“You look nice,” he says, looking at me appraisingly, at my curled hair and makeup, his gaze flickering over the hemline of my little black dress, my pretty sandals and painted nails, up to the black fleece jacket, which I’m still wearing around my shoulders. “Not a funeral, this time.”
“No.” I don’t know what else to say.
“A date.”
I’m tempted to lie, to say that I was out with a bunch of people, no biggie, nothing special, but I’m bad at lying, and Tucker’s really good at spotting a fib. “Yeah. A date.”
“With Prescott,” he concludes.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” He pats Midas on the nose, then turns and scuffles away a few steps. The look on his face is killing me, like he’s trying so hard to act like he doesn’t care, but I know him.
“Tucker—”
“Nah, it’s all right,” he says. “I guess I should have expected him to make his move, now that we’re over and done. So how’d it go?”
I stare at him wordlessly.
“Well, it can’t have gone too well, or you wouldn’t have ended up here at the end of the night.”
“That,” I say carefully, “is none of your beeswax, Tucker Avery.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” he says. “We’ve got to move on, don’t we? But the way I see it, there’s one big thing getting in the way of us doing that.”
My breath catches. “Oh yeah? What?”
He looks at me coolly. “You keep showing up.”
He has a point.
“Look—” we say at the same time. He sighs.
“You go,” I say.
He scratches at the back of his neck. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry I’ve been so testy with you. You were right. I’ve been a jerk.”
“You were surprised. And you’re right. I’m invading your space.”
He nods. “Still, it’s no excuse. You’re not the worst thing that could pop up unexpectedly into my life.”
“Oh great. I’m not the worst thing.”
“Nope.”
We laugh, and it feels good, laughing. It feels like old times. But then I think, Maybe I am the worst thing that could pop up in his life. He’s looking at me with a flicker of longing in his eyes that I recognize all too well, and it sends a dart of fear for him all though me. I can’t let myself get close to him. I’m not good for him. Plus, I might not even make it through this year.
“Your turn,” he says.
“Oh.” I find I can’t tell him what I was thinking. I point my thumb behind me at the open barn door. “I was going to say that I should go.”
“Okay.”
He looks confused when I don’t move. Then amused. “Oh, right. You want me to leave.”
“You can stay. Only, the glory …”
“That’s all right.” He smiles with his dimples, then moseys past me toward the door. “Maybe I’ll see you around, Carrots.”
No, you won’t, I think grimly. I have to stop this. I can’t keep coming here. I have to stay away.
He called me Carrots.
Angela’s still in the same position she was in when I left her, scribbling away on Wan Chen’s bed. She stares at me for a minute after I materialize in the room.
“Wow,” she says. “You were right when you said it was like beaming yourself in Star Trek. That is pretty cool.”
“I’m getting better at it,” I admit.
“How did your date—” she starts to ask, then gets a look at my face. “Oh. It didn’t go well.”
“No, it didn’t go well,” I say, kicking off my shoes and lying on my back on my bed.
She shrugs. “Men.”
“Men.”
“If we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all there?” she says.
I’m tired and can’t help but laugh at her joke.
“That’s why I don’t bother with men,” she says. “I don’t have the patience.”
Right. She doesn’t deal with mere mortals, she means.
“It’s Phen,” she says then.
“The father, you mean?”
She starts like my question surprises her, then hesitates for a split second before she says, quietly, “Yes. But you already knew that.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“But it’s also Phen in my vision,” she goes on to say. “The man in the gray suit. It’s Phen.”
Shock ripples through me. “Are you sure?”
She nods enthusiastically. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him before. All those times I had the vision, but I didn’t think it was about me.”
“Yeah, visions can be tricky that way.”
“I wasted so much time feeling sorry for myself,” she says. “I thought, since this happened”—she nods at her baby bump—“that I’d wrecked everything. But I didn’t. It was supposed to happen this way. It was meant to be.”
I turn over onto my stomach. “So what are you supposed to do?”
“I’m supposed to tell him about our baby,” she says. “The seventh is ours.”
This strikes me as a very bad idea, given all I know about Phen. He’s just not trustworthy, for all his charm. But Angela’s not going to want to hear that right now. She doesn’t listen to reason when it comes to Phen.
“Okay, let’s say that you’re right—” I start slowly.
“Of course I’m right,” she says.
“Of course you’re right,” I agree. “But how does Phen know to come? How will he know to meet you there?”
“That’s easy. I sent him an email.”
I try to get my head around the idea of an angel with a Gmail account. “But Ange—”
“He’ll come, and I’ll tell him,” she says firmly. “Don’t you see what this means, Clara?”
I don’t.
“It means,” she says serenely, curving her arm around the crook of her swollen belly, “that everything is going to be okay.”
I highly doubt that. But for once, I hope she’s right.
11
ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
I’m in the dark again. Hiding.
I’m crying. No doubt about it this time. My face is wet. Strands of my hair stick to my cheeks. Tears gather under my chin and drip down. Something’s happened that I can’t get out of my brain, but I only understand it in terms of sounds: a strangled moan, a sob, a few whispered words.
God help me.
I put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. The Clara that is me in the future feels helpless. Useless. Lost. The Clara that is me now doesn’t know where I am. I only know the darkness. The fear. The sound of voices coming. The smell of blood.
It’s no use hiding. They’ll find me. My fate has already been decided. I just have to wait for it all to play out. I have to be brave, I think, and face it.
God help me, I think, but I feel so very little faith that God will.
I come to under a tree. There’s something hard poking me under my back, and I feel for it: the book I was reading before the vision got me. I glance around to see if anybody saw me go comatose in the grass, but nobody, as far as I can tell, is looking. I wipe at my eyes. Crying again. Panicky, my heart drumming, my palms sweating, with what feels like one big knot in my stomach.
I’ve got to figure this vision out before I drive myself crazy.
I take out my phone and stare at Christian’s name in my contact list for a long time before I sigh and put it back into my backpack. Christian hasn’t said two words to me for more than a month, not even in fencing class. His pride is wounded. I get that. I’d be mad too if I’d been about to kiss him, to lay my heart on the line like that, and he went and thought about another girl.
I pick up my book, flip to the page I was on before my brain took a quick trip to the future. It’s a novel, one of the epic dystopians that’s so popular these days. I’m liking it—it puts things into perspective. Sure, I might have occasional visions of doom, a mysterious, soul-crushing pain in my heart, a premonition of death, but at least I’m not scrounging the post-apocalyptic countryside looking for shelter, my only friend a three-eyed mutated dog that I’ll have to eat later in order to survive nuclear winter.