“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 the 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.