Hallowed

Chapter 9 Paradise Lost

“Farewell, happy fields, / where joy for ever dwells! hail, horrors! Hail, / infernal world!

and thou, profoundest hell / receive thy new possessor! one who brings / a mind not to be changed by place or time,” reads Kay Patterson. She has a nice reading voice, I’ll give her that, even though I suspect that underneath her polished exterior beats a heart of pure evil.

Okay, so not pure evil. Because Christian liked her, and Christian’s not an idiot. Even Wendy says that Kay’s not so bad when you get to know her. So there must be something I’m not seeing.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” she continues.

“Good, Kay,” Mr. Phibbs says. “So what do you think it means?” Kay’s immaculately tweezed eyebrows squeeze together. “Means?”

“What is Satan saying here? What’s he talking about?”

She looks at him with clear annoyance. “I don’t know. I don’t speak old English, or whatever this is.”

I’d mock, but I’m not doing much better. Or any better, truthfully, when it comes to this book. Which doesn’t make sense. I’m supposed to be able to speak and understand any language ever spoken on earth, so why am I so lost on Paradise Lost?

“Anyone?” Mr. Phibbs looks around the room.

Wendy raises her hand. “I think maybe he’s talking about how terrible hell is, but for him, it’s better than heaven, because at least in hell he gets to be free. It’s that ‘better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’ idea.”

Creepy. I always get squirmy every time the topic of angels comes up in any regular-person conversation, and now that’s happening in English class. I’m sure my mother would not approve this reading material.

But then again, she probably already knows all about it. Since she knows everything. And tells me nothing.

“Excellent, Wendy,” praises Mr. Phibbs, “I can see you’ve read the CliffsNotes.” Wendy turns a lovely shade of crimson.

“No harm in reading the CliffsNotes, dear,” Mr. Phibbs says jovially. “It’s good to get someone else’s interpretation. But it’s more important that you wrestle with these texts on your own. Feel the words with your gut, not just hear them in your head. But O, how fallen! how changed / from him, who, in the happy realms of light, / clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine / myriads though bright,” he recites from memory. “Beautiful words. But what do they mean?”

“He’s talking about the angel he used to be,” says Angela from up front. She hasn’t said a word during this entire conversation, neither of us have, but now it’s obviously getting to be too much for her to sit here and be quiet when he’s talking about angels. “He’s lamenting how far he’s fallen, because even though he’d rather make the rules in hell than obey God in heaven, like he said, he still feels sorrow, because now he’s”—she glances down at her book to read— “in utter darkness, . / as far removed from God and light of heaven, / as from the center thrice to the utmost pole. I’m not sure how far that is, exactly, but it sounds like pretty far.”

“Did you feel that in your gut?”

“Uh. .” Angela’s a brain person, not a gut person. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, an insightful interpretation, anyway,” he says. “Remember what Milton tells us at the beginning of the book. His goal here is to explore the idea of disobedience to God, both in the rebellion of the fallen angels and in the heart of man, which leads to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. . ”

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I don’t want to explore the idea of disobedience to God — not exactly a gut-friendly topic of conversation for me right now, since I’ve pretty much made up my mind to fight my purpose.

“Mr. Phibbs, I have a question,” Angela says then.

“Wonderful,” he says. “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

“Right. How old are you?” she asks.

He laughs.

“No seriously. How old?” she presses.

“That’s not at all related to the subject at hand,” he says crisply, and I can tell that she’s rattled him, although I’m not sure why. He smoothes back his white hair, fiddles with the piece of chalk in his hand. “Now shall we get back to Satan and his plight?”

“I just wanted to know if you’re as old as Milton,” Angela says, acting playfully, nauseatingly dumb, like she’s teasing him, like it’s not a serious question, even though it is. “Like, did the two of you ever hang out together?”

Milton, if I remember what Mr. Phibbs told us last week, died in 1674. If Mr. Phibbs ever hung out with Milton that would put him well over three hundred and fifty years old.

Is it possible? I look at him, noting the way his skin sags in places, the host of deep wrinkles on his forehead, around his eyes, circling his mouth. His hands have that gnarly tree quality to them. He’s clearly old. But how old?

“I only wish I could have had that pleasure,” Mr. Phibbs says with a tragic sigh. “But alas, Milton was a bit before my time.”

The bell rings.

“Ah,” he says, his blue eyes sharp on Angela’s face. “Saved by the bell.” That night I sneak out to fly to the Lazy Dog. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s my angelic nature.

I sit outside Tucker’s window with snow in my hair, and I watch him, first as he works on his homework, then getting ready for bed (and no, I turn away when he’s changing, I’m not a total perv), and then as he falls asleep.

At least, right this minute, he’s safe.

Again I consider telling him about my dream — I hate keeping this from him. It feels like something he deserves to know. I’m so angry with Mom, I realize, for all the secrets she keeps from me, but am I any different? I’m keeping this secret to avoid alarming him needlessly if by some stroke of luck I’m reading my vision wrong. I’m holding back because his knowing about it won’t change it. I’m protecting him.

But it still sucks.

Around twelve thirty or so, his window suddenly jerks open. I’m so startled — I’d been half asleep — that I almost fall off the roof, but a strong arm grabs me and hauls me back over the edge.

“Hi there,” Tucker says brightly, like we’re bumping into each other on the street.

“Uh, hi.”

“Nice night for stalking,” he observes.

“No. I was—”

“Get your butt in here, Carrots.”

I climb awkwardly into his room. He puts on a T-shirt and sits cross-legged on the bed, looking at me.

“It’s not stalking if you’re happy to see me?” I suggest tremulously.

“How long have you been out there?”

“How long have you known I was there?”

“About an hour,” he says. He shakes his head in disbelief. “You’re a crazy girl, you know that?”

“I’m starting to figure that out about myself.”

“So why are you really here?” He pats the spot on the bed next to him, and I sit. He slings an arm around me.

“I wanted to see you,” I say as I curl into his side. “It was a long and lonely weekend and I didn’t get to see you much at school today.”

“Oh, right. How was camping? I don’t think I’ve ever been camping in the snow,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “Sounds chilly.”

“It wasn’t exactly in the snow.” Then I tell him about the congregation. Not everything, exactly, not about hell or the Black Wings or Mr. Phibbs as an angel-blood, but I tell him most of it. I know my mom wouldn’t approve. Christian wouldn’t approve. Of course Angela wouldn’t approve. The congregation is confidential, she said, like I should take this entire weekend and put a big old CONFIDENTIAL stamp across it.

I tell him anyway. Because I’m not ready to set up my own secret identity just yet, not from Tucker. Because the one thing I know for sure is that I love him. Because if I’m honest about one thing it makes me feel slightly better about not telling him about other things.

He takes the news of the congregation pretty well.

“Sounds like church camp,” he says.

“More like a family reunion,” I say.

He leans over and kisses me, a soft, featherlight kiss that only catches the side of my mouth, but still leaves me breathless.

“I missed you,” he says.

“I missed you, too.”

I curl my arms around his neck and kiss him, and everything goes away but this moment, his lips on mine, seeking, his hands in my hair, drawing me in, our bodies together on the bed, realigning to get closer, his fingers on the buttons of my shirt.

I can’t let him die.

“You’re so warm,” he murmurs.

I feel warm. I feel like I could burst into flame, simultaneously light and heavy, and time is slowing down, like I am seeing everything frame by frame. Tucker’s face hovering above my own, a tiny mole just below his ear that I never noticed before, the shadows we’re making on the ceiling, the dimple appearing in his cheek as he smiles, the way his heartbeat is speeding up, his breath. And I can feel what he’s feeling too, on the edges of my mind: love, the way he thrills to the feel of my skin under his hands, my smell filling his head—

“Clara,” he says, breathing hard as he pulls away.

“It’s okay,” I say then, drawing his head down to mine again, pressing my cheek to his, our lips not quite touching, our breath on each other’s faces. “I know you have your ideas about this, and I think that’s sweet, but. . what if this is all the happiness we get? What if this is our chance, before everything changes? What if this is it? Shouldn’t we just. . live?” This time when we kiss, it’s different. There’s an urgency that wasn’t there before. He pauses to pull his shirt over his head, revealing all that golden brown skin, his rodeo/farm/work hard-physical-labor-all-his-life muscles. He’s beautiful, I think, so crazy beautiful it almost hurts to look at him, and I close my eyes and lift my arms over my head and let him take my shirt off too. The cool air hits my skin, and I shiver, I quake, and Tucker runs his calloused fingertips gently along the top of my shoulder, strumming over my bra strap, across the line of my collarbone and up my neck, ending below my chin where he tips my head up to kiss me again.

This is really going to happen, I think. Me and Tucker. Right now.

My heart is beating so fast, skimming more than beating, like a hummingbird’s wings in my chest, my breath coming in shudders like I’m cold, like I’m scared, but I’m neither. I love him. I love him, I love him — the words have a pulse of their own.

Suddenly he freezes.

“What?” I whisper.

“You’re glowing.” He sits up abruptly.

I am. It’s very faint, not full glory by any stretch of the imagination, but as I spread my fingers and examine the back of my hand I see that my skin is very definitely glowing.

“No, your hair,” he says.

My hair. I immediately grab at it with both hands. It’s shining, all right, beaming. A sparkly shiny sunbeam in the dark of Tucker’s room. I’m a human lamp.

Tucker isn’t looking at me.

“It’s nothing. Angela calls it comae caelestis. Sign of a heavenly being. It’s why Mom made me dye my hair last year.” I’m babbling now.

“Can you. . turn it off?” he says. “I’m sorry, but when I look at it, I feel. . dizzy, like I’m going to fall over or pass out or something.” He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

“Also a little nauseated.”

Great to know I have that kind of effect on a guy.

“I can try,” I say, and it turns out not to be too hard to shut it off. Just seeing the strained expression on Tucker’s face does the trick.

I swear I hear Tucker breathe a sigh of relief.

“Sorry about that,” I say again.

He looks at me, swallows hard, tries to regain his composure. “Don’t be sorry. It’s part of who you are. You shouldn’t have to apologize for who you are. It’s pretty, really. Awe inspiring.

Fall down on your knees and worship, all that.”

“But it makes you want to puke.”

“Just a little.”

I lean over to kiss his still adorably bare shoulder. “So. My light’s out. Where were we?” He shakes his head, scratches at the back of his neck the way he does when he’s uncomfortable. Coughs.

I sit there awkwardly for a moment. “Okay,” I say. “I guess I should. .”

“Don’t leave.” He catches my hand before I can stand up. “Stay.” I let him draw me back down into the bed. He lies behind me, spoons me, rests his hand on my hip and breathes steadily onto the back of my neck. I try to relax. I listen to the ticking of the clock on his nightstand. What if I can never find a way to control the glow? What if every time I feel happy in that particular way, I light up? I’ll light up, he’ll get queasy, and then— freakus interruptus.

There’s a bleak thought. It’s like my own special form of birth control. The full body glow.

And then I think, He’s going to die without ever having made love to a woman.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tucker whispers. He moves his hand up and takes mine, squeezes it.

Oh. My. God. Did I just say that aloud?

“What doesn’t matter?” I ask.

“Whether or not we can. . you know,” he says. It’s crazy that he can’t read minds but still he knows almost exactly what I’m thinking. “I still love you.”

“I still love you, too,” I answer, then turn and snuggle my face into the side of his neck, wrap my arms around him, and that’s where I stay until he falls asleep.

I wake up when somebody opens the curtains, and here’s what I see: Mr. Avery, in overalls, with his back to me, looking out the window where the sun is just cresting the barn.

“Rise and shine, son,” he says. “Cows won’t milk themselves.” Then he turns. Sees me. His mouth falls open. My mouth is already open, my breath lodged in the back of my throat, like if I don’t breathe he somehow won’t know I’m here. So we stare at each other like a couple of beached fish.

Outside a rooster crows.

Tucker mumbles something. Turns over, pulling the blanket off me.

I yank the blanket back up to cover my bra. Thank God I’m still wearing my jeans, otherwise it would look really bad.

It still looks really bad.

Really bad.

“Um,” I say, but my brain is like a block of ice. I can’t chip words out of it. I reach over and shake Tucker. Hard. Harder when he doesn’t respond right away.

“It can’t be six thirty already,” he groans.

“Oh, I think it can,” I manage.

Suddenly he jolts upright. Now all three of us are staring at each other like fish. Then Mr.

Avery closes his mouth so quickly I hear the click of his teeth coming together, turns, and walks out of the room. He shuts the door firmly behind him. We listen to his footsteps march down the stairs, down the hall toward the kitchen. We hear Mrs. Avery say, “Oh good, here’s your coffee, dear. . ” Then nothing. He’s not talking loudly enough for us to hear.

I grab my shirt and tug it over my head, hunt around for my shoes in a panic.

Tucker does something I’ve almost never heard him do.

He swears.

“Do you want me to stay and try to explain?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Oh no, no, don’t do that. You should just. . go.” I open the window, turn back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“I’m not sorry.” He swings his legs out of bed, stands up, and crosses over to me, gives me a quick but tender kiss on the mouth, holds my face in his hands, and looks into my eyes.

“Okay? I’m not sorry. It was worth it. I’ll take the heat.”

“Okay.”

“It’s been nice knowing you, Clara,” he says.

“Huh?” My brain is still a bit shell-shocked.

“Say a prayer for me, will you?” He gives me a shaky grin. “Because I’m pretty sure my parents are going to kill me.”

When I get home it only gets worse. My bedroom window is locked.

Awesome.

I slip in the back door (thankfully not locked) and close the door gently behind me.

Mom works late nights. She sleeps in a lot, these days. There’s a chance she didn’t notice.

But my window’s locked.

Jeffrey’s drinking a glass of orange juice at the counter.

“Oh man,” he says when he sees me. “You are so busted.”

“What should I do?” I ask.

“You should have a really good excuse. And maybe you should cry — girls do that, right?

And possibly be gravely injured. If she has to fix you, she might go easier on you.”

“Thanks,” I say. “You’re so helpful.”

“Oh, and Clara,” he says as I’m tiptoeing upstairs, “you might want to turn your shirt so it’s not on backward.”

I’m amazed I make it all the way up to my room without being pulled over. I put on fresh clothes, wash my face, and comb out my hair, and I start thinking everything’s going to be fine, no worries. But then I come out of the bathroom and see Mom sitting in my desk chair.

She looks like one pissed-off mama.

For a minute, a minute that feels like eternity, she doesn’t say anything. She stares at me with her arms crossed over her chest.

“So,” she says finally, her voice like drips of ice. “Tucker’s mother called a few minutes ago. She asked me if I knew where my daughter was, because last time she checked you were in her son’s bed.”

“I’m so sorry,” I stammer. “I went over to the Lazy Dog to see Tucker, and I fell asleep.” Her hands clench into fists. “Clara—” She stops herself, takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to do this,” she says. “I can’t.”

“Nothing happened,” I say.

She scoffs. Gives me a look that tells me not to insult her intelligence.

“Okay, something almost happened.” Maybe if I go with the truth, she’ll see it as a sign of good faith, I rationalize. “But nothing did. Happen, I mean. I fell asleep. That’s it.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better,” she says sarcastically. “Something almost happened, but didn’t. Great. Wonderful. I’m so relieved.” She suddenly shakes her head. “I don’t want to hear about last night. We’re done with this, young lady. If I have to nail your window shut, you are staying here, in your own bed, in your own house, every night. Do you understand me?”

“Furthermore,” she continues, when I don’t answer, “you and Tucker are no longer to see each other on a one-on-one basis.”

I whip around. “What?”

“You’re not to be alone with him.”

All my breath leaves me in a rush. “For how long?”

“I don’t know. Until I figure out what to do with you. I think I’m being very generous with you, considering what you’ve done.”

“What I’ve done? This isn’t the year 1900, Mom.”

“Believe me, I know,” she says.

I try to meet her gaze. “Mom, I have to keep seeing Tucker.” She sighs. “Are you really going to make me say the my-house-my-rules thing?” she says in a weary voice, rubbing at her eyes like she doesn’t have the time or the energy right now to deal with me.

My chin lifts. “Are you really going to make me move out just so I can do what I want with my own life? Because I will.”

It’s a bluff. I don’t have anywhere to go, any money, any place to be but here.

“If that’s what it takes,” she says softly.

That does it. My eyes fill with humiliating tears. I know she has a right to be mad, but I don’t care. I start screaming all the stuff I’ve been wanting to say for months: Why do you have to be this way? Why don’t you care about Tucker? Can’t you see how good we are together?

Okay, so you don’t care about Tucker, but don’t you care about my happiness?

She lets me yell. I throw my tantrum while she looks down at the floor with an almost embarrassed expression and waits for me to finish. Then, after I’m done, she says, “I love you, Clara. And I do care about Tucker, as much as I know you won’t believe that. I do care about your happiness. But I care about your safety first. That has always been my first priority.”

“This isn’t about my safety,” I say bitterly. “This is about you getting to control my life.

How am I not safe around Tucker? Seriously, how?”

“Because you’re not the only thing out there in the night!” she exclaims. “When I woke up and you weren’t here. . ” Her eyes close. Her jaw tightens. “You will stay in this house. And you will see Tucker, under supervision, when I think it’s allowable for you to do so.” She gets up to leave.

“But he’s dying,” I blurt out.

She stops, her hand on the doorknob. “What?”

“I’ve been having a dream — a vision, I think — of Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s a funeral.

And Tucker’s never there, Mom.”

“Sweetie,” Mom says. “Just because he’s not there doesn’t mean—”

“Nothing else makes sense,” I say. “If it was someone else who died, Tucker would be there. He’d be there for me. Nothing could keep him away. That’s who he is. He’d be there.” She makes a noise in the back of her throat and crosses over to me. I let her hug me, breathing in her perfume, trying to take comfort in her warmth, her solid, steady presence, but I can’t. She doesn’t seem that warm to me right now, or solid, or strong.

“I won’t let it happen,” I whisper. I pull away. “What I need to know is how I can stop it, only I don’t know how it’s going to happen so I don’t know what to do. Tucker’s going to die!”

“Yes, he is,” she says matter-of-factly. “He’s mortal, Clara. He will die. More than a hundred people on this earth die every minute, and someday he will be one of them.”

“But it’s Tucker, Mom.”

I’m on the verge of tears again.

“You really love him,” she muses.

“I really love him.”

“And he loves you.”

“He does. I know he does. I’ve felt it.”

She takes my hand. “Then nothing can ever truly separate you, not even death. Love binds you,” she says. “Clara. . I need to tell you—”

But I can’t let her talk me into placidly accepting Tucker’s death. So I say, “Love didn’t exactly bind you and Dad together, did it?”

She sighs.

I’m sorry I said it. I try to think of some way to make her understand. “What I mean is, sometimes people do get separated, Mom. For good. I don’t want that to happen to me and Tucker.”

“You stubborn, stubborn girl,” she says under her breath. She gets up and goes to my door.

Stops. Turns back toward me. “Have you told him?”

“What?”

“About the dream, or what you think it means,” she says. “Because ultimately, you don’t know what it means, Clara. It’s not fair to put that on him unless you know for sure. It can be a terrible thing to know you’re going to die.”

“I thought you said that we’re all going to die.”

“Yes. Sooner or later,” she says.

“No,” I admit. “I haven’t told him.”

“Good. Don’t.” She tries to smile but doesn’t quite manage it. “Have a good day at school.

Be home before dinner. We have more to talk about. There’s more I want to say.”

“Fine.”

After she goes I throw myself down on my bed, suddenly exhausted.

Sooner or later, she said. And she would know, I guess. At her age, most of the people she’s known have grown old and died. Like the thing with the San Francisco earthquake. There was a news story she cut out of the paper a few months ago about how the last survivor of the earthquake had died. Which makes her the last true survivor.

She’s right. Sooner or later Tucker is going to die.

Later, I think. I need to make sure it’s later.

Angela catches me by the cafeteria door at lunchtime.

“Angel Club,” she whispers. “Right after school, don’t be late.”

“Oh come on.” I am so not in the mood for Angela’s endless Q and A, her intensity, her wild theories. I’m tired. “I’ve got other stuff too, you know.”

“We have a new development.”

“How new? We just spent the weekend together.”

“It’s important, okay!” she screeches, which totally startles me. Angela’s not a screecher.

I look at her more closely. She looks worn out, dark and puffy around the eyes, frazzled.

“All right, I’ll be there,” I agree quickly. “I can’t stay super late, but I’ll definitely be there, okay?”

She nods. “Right after school,” she says again, then walks quickly away.

“What’s with her?” Christian materializes beside me and together we stare after her. “I told her I had a meeting for ski team, and she practically ripped my head off.” I shake my head, because I have no idea what’s up with her.

“I guess it’s important,” he says. Then he’s walking away too, joining his posse of popular people, heading out to lunch. I stand there for a minute feeling weird and lonely and finally move toward the lunch line. I get my lunch and flop down at my usual seat next to Wendy, who’s sitting with Jason at the Invisibles table.

She gives me this piercing look. She knows about this morning.

Jason says he has to go check on something, and off he goes.

I’m in so much trouble. With everybody.

“Where’s Tucker?” I ask immediately. “He’s still, like, alive?”

“He had to go home and do some chores during lunch hour. He wrote you a note.” She holds out a single sheet of notebook paper. I snatch it out of her hand. “I didn’t read it,” she says quickly as I unfold it, but something in her voice makes me think she might have.

“Thanks,” I say, my eyes scanning down the words. In his awkward script he’s written, Keep your chin up, Carrots. We’ll get through this. We just have to follow the rules for a while, and drawn an X—a kiss.

“Were your parents furious?” I ask, putting the note in the inside pocket of my jacket. I flash back to how Mr. Avery’s eyes bulged when he saw us.

She shrugs. “Mostly they were shocked. I don’t think they ever expected. .” She coughs.

“Okay. Heck yeah, they were mad. They kept saying the word disappointed, and Tucker looked like a dog getting kicked every time he heard it, and then when he seemed sufficiently whipped they sent him out to muck the barn so they could deliberate on a punishment.”

“And what’s the punishment?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s just say my parents are not your biggest fans right now, and things were tense at the Averys’ this morning.”

“I’m sorry, Wen,” I say, and I mean it. “I guess I made a mess of things.” She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes briefly. “It’s okay. It’s relationship drama. We all have relationship drama, right? You just happen to have a relationship with my brother. I guess I should have seen that coming.

“I have to mention one thing, though,” she adds good-naturedly, after a minute. “If you hurt my brother, you’re going to have to deal with me. I will bury you in horse manure.”

“Right,” I say quickly, “I’ll remember that.”

“So, what’s the big emergency?” Jeffrey says. He jogs down the aisle of the Pink Garter toward where Christian and I are sitting, waiting for Angela, who is uncharacteristically late. “I thought we weren’t going to meet this week because we like, you know, spent all weekend together. I’m kind of sick of you people.”

“Glad to see that you decided to grace us with your presence, anyway,” Christian says.

“Well, I couldn’t miss it,” he says. “You do know this whole club rotates around me, right?

I move that we change the name to the Jeffrey Club.” He grins as he reaches the table. On pure sisterly instinct I stick out my foot like I’m going to trip him, and he scoffs, steps over my leg and shoves my shoulder.

“How about the doody-head club?” I suggest.

He snorts. “Doody-head.” That was our highest form of insult when we were kids.

We tussle around for a second, trying to give each other noogies. “Ow,” I say, when he accidentally bends my wrist backward. “When did you get so freaking strong?” He steps back and grins. It feels weirdly good, roughhousing with Jeffrey. He’s been almost his normal old self since we came back from the congregation, like he has finally given himself permission to move on from whatever it was weighing him down before.

Christian is staring at us. He’s an only child and could never understand the delicate joys of sibling abuse. I give Jeffrey one last push for good measure and take my seat at the table.

Jeffrey plunks down on the chair opposite me.

Angela comes in from the back. Sits down without a word. Opens her notebook.

“So. Emergency,” I say.

She takes a deep breath. “I’ve been looking into the life span of angel-bloods,” she says.

“Does this have anything to do with you asking Mr. Phibbs how old he is?” I venture.

“Yes. After seeing the congregation last weekend, I was curious. Mr. Phibbs is a Quartarius, I’m pretty sure, but he looks a lot older than your mom, who’s a Dimidius. So you can see why I was confused.”

I don’t see.

“Either Mr. Phibbs must be a lot older than your mother,” she goes on to explain, “or your mom must age at a different rate than Mr. Phibbs does. Which made me think, what if Quartarius, who are only a quarter-angel — seventy-five percent human — age at like seventy-five percent the rate that humans do? Humans don’t live much past one hundred, typically, so a Quartarius angel-blood might live to be a hundred and twenty-five. Which would account for Mr. Phibbs looking old.”

She stops. Drums her pen against her notebook. Looks worried.

“Go on,” I say.

Another deep breath. She doesn’t look at me, which is really starting to freak me out. “I thought Dimidius, who are only half human, might live at least twice as long, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years. So your mom would be a middle-aged angel-blood. She’d look like she was forty. Which she does.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” says Christian.

She swallows. “I thought I did,” she says in an oddly flat voice. “But then I read this.” She flips a few pages in her notebook, then begins to read. “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God— that’s angels; at least it’s largely interpreted as angels —saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.”

I know this passage. It’s the Bible. Genesis 6. Enter the Nephilim: angel-bloods.

But Angela keeps reading: “The Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not remain in man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be a hundred and twenty years. Then it goes back to talking about the Nephilim, when ‘the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them’ and all the ‘heroes of old’ stuff, and it occurred to me that something’s weird here. First we’re talking about the Nephilim, then God sets a limit on the life span of man, then we go back to talking about the Nephilim. But then I realized. It’s not a limit on the life span of man. That part in the middle isn’t about man. It’s about us. God wants us to be mortal.”

“God wants us to be mortal,” I repeat cluelessly.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not we’re capable of living for hundreds of years. We don’t live more than a hundred and twenty years,” concludes Angela. “I researched it all last night, and I can’t find a record of a single angel-blood, Dimidius or Quartarius, who’s lived longer. Every single one I’ve been able to find a paper trail on dies either before or during their hundred and twentieth year, but nobody ever makes it to one hundred and twenty-one.” Suddenly Jeffrey makes a choking sound in the back of his throat. He jumps up. “You’re full of crap, Angela.” His face contorts into an expression I’ve never seen on him before, wild and desperate, full of rage. It scares me.

“Jeffrey—” Angela begins.

“It’s not true,” he says, almost like he’s threatening her. “How can it be? She’s completely healthy.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “Let’s all calm down. So we get a hundred and twenty years. No biggie, right?”

“Clara,” whispers Christian, and I feel something like pity from him, and then it all hits home.

I’m so stupid. How could I be so stupid? Here I am thinking it’s fine, a hundred and twenty years is fine, because at least we get to stay young and strong. Like Mom. Mom, who doesn’t look a day over forty. Mom, who was born in 1890. Margaret and Meg and Marge and Margot and Megan and all those strangers, those past lives she got to live. And Maggie, my mother, who turned a hundred and twenty a few weeks ago.

I feel dizzy.

Jeffrey punches the wall. His fist goes right through like it’s made of cardboard, spilling plaster everywhere, his blow strong enough that the whole building seems to shudder.

Mom.

“I have to go,” I say, standing up so fast that I knock over my chair. I don’t even stop to pick up my backpack. I just run for the exit.

“Clara!” Angela calls from behind me. “Jeffrey. . wait!”

“Let them go,” I hear Christian say as I reach the door. “They need to go home.” I don’t remember the drive back to my house. I’m just here, suddenly parked in the driveway, hands clenched on the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles are white. In the rearview mirror I see Jeffrey’s truck parked behind me. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve probably broken a dozen traffic laws to get here as fast as I possibly could, some part of me wants to drive away. I don’t want to go inside. But I have to. I have to know the truth.

Angela’s been wrong before, I think, although right now I can’t remember when. She’s been wrong. She’s full of crap.

But she’s not wrong.

It’s not Tucker’s funeral, in my dream of Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s Mom’s.

I feel like I’ve been on the teacups at Disneyland, all vertigo, my head spinning even when the rest of me is holding still. My emotions are a jumbled cocktail of relief about Tucker, mixed with shock and crazy hurt, guilt and a whole different level of grief and confusion. I could throw up. I could fall down. I could cry.

I get out of the car and walk slowly up the steps to the house. Jeffrey falls in behind me as I open the front door and move through the entryway, past the living room and the kitchen and straight down the hall to Mom’s office. The door’s open a crack, and I see her reading something on her computer, her face the picture of concentration as she stares at the screen.

An odd calm comes over me. I knock, a gentle rap of knuckles on the wood. She turns and glances up.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says. “I’m glad you’re home. We really do need to talk about—”

“Angel-bloods only live a hundred and twenty years?” I blurt out.

Her smile fades. She looks from me to Jeffrey standing behind me. Then she turns back to her computer and shuts it down.

“Angela?” she asks.

“Who cares how we know?” I say, and my voice sounds sharp in my ears, shrill. “Is it true?”

“Come in here,” she says. “Sit down.”

I sit on one of her comfy leather chairs. She turns to Jeffrey, who folds his arms over his broad chest and holds his ground in the doorway.

“So you’re dying,” he says in a total monotone.

“Yes.”

His face goes slack with dismay, his arms dropping to his sides. I think he expected her to deny it. “What, you’re going to die just because God decided that we shouldn’t live too long?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” she says. “But essentially, that’s the gist.”

“But it’s not fair. You’re still young.”

“Jeffrey,” Mom says. “Please sit down.”

He sits in the chair next to mine and now she can turn and address us both. I watch her face as she tries to collect her thoughts.

“How does it happen?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. It varies for all of us. But I’ve been getting progressively weaker since last winter. Markedly so these past few weeks.”

The headaches she keeps having. The fatigue she blamed on work problems. The coldness in her hands and feet, the way her normal warmth seemed to leave her. The new wrinkles. The shadows under her eyes. The way she’s always sitting down these days, always resting. I can’t believe I didn’t put it all together before.

“So you’re getting weaker,” I say. “And then what, you’ll just fade away?”

“My spirit will leave this body.”

“When?” Jeffrey asks.

She gives us that sad, thoughtful look I’m so familiar with by now. “I don’t know.”

“Spring,” I say, because that’s one thing I do know. My dream has shown me.

Something hot and heavy starts to rise up in my chest, so powerful it roars in my ears, squeezes the air out of my lungs. I gasp for breath. “When were you planning to tell us?” Her midnight eyes flash with sympathy, which I find ironic, since she’s the one who’s dying. “You needed to focus on your purpose, not on me.” She shakes her head. “And I suppose I was also being selfish. I didn’t want to be dying yet. I was going to tell you today,” she says with another weary sigh. “I tried to tell you this morning—”

“But there’s something we can do,” interrupts Jeffrey. “Some higher power we can appeal to, right?”

“No, honey,” she answers gently.

“We can pray or something,” he insists.

“We all die, even angel-bloods.” She gets up and goes to kneel in front of Jeffrey’s chair, putting her hands over his. “It’s my turn now.”

“But we need you,” he chokes out. “What will happen to us?”

“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says. “I think what’s best for you might be to stay here, complete the school year. So I will transfer guardianship to Billy, who’s agreed to take you.

If that’s all right with you.”

“Not Dad?” Jeffrey asks with a quiver in his voice. “Does Dad even know?”

“Your father, he’s not. . He doesn’t really have the resources to take care of you.”

“He doesn’t have the time, you mean,” I add woodenly.

“You can’t die, Mom,” Jeffrey says. “You can’t.”

She hugs him. For a split second he resists, tries to pull away, but then he gives in, his shoulders shaking as she holds him, a terrible rough sob rumbling out of his chest. I hear that hurt-animal noise come out of my brother and part of me starts to split in half. But I don’t cry. I want to be mad at her, accuse her of being a big fat liar my whole life, shout that she’s abandoning us, maybe punch a hole in the wall myself, but I don’t do that either. I remember what she told me this morning, about death. I thought she was talking about me and Tucker, but now I know she was talking about me and her.

I find myself sliding out of my chair, moving on my knees over to Jeffrey’s chair. Mom pulls back and looks at me, her eyes shining with tears. She opens up the hug to let me in, and I snuggle against her, enveloped in a mix of her rose and vanilla perfume and Jeffrey’s cologne. I can’t feel anything — it’s like I’m floating out of my body, somehow, disconnected. I still can’t breathe.

“I love you both so much,” she says against my hair. “You have made my life into something so extraordinary, you can’t even know.”

Jeffrey sobs. Big, macho Jeffrey, crying like his heart will break.

“We’re going to make it through this together,” Mom says fiercely, pulling back again to look into our faces. “We’re going to be all right.”

She’s different at dinner. It’s just her and me at the table, since Jeffrey has a wrestling match, and she insisted he go. She doesn’t say much, but there’s something lighter about her, something in the way she sits up so straight that makes me realize that lately she’s been slumping, something in the way that she eats every last bite of her meal that makes me see that lately she’s been picking at her food. She’s acting so much stronger all of a sudden, like it hasn’t been the sickness that’s been weighing her down, but the secret. Now we know, and it’s like that secret’s been lifted off her, and momentarily she feels like herself again. It will not last. She knows it will not last. But she’s determined to enjoy the moment of normalcy.

She puts her fork down with a sigh, then looks at me across the table and raises her eyebrows. It takes me a second to realize that I’m reading her emotions.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“Didn’t feel like spaghetti?”

I glance down at my plate. I’ve hardly touched my food. “It’s good. I’m just—” You’re dying, I think. How can I eat when I know you’re dying and there’s nothing we can do to stop it?

“Can I be excused?” I’m out of my chair before she has a chance to answer the question.

“Sure,” she says with a bemused smile. “I’m going to go to Jeffrey’s match in a bit. Do you want to come?”

I shake my head.

“We can talk later, if you want,” she says.

“Can I say no? I mean, maybe sometime, but right now, I don’t really want to talk. Is that okay?”

“Of course. This is going to take some time to get used to, for all of us.” I retreat to the quiet of my bedroom and lock the door. Will I ever get used to the idea that I’m going to lose my mother? It seems so ridiculous, such an impossible thing to happen, my mother, who’s like Supermom, cheering at all Jeffrey’s games, videotaping my dance recitals, whipping up cupcakes for the wrestling team bake sale, not to mention fending off Black Wings, able to literally leap (okay fly, but what’s the diff?) over buildings in a single bound. And she’s going to die. I know exactly what it will be like. We’re going to put her body in a coffin. In the ground.

It’s like a bad dream, and I can’t wake up.

I reach for my phone. Dial Tucker’s number automatically. Wendy answers.

“I need to talk to Tucker.”

“Um, he’s kind of lost his phone privileges.”

“Wen, please,” I say, and my voice breaks. “I need to talk to Tucker. Right now.”

“Okay.” She runs to get him. I hear her telling him that she thinks something’s wrong with me.

“Hey, Carrots,” he says when he picks up, “what’s the matter?”

“It’s my mom,” I whisper. “It’s my mom.”

There’s movement outside my window. Christian. I can feel his worry radiating like a heat lamp. He wants to tell me that he understands. He lost his mother too. I’m not alone. But he’s making up his mind not to say those things to me, because he knows that ultimately words are meaningless at times like these. He just wants to sit with me, for hours, if that’s what I need.

He would listen if I wanted to vent. He’d hug me.

It’s something I didn’t entirely expect from him. When I told Tucker he kept saying he was so sorry, over and over again, and I could tell he didn’t know what else to say, how to react to news like this, so I told him I had to go and let him off the hook.

I get up and go to the window and stand for a minute looking at Christian, at his back, since he’s turned away from me, perched in his usual spot on the eaves. He’s wearing the black fleece jacket. I know this angle of him so well. He’s here for me. It’s like he’s always been here, in some way or another.

A snowflake strikes the glass. Then another. Then it really starts to come down, big, heavy flakes, floating toward the house. Christian unzips the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a black knit hat and puts it on. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. And he waits.

I have the urge to call for him. In my mind I can see how it would play out. I’d open the window and say his name into the chilled air. I’d go to him. He’d turn. He’d try to say something but I’d stop him. I’d take his hand and lead him back through the window, back to my room, and then he’d take me in his arms. It’d be like my dream. He’d make it better. I could lean on him. It would be as easy, I think, as calling his name.

His back stiffens. Does he hear all these thoughts rattling around in my brain?

I back away from the window.

I tell myself that I don’t want to feel better. There should be no happiness or comfort in all of this. I want to be devastated. So I turn away from Christian and slip into the bathroom to change into my pajamas. I ignore Christian’s presence when I come out and he’s still here. He must be freezing out there, but I push the thought out of my head. I lie down on my bed, my back to the window, and the tears finally arrive, running down my face, into my ears, onto my pillow. I lie there for a long time, for hours maybe, and right as I’m about to finally drift to sleep I think I hear the flutter of Christian’s wings as he flies away.