Clara? His voice in my head is bleary.
Oh crap, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.
Where are you?
Outside. I—Here … I dial his number.
He answers on the first ring. “What’s up? Are you okay?”
“Do you want to hang out?” I ask. “I know it’s early….”
I can actually hear him smiling at the other end of the line. “Absolutely. Let’s hang out.”
“Oh, good.”
“But first let me put some pants on.”
“You do that,” I say, glad he can’t see me totally blushing at the idea of him in boxers. “I’ll be right here.”
He emerges a few minutes later in jeans and a brand-new Stanford sweatshirt, his hair rumpled. He restrains himself from hugging me. He’s relieved to see me after our argument at the bookstore a week ago. He wants to say he’s sorry. He wants to tell me that he’ll support me in whatever I decide to do.
He doesn’t have to say any of this out loud.
“Thanks,” I murmur. “That means a lot.”
“So what’s going on?” he asks.
It’s hard to know where to begin. “Do you want to get off campus for a while?”
“Sure,” he says, a spark of curiosity in his green eyes. “I don’t have class until eleven.”
I start walking back toward Roble. “Come on,” I call over my shoulder. He jogs to catch up with me. “Let’s take a drive.”
Twenty minutes later we’re cruising around Mountain View, my old hometown.
“Mercy Street,” Christian reads as we pass through downtown looking for this doughnut shop I used to go to where the maple bars are so good it makes you want to cry. “Church Street. Hope Street. I’m sensing a theme here….”
“They’re just names, Christian. I think someone had a laugh putting city hall on Castro between Church and Mercy. That’s all.” I check my mirrors and find myself unprepared for the glimpse of his gold-flecked eyes gazing at me steadily.
I glance away.
I don’t know what he expects of me now that I am officially single. I don’t know what I expect of myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.
“I’m not expecting anything, Clara,” he says, not looking at me. “If you want to hang with me, great. If you want some space, I get that too.”
I’m relieved. We can take this “we belong together” thing slow, figure out what that really means. We don’t have to rush. We can be friends.
“Thanks,” I say. “And look, I wouldn’t have asked you to hang out with me if I didn’t want to hang out with you.” You’re my best friend, I want to say, but for some reason I don’t.
He smiles. “Take me to your house,” he says impulsively. “I want to see where you lived.”
Awkward conversation officially over. Obediently I make a right toward my old neighborhood. But it’s not my house. Not anymore. It’s somebody else’s house now, and the thought makes me sad: someone else sleeping in my room, someone else at the kitchen window where Mom always used to stand watching the hummingbirds flit from flower to flower in the backyard. But that’s life, I guess. That’s being a grown-up. Leaving places. Moving on.
The sun is coming up behind the rows of houses when we get to my street. Sprinklers cast nets of white mist into the air. I roll the window down and drive with my right hand, let my left hand drag through the cool air outside. It smells so good here, like wet cement and fresh-cut grass, the aroma of bacon and pancakes wafting between the homes, garden roses and magnolia trees, the smells of my life before. It’s surreal, passing along these familiar tree-lined streets, seeing the same cars parked in the driveways, the same people headed off to work, the same kids walking to school, only a little bigger than the last time I saw them. It’s like time has stopped here, and these past two years and all the crazy stuff that went down in Wyoming never took place.
I park the car across the street from my old house.
“Nice,” Christian says, gazing out the open window at the big green two-story with blue shutters that was my home-sweet-home for the first sixteen years of my life. “White picket fence and everything.”
“Yeah, my mom was a traditionalist.”
The house, too, looks exactly the same. I can’t stop staring at the basketball hoop that’s set up over the garage. I can almost hear Jeffrey practicing, the cadence of the ball hitting the cement, his feet shuffling, his exhaled breath as he jumps and puts the ball through the hoop, the way the backboard thumps and the net swishes, and Jeffrey hissing, “Nice,” between his teeth. How many times did I do my homework with that sound in the background?
“He’ll turn up,” Christian says.
I turn to look at him. “He’s sixteen, Christian. He should be home. He should have someone taking care of him.”
“Jeffrey’s strong. He can handle himself. You really want him to come home and get arrested and all that?”
“No,” I admit. “I’m just … worried.”
“You’re a good sister,” he says.
I scoff. “I messed everything up for him.”
“You love him. You would have helped him if you’d known what he was going through.”
I don’t meet his eyes. “How do you know? Maybe I would have blown him off and kept on obsessing about my own thing. I’m good at that.”
Christian catches his breath, then says more firmly, “It’s not your fault, Clara.”
I wish I believed him.
Silence falls over us again, but this time it’s weightier.
I should tell him about the vision. I should stop stalling. I don’t even know why I’m stalling.
“So tell me,” he says, leaning his elbow on the edge of the window.
Thus I rattle off every detail I can remember, ending with my revelation that it’s him there with me, him in the dark room. Him yelling for me to get down.
He’s quiet for a while after I’m done. “Well. It’s not a very visual type of vision, is it?”
“No, it’s pretty much darkness and adrenaline, at this point. What do you think?”
He shakes his head, baffled. “What does Angela say?”
I shift uncomfortably. “We haven’t really talked about it.”
He looks at my face, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Have you told anybody else?” He reads my guilty expression. “Why not?”
I sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Why haven’t you told Billy? That’s the entire reason she became your guardian, you know, to help you through stuff like this.”
Because she’s not my mom, I think.
“Billy just got married,” I explain. “I didn’t want to spill my depressing guts all over her on her honeymoon, and Angela, well, she had her own thing going on in Italy.”
“What thing?” he asks, frowning.
I bite my lip. I wish I could tell him about Phen.
“Who’s Phen?” Christian asks with a hint of a smile, able to pick that much out of my head. “Wait, wasn’t he the angel who told Angela about the Black Wings all those years ago?” His eyes widen as they meet mine. “He’s the mysterious Italian boyfriend?”
It’s official. I suck at keeping secrets, especially from him.
“Hey! No mind reading! I can’t talk about it!” I sputter. “I promised.”
“Then stop thinking about it,” he says, which is like someone telling you not to think of an elephant, which of course is the first image that pops into your brain. “Whoa. Angela and an angel. What’s this about the gray wings?”
“Christian!”
“He’s not a Black Wing, is he?” Christian looks genuinely worried, the way he always does whenever the topic of Black Wings comes up. They killed his mother, after all.
“No, he’s not—” I stop myself. “I would have told you if—Christian!”
“Sorry,” he mutters, but he’s not very sorry at all. “So, uh … back to your vision. And why you kept it to yourself this long. Because that, I’m pretty sure, you are allowed to tell me.”