“One of my juniors asked me today if there’s such a thing as Limbo,” Gabriel said over dinner one night. I found it ironic that the conversation had turned to punishment for sins.
Ivy put down her fork. “What did you say?”
“I said nobody knows.”
“Why didn’t you say yes?” I asked.
“Because good deeds have to be voluntary,” my brother explained. “If a person knows for sure they’ll be judged, then they’ll act accordingly.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “What’s Limbo like anyway?” I knew enough about Heaven and Hell, but no one had ever told me about the eternal midpoint.
“It comes in several different forms,” said Ivy. “It can be a waiting room, a train station.”
“Some souls say it’s worse than Hell,” Gabriel added.
“That’s ridiculous,” I scoffed. “What could be worse?”
“Eternal nothingness,” said Ivy. “Year upon year of waiting for a train that’s never coming, waiting for someone to call your name. People start to lose all sense of time, it blurs into one never-ending stretch. They beg to go to Heaven, try to throw themselves into Hell, but there is no way out. The souls wander aimlessly. And it never ends, Bethany. Centuries can go by on earth and they will still be there.”
“Sounds like crap,” was all I could think to say. Gabriel and Ivy looked surprised for a moment before bursting into laughter.
I wondered if an angel could be exiled to Limbo.
At Tuesday lunchtime I sat with Molly and the girls on the lawn in the afternoon sunshine. Around us green buds tipped the branches of the trees, bringing everything back to life. The imposing main building of Bryce Hamilton loomed behind us, casting a shadow over the benches arranged in a circle around the broad trunk of an ancient oak with ivy twining around its trunk in an amorous embrace. If we looked west, we had a view of the ocean in the distance stretching to the horizon, clouds drifting lazily overhead. The girls lounged on the lush grass, letting the sun warm their faces. I was feeling bold and ventured to tug my skirt up above my knees.
“Way to go, babe!” The girls applauded my progress, commenting that I was becoming “one of them” before falling into their usual routine of gossiping about teachers and absent friends.
“Miss Lucas is such a cow,” Megan complained. “She’s making me redo my Russian Revolution assignment because it was too ‘sloppy.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think it means you did it in the half hour before it was due,” Hayley said. “What did you expect — an A plus?”
Megan shrugged. “I reckon she’s just jealous because she’s hairy as a yeti.”
“You should write a letter of complaint,” a girl named Tara said with a serious expression. “She’s totally discriminating against you.”
“I agree she’s defs picking on you,” Molly began, and then fell suddenly silent, her gaze locked on a figure striding across the lawn.
I turned to identify the source of her fixation and saw Gabriel making his way toward the music center, some distance from where we sat. He cut a solitary figure with his faraway look and a guitar case slung over one shoulder. He had abandoned school protocol regarding dress sense some time ago, and today he was wearing his torn jeans with a white T-shirt under a pin-striped vest. No one had dared to query it. And why would they? Gabriel was so popular there would have been uproar among the students if he resigned. I noticed that Gabe looked so at ease with his surroundings. He had an easy gait and his movements were fluid. He seemed to be coming in our direction, which made Molly sit bolt upright and frantically smooth down her wild curls. Gabriel, however, suddenly cut across in a different direction. Lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t as much as glanced in our direction. Molly looked crestfallen.
“What can we say about Mr. Church?” Taylah speculated when she spotted him, eager to resume their usual sport. I had been quiet for so long, absorbed in my fantasy of being stranded on a secluded island somewhere in the Caribbean or held captive on a pirate ship, waiting for Xavier to come and rescue me, that it seemed they had temporarily forgotten I was there. Otherwise they might have reconsidered discussing Gabriel in my presence.
“Nothing,” said Molly defensively. “He’s a legend.”
I could almost see the wheels turning in her head. I knew her fascination with Gabriel had grown in recent times, fueled by his remoteness. I didn’t want Molly to suffer the rebuff that would inevitably follow from this infatuation. Gabriel was made of stone, metaphorically speaking, and was incapable of reciprocating her feelings. He was as detached from human life as the sky is from the earth. When he looked at humankind, he saw only souls in peril, barely even distinguishing men from women. I could see that Molly was under the delusion that Gabriel operated like the other young men she knew; full of hormones and unable to resist feminine allure if the girl in question played her cards right. But Molly had no idea what Gabriel was. He might have taken human form, but unlike me, he was far removed from anything human. In Heaven he was known as the Angel of Justice.
“He’s a little uptight,” Tara said.
“He is not!” Molly snapped. “You don’t even know him.”
“And you do?”
“I wish I did.”
“Well, keep wishing.”
“He’s a teacher,” Megan interrupted, “and in his twenties.”
“Music teachers are kind of on the fringe,” said Molly optimistically.
“Yeah, on the fringe of the staff,” said Taylah. “Get over it, Molls, he’s out of our league.”
Molly narrowed her eyes as if she’d been issued a challenge. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I like to think he’s in a league of his own.”
There was a sudden awkward silence as they remembered my presence. The subject was quickly dropped.
“So,” said Megan a little too brightly. “About the prom…”
When Xavier dropped me off at home that afternoon, I found Ivy icing cupcakes. There was a smudge of flour across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes sparkled as though she was captivated by the whole process. She had lined up all her ingredients neatly in assorted measuring cups, and now she was arranging her sprinkles so they formed perfectly symmetrical designs. It was something that no human hand could have managed. They looked like miniature artworks rather than something designed to be eaten. She presented me with one as soon as I came in.
“They look great,” I said. “Can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think there’s any chance Gabriel will let me go to the school dance?”
Ivy stopped what she was doing and looked up.
“Xavier asked you, didn’t he?”
“What if he did?” I was suddenly defensive.
“Calm down, Bethany,” my sister said. “He’d look very handsome in a tuxedo.”
“You mean you don’t see a problem with it?”
“No, I think you’d make a lovely couple.”
“Maybe, if I make it there at all.”
“Don’t be so negative,” Ivy chided. “We’ll have to see what Gabriel thinks, but it is a school event and it would be a shame to miss it.”
I was impatient to hear the verdict. I dragged Ivy outside, and we scoured the beach for Gabriel, where he was taking a walk. The shoreline wound in one direction up to the main beach, where bodysurfers rode the waves and ice cream vans set up shop beneath the palms. In the other direction, if your eye traveled far enough, were the jagged cliffs of the wild Shipwreck Coast and a rocky outcrop known as the Crags. The area was famous for its dangerously high winds, choppy seas, and fierce rips. Divers occasionally searched for wreckage from the many ships that had gone down there over the years, but usually the only visitors were the gulls bobbing harmlessly on the water.