Due to the small size of the group, we’d been relegated to a cramped classroom in the old part of the school that adjoined the administration offices. As the room wasn’t used for any other purpose, we were allowed to shift the furniture and put up posters. My favorite was one of Shakespeare depicted as a pirate wearing an earring. The room’s only advantage was that it came with a view of the front lawns and palm-lined street. Unlike other subjects, literature class could never be described as lackluster. Instead, the very air seemed to be charged with ideas all vying to be heard.
I sat next to Ben and watched him look up his favorite bands on his laptop, an activity he kept up even once the class had started. Miss Castle arrived carrying a mug of coffee and an armful of handouts. She was a tall, slender woman in her early forties with masses of dark curly hair and dreamy eyes. She always wore heavy-framed glasses on a fine red cord around her neck and pastel blouses. Judging by the way she carried herself and the way she spoke, she would have been more comfortable in a Jane Austen novel, in which women rode in carriages and witty repartee flew across a drawing room like sparks. She was passionate about language, and it didn’t matter what text we were studying, she identified vividly with the heroine every time. Her teaching was so animated, people sometimes stopped to look into the classroom, where they’d see Miss Castle thumping the teacher’s desk, firing off questions or gesticulating wildly to illustrate a point. I wouldn’t have been surprised to walk in one day and find her standing on top of her desk or swinging from the light fixtures.
We’d started the term studying Romeo and Juliet in conjunction with Shakespeare’s love sonnets. Now we were assigned the task of writing our own love poems, which would be recited to the class. The studious girls, who’d never had to rely on their own imaginations before, flew into a panic. This was something they couldn’t look up on the Internet.
“We don’t know what to write about!” they wailed. “It’s too hard.”
“Just think about it for a while,” said Miss Castle in her floaty voice.
“Nothing interesting happens to us.”
“It doesn’t have to be personal,” she coaxed. “It can be a total figment of your imagination.”
The girls remained uninspired.
“Can you give us an example?” they persisted.
“We’ve been looking at examples all term,” said Miss Castle in a dejected tone. Then an idea for a starting point came to her. “Think about qualities you find attractive in a boy.”
“Well, I think intelligence is very important,” a girl named Bianca volunteered.
“Obviously, he should be a good provider,” her friend Hannah piped up.
Miss Castle looked at a loss. She was spared having to comment by a contribution from a different quarter.
“People are only interesting if they’re dark and disturbed,” said Alicia, one of the goths.
“Chicks shouldn’t talk so much,” drawled Tyler from the back of the room. It was the first thing we’d heard him say all term, and Miss Castle was graciously prepared to overlook its derogatory nature.
“Thank you, Tyler,” she said with underlying sarcasm. “You have just proved that the search for a partner is a very individual thing. Some say we can’t choose who we fall in love with; love chooses us. Sometimes people fall for the complete antithesis of everything they believe they’re looking for. Any other thoughts?”
Ben Carter, who had been rolling his eyes and wearing a martyred expression throughout the discussion, put his face in his hands.
“Great love stories have to be tragic,” I said suddenly.
“Go on,” encouraged Miss Castle.
“Well, take Romeo and Juliet for example: It’s the fact that they’re kept apart that makes their love stronger.”
“Big deal — they both end up dead,” snorted Ben.
“They’d have ended up divorced if they’d stayed alive,” announced Bianca. “Did anyone else notice that it took Romeo all of five seconds to switch from Rosaline to Juliet?”
“That’s because he knew Juliet was the one from the moment he met her,” I said.
“Puh-lease,” Bianca retorted. “You can’t know that you love someone after two minutes. He just wanted to get in her pants. Romeo is just like every other horny teenage boy.”
“He didn’t know anything about her,” Ben said. “All his praise is for her physical attributes: ‘Juliet is the sun’ and blah blah blah. He just thinks she’s a babe.”
“I think it’s because after he met her everyone else became insignificant,” I said. “He knew right away that she was going to be his whole world.”
“Oh God,” groaned Ben.
Miss Castle gave me a meaningful smile. Being a hopeless romantic, she couldn’t help but take Romeo’s side. Unlike most of the teachers at Bryce Hamilton, who competed to see who could get to the parking lot first after the final bell rang, she wasn’t jaded. She was a dreamer. I suspected that if I told Miss Castle I was a celestial being on a mission to save the world, she wouldn’t have even blinked.
12
Saving Grace
I’d never seen God. I’d felt His presence and heard His voice but never actually come face to face with Him. His voice wasn’t what people imagined, booming and reverberating as depicted in epic Hollywood movies. Rather it was as subtle as a whisper and moved through our thoughts as gently as a breeze through tall reeds. Ivy had seen Him. An audience in Our Father’s court was reserved for the seraphim alone. As an archangel, Gabriel had the highest level of human interaction. He saw all the greatest suffering, the sort that was shown on the news; war, natural disasters, disease. He was guided by Our Father and worked with the rest of his covenant to point the earth in the right direction. Although Ivy had a direct line of communication with Our Creator, she could never be induced to talk on the subject. Gabriel and I had attempted many times to glean information from her to no avail. So, strangely enough, I ended up imagining God in much the same way as Michelangelo had: a wise old man with a beard, sitting on a throne in the sky. My mental picture was probably inaccurate, but there was one thing that couldn’t be disputed: No matter what his appearance, Our Father was the complete embodiment of love.
Much as I savored every day spent on earth, there was one thing I sometimes missed about Heaven: how everything there was clear. There was no conflict, no dissension apart from that one historic uprising that resulted in the Kingdom’s first and only eviction. Although it had altered the destiny of humankind forever, it was rarely talked about.
In Heaven I was dimly aware of the existence of a darker world, but it was removed from us and we were usually too busy working to think about it. We angels each had assigned roles and responsibilities: Some of us welcomed new souls into the Kingdom, helping to ease the transition; some materialized at deathbeds to offer comfort to departing souls; and others were guardians assigned to human beings. In the Kingdom, I looked after the souls of children when they first entered the realm. It had been my job to comfort them, to tell them that in time they would see their parents again if they let go of their doubts. I was a sort of celestial usher for preschoolers.