what they did to my dad.’ But now I have to watch it on my tape.”

  “That sounds like a bad idea,” I said. “I get sad just looking at my dad’s picture.” She turned and looked at me then, and brought my hand up to her heart.

  “You know, we are exactly alike, me and you. Exactly alike.”

  “No, we’re not,” I said, taking my hand away. “My stomach hurts. I’m going to take a nap.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hey, I almost forgot.” She rummaged in her suitcase-sized duffel bag and brought out a present.

  “You already gave me the cards,” I said.

  “Just open it.” It was another Ouija board, just the regular kind, not fancy like hers. “You’re not supposed to play with it alone. It’ll make you crazy or possessed if you do.”

  “I don’t need one of these,” I said, and she leaned close.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” she said. “You don’t have to put up an act. I know you want to talk to your dad.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, and dropped it on the floor.

  “You’re going to be all over it when I’m gone.”

  “Jesus! Will you knock that off!”

  “You keep saying Jesus like that and you’re going to get gonorrhea or something,” she said. “It’s not good for you to say Jesus all the time.” I pushed the nurse button, to ask them to kick her out, but she left by herself. “What do you want me to bring you tomorrow?” At first I said nothing, but then I said my lacrosse stick and a ball. Then she was gone, and I reached down and slid the game underneath the bed. When the nurse came in I told her I didn’t need her, but she stayed for a minute, refilling the water pitcher and straightening the blankets.

  “Your girlfriend is pretty,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, not knowing why I didn’t say she wasn’t my girlfriend. I turned over and thought about lacrosse plays, because that usually helps me sleep, and I think I slept for a couple of minutes, because I had a dream that Paul and I were facing off together in front of a huge crowd. Which made no sense because we play on the same team and Paul’s a goalie. When I opened my eyes I was staring at a whole window full of blue sky.

  I flipped through the cards. They said things like Hope the bleeding in your stomach stops soon and You are going to live! One was a stick-figure lacrosse player saying Your team needs you back. Only one of them said Get well soon, Antichrist! I threw that one away.

  It’ll just be another day, my father said, meaning the day he would die. And he said not to mark it, or make it special, or keep it like some black holiday. Parents come and go, he said, that’s how it’s supposed to be, even though he was only forty-two. He made me promise never to use his death as an excuse for not trying at something, and not to be one of those people who give up on life because God demonstrates early to them that it ends. Cindy said it was like he wanted me to get over his death before he even died. And she said that for her every day was the day. She didn’t have to wait for the one-month or six-month or one-year anniversaries. She marked the time every morning, and every morning when she woke the two planes flew into her head and the towers fell down all over again.

  I don’t know when we became friends, or even when she stopped being annoying to me, or when I started to look forward to sitting with her after practice, waiting for the bus. She helped me change the note from the doctor to say I could play again in a week instead of a month. We would lie on our backs, staring straight up at the sky, not even looking at each other when we talked. And sometimes the bus would come and go in that time, and she would give me a ride home.

  She had become less popular, either because people were forgetting about what had happened, like she said they would, or because they just didn’t like having her bring it up all the time, or talk about it like it had just happened that morning. It made it easier to be around her when she stopped always drawing a crowd wherever she went. It didn’t bother me when Paul Ricker made fun of me for having a crazy girlfriend, even though I didn’t think of her as a girlfriend.

  She left the Antichrist thing alone, mostly. Every once in a while she would say something like, “When you come into your kingdom you will have to do something about him,” meaning our obnoxious English teacher or the headmaster or one of the people who were starting to make fun of her. Or she would say very casually that she had reached one of the terrorists with her board and he had saluted her as an FOA. If she made me mad with it, then she would laugh and hit my shoulder and say that she was kidding. She admitted that the ulcer had just been a coincidence with the holy water, and by late November I thought she had given up on it, and given up on trying to prove that it was true.

  But we went out driving one night, the same day of the first big snow. After I made dinner for my mother I walked down to Cindy’s house and found her making a ramp for her sister to jump off on their skis. There was a little mound over their septic tank that you could go down and build up speed. The ramp was too close to the house, though, and I told her so.

  “It’s fine,” she said. But when her sister jumped off of it she skied right into the garage.

  “I told you,” I said. Her sister had gone crying into the house, threatening to tell their mother that Cindy did it on purpose.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. We went out like we always did, driving up and down the hills in our town, then out to Generals Highway. I slouched back in my seat and put my feet on the dashboard, not thinking of anything while Cindy talked. She stopped and picked up a pizza to go with the beer she’d stolen out of her fridge, and we took it to a place we’d been before, a development under construction about ten miles up the river from where we lived. When we arrived it was dark, and the back-hoes were giant shadows among the trees. “Home at last,” Cindy said, pulling the car into a driveway that ran up to an empty foundation.

  Right away she climbed into the backseat. Usually we talked for a while, both of us lying back in the seats with our eyes closed, not always about our fathers or the attacks or even school or lacrosse, and then it would get cold and she would say it would be warmer in the back where we could sit up against each other.

  “Don’t you want any pizza?” I asked her.

  “Not just yet.” She patted the seat next to her, and I went back.

  We never did much. It would have disappointed Paul and his lurid imagination. He always asked about very particular things, acts and insertions I had barely ever imagined, until I blushed enough to make him shut up. Cindy and I would kiss, and hold each other, and I would usually take off my shirt because she liked to put her cheek right against my chest, and sometimes when I held her like that is when we would talk most about our fathers, usually just a story about something they had done when we were kids, something bad or something good—it didn’t matter. And then we would kiss again, and I knew that she wanted me to do more than I could. It was only fear that kept me from going as far as she would let me. I think I wanted to, but I felt sure that something horrible would happen if I did. “Maybe something terrible should happen,” she said when I told her this.

  It all seemed so usual already, and so familiar. The way the leather car seat felt against the skin of my back, and the way the whole car seemed to glow when the moon shined through the fogged-up windows, and the way she pulled on my hair to tilt back my head so she could get at the space under my chin. It was all fine. I never minded when she muttered things I could only half understand, or spoke sentences where I would only catch a single word, like “falling” or “sky” or “open.” But that night she had opened up my pants with one hand, though she didn’t reach in, and she was pushing her hips into me so forcefully I thought we would break through the undercarriage and fall onto the snow, when she put her mouth right in my ear and said, “I wan
t you to put your fist through the whole world like you did through those two towers.”

  I sat up and pushed her away. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t say anything.” And she tried to kiss me again, but I pushed her away.

  “I should go home,” I said, and put on my shirt.

  “Whatever,” she said, watching me as I climbed into the front seat. I sat there for a little while, with the pizza in my lap again, staring straight ahead while she asked me to come back again. Finally she heaved a big sigh, then got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s seat.

  “How could you say something like that?” I asked her, when we were about halfway home.

  “Don’t judge me,” she said. “What do you know?”

  “That’s fucking horrible. You of all people should know how horrible that is.”

  “Fuck off,” she said. “What do you know? You can’t even be hurt. And don’t tell me I’m horrible when you’re the son of the fucking Devil.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Totally,” she said. “Who would have thought the Antichrist would be such a loser?” I had nothing to say to that, and I thought about asking her to stop the car so I could walk home, but it was snowing again.

  “You missed my turn,” I told her when she drove by Severna Forest Road.

  “You can walk from my house,” she said. And she sped up as she got closer to her house, taking the sharp turns on Beach Road at thirty miles an hour in the ice and snow. When I told her to slow down she didn’t say anything, but just before we got to her house she turned and looked at me and smiled, and then she reached over and with a practiced motion undid my seat belt from its clasp. Before I could ask what she was doing she floored the accelerator and aimed the car at the garage, running straight at the ramp she’d built earlier.