Hallowed

Chapter 10 The Absence of Certainty

I close my physics book, where I’ve tried unsuccessfully to solve the same problem about the Heisenberg principle three times this morning. So much for good grades, I think. Who cares about grades, anyway? At least I’ve already applied to my colleges, even caved to Angela and applied to Stanford, which I still think is a long shot, regardless of what Mom says.

Maybe I shouldn’t even go to college. I mean, Jeffrey will turn sixteen about the time Mom dies, and even though he’s agreed to this whole Billy-the-legal-guardian thing, he’s going to need me here, too, right? I’m his only family.

I lie back on my bed and close my eyes. The days have started to blur together. Weeks have passed since Mom confirmed her death sentence. I go to school like nothing has changed. I come home. I do my homework. I keep showering and I brush my teeth and I carry on. We’ve had a few Angel Club meetings, but it doesn’t seem so important now. Jeffrey has stopped going altogether. I’ve stopped trying so hard to bring the glory, now that I understand that there’s not a lot I can do. I can’t save my mother. I can’t do anything but trudge through my semblance of a life like a zombie. Tucker and I have gone on double dates with Wendy and Jason, and I try to pretend everything’s fine, everything’s normal. But it’s like somebody has hit the pause button on my life.

My mom is dying. It’s hard to think about anything else. Some part of me still doesn’t believe it’s true.

Something smacks my window. I open my eyes, startled. A clump of snow slides down the glass. It takes me a second to compute: somebody threw a snowball at my window.

I hurry over and open the window as a second snowball comes sailing through the air. I have to duck at the last second so I don’t get beaned in the head.

“Hey!” I yell.

“Sorry.” It’s Christian, standing down in the yard. “I wasn’t aiming for you.”

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Trying to get your attention.”

I look past him toward the front of the house, where I see his shiny black truck parked in the driveway. “What do you want?”

“I’ve come to get you out of the house.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been holed up here all week, brooding,” he says, squinting up at me. “You need to get out. You need to have some fun.”

“And you’ve appointed yourself as the bringer of fun.”

He smiles. “I have.”

“So where are you taking me? Assuming, that is, that I’m crazy enough to go.”

“The mountain, of course.” The mountain. Like there’s only one. But when he says that my heart automatically starts to beat faster.

Because I know exactly what he means.

“Dust off your gear,” he says. “We’re going skiing.”

Okay, so I can’t say no to skiing. It’s my drug of choice. So that’s how I find myself, about an hour later, perched on the chairlift next to Christian, sucking on a cherry Jolly Rancher, dangling over a snowy slope watching skiers weave lines down the hill. It’s a rush being so high up, the cold air on my face and hearing the scrape of skis on snow. It’s heavenly.

“There it is,” says Christian, looking at me with something like admiration.

“There what is?”

“The smile. You always smile when you ski.”

“How do you know?” I challenge, even though I know it’s true.

“I watched you last year.”

“Yeah, well, when you race you do this funny grimace thing with your mouth.” He makes a shocked face. “Do not.”

“Do so. I watched you, too.”

The wheels rattle when our chair crosses a tower, and a few skiers call to each other below. I turn away from his seeking green eyes. I remember last year, when it seemed like a magical turn of fate when I ended up on the chairlift with him, able to talk to him, really talk to him, for the very first time.

Now I don’t want to talk.

He senses my withdrawal, or maybe he reads it.

“You can talk to me, Clara.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to read my mind?”

His expression clouds. “I don’t just scan your mind whenever I want, Clara.”

“But you could.”

He shrugs. “My power’s unpredictable when it comes to you.”

“It’s amazing that anything in your life could be unpredictable,” I say.

He looks away and knocks snow off his skis. We watch it tumble down to the ground.

“Reading minds isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. I mean, how would you like it, walking down the hall at school, knowing exactly what everyone thinks about you?”

“That would suck.”

“But with you, it’s different,” he says. “It’s like, sometimes you just talk to me, even if you don’t know you’re doing it. I don’t know how to block that out. I don’t really want to.”

“Well, it’s not fair. I don’t ever get to know what you’re thinking. You’re Mr. Mysterious who knows more about everything than I do, but you don’t tell me.” He watches my expression for a moment, then says, “Most of the time what you’re thinking about, when it comes to me, is that you want me to go away.” I let out a breath. “Christian.”

“If you want to know what’s going on in my head, ask me,” he says. “But I get the distinct impression that you don’t want to know.”

“Hey, I want to know everything,” I protest, even though that’s not completely true.

Because I don’t want to understand what our future would have been if I hadn’t chosen Tucker. I don’t want to feel what he always makes me feel: confused, scared, excited, guilty, yearning, aware of myself and everything I feel and he feels, like he has the power to magically switch on my empathy, even when it’s true — I don’t want to know. I don’t want to need him.

“I want to know what my purpose was supposed to be, for crying out loud,” I go on.

“Why can’t somebody just tell me: here’s your purpose, so go do it? Would that be too much to ask? Or where my brother was that night in the woods? Or about Angela’s secret boyfriend? I also want to know why a Black Wing is in love with my mother, and what her purpose was, and why she still, even when she’s dying, won’t tell me anything about it, and if you tell me it must be for my protection or my own good or something, I think I will push you off this chairlift. And is all this some kind of punishment for not fulfilling my purpose? Which brings me back to what, exactly, is my freaking purpose? Because I would really, really like to know.” Christian shakes his head. “Wow.”

“I told you.”

“So Angela has a secret boyfriend. .,” he says.

“Oh crap, I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. Way to go,” he adds with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Although now I’m pretty curious.”

I groan. “I’m so not good with secrets.”

He glances over at me. “I don’t think you’re being punished.”

“You don’t?”

“Hey, I don’t even know what my purpose is,” he says, and then his voice softens. “But I do know that if you hadn’t had your vision about the fire, you never would have come to Wyoming. We wouldn’t be sitting on this chairlift right now. If your mom had told you about the congregation earlier, you would have been at the last meeting, the one I went to, and we would have found out about each other before the fire. Everything would have been different. Right?” Yes, it would have been different. We would have known that we weren’t supposed to save each other. We would have known that our meeting in the forest was supposed to be something else. And where did that leave us? Would I have still flown off to save Tucker, knowing that?

“It feels like a test.” I lean back in the chair and look up at the clouds. “Like it’s all one long final examination, and now this vision with the cemetery, it’s the next question. Although it doesn’t seem like I’m supposed to do anything. At least, with my fire, I knew I was supposed to do something.”

“What were you supposed to do?” he asks in an amused voice.

“Save you. Only I wasn’t actually supposed to do that, was I?”

“That’s the hardest part,” he says. “The absence of certainty.” The phrase has a nice ring to it. It could be the motto of my life.

“So if it’s a test, what do you think the answer is?” he asks.

You, I think, the answer is supposed to be you, but I don’t say that. I guess I’m still fighting my purpose, even now that I know it’s my mom dying and not Tucker. It still feels like I am being asked to choose between Christian and Tucker.

“No clue,” I answer finally.

“Right. So,” he says. “Is there something you want to ask me, specifically? I can’t promise that I can give you a good answer, but I’ll try.” I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Did you. . love Kay?” He looks away, toward the valley and the town below, knocks his skis together again, gently. Resents me for asking.

Sorry, I think at him.

“No, it’s a fair question,” he says. Sighs. “Yes. I loved her.”

“Then why did you break up with her?”

“Because she was going to find out about me.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

He leans back in the chair too and exhales out his nose. “I’ve had it hammered into my head since Day One that we shouldn’t tell humans. It’s bad for both parties, my uncle says. And he’s right — it’s impossible to have a relationship with a human, a real relationship, anyway, without them noticing there’s something off about you. Once they do, then what?” Suddenly I think about my dad, how he moved to the other side of the country after he and Mom split, which in retrospect seems extreme, although it now occurs to me, maybe he found out she wasn’t normal. Maybe that’s why he abandoned us. Maybe Christian’s uncle is right. Maybe any relationship with a human is doomed.

A corner of Christian’s mouth turns up. “I guess we could pick really dumb people to be with.”

“Kay’s not dumb,” I say. She might be a royal queen bee you-know-what, she might play dumb in class sometimes, but she’s no dummy.

“No, Kay’s not dumb,” he agrees. “And eventually she would have made it impossible not to tell her. She was going to get hurt.”

I think of the night Tucker found out, his hounding questions, the crazy assumptions he made. He wouldn’t relent until I revealed myself.

“I get it,” I say quietly, looking down at my gloves.

“So how much does Tucker know?” he asks. “Because he’s not dumb, either.” It embarrasses me that Christian was such a good little angel-blood and did the right thing and kept the right secrets while I so obviously did not. Like a lovesick puppy, compulsively, selfishly, I told a human everything. I put everyone at risk, especially Tucker.

“That much, huh?” Christian says.

“I’ve told him. . a lot.”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

His eyes when he looks at me now are about ten degrees colder than they were a minute ago.

“I told you. I’m not good with secrets,” I say again.

“Well, you did keep one thing from him, and aren’t you happy you did?” He’s talking about my dream, of course. How it turned out to be Mom’s grave, and not Tucker’s, that I was seeing.

“Yeah,” I admit, “although I don’t know if happy is the right word for it.”

“I know.” He puts his gloves back on, claps his hands together, which startles me into looking up. The chair is quickly approaching the top of the mountain.

“So serious talk is officially over. I brought you here to have fun.” He adjusts his ski poles. I do the same. The chair comes up to the top of the hill. I put my ski tips up the way Christian taught me last year. The chair levels out, and I stand up and push off, brush shoulders playfully with Christian as I slip easily by him. I’m a blue square girl now, not a newbie to the skiing thing anymore.

“My little prodigy,” he says with mock pride. He pulls his goggles down over his eyes.

Smiles wickedly. “Let’s do it!”

I hardly think about my mom the entire morning. Christian and I braid patterns down the face of the slope, weaving back and forth, occasionally invading each other’s space, cutting each other off, playing around like kids. Sometimes we race, and Christian lets me get ahead a bit before he uses his super-racer powers to leave me in the snow, but he never goes very far without me. He skis at my pace, to my skill level. I appreciate that.

Then he takes me to this powder run he says he loves. We stand at the top, looking down.

The sign posted at the side says this is a black diamond: not just difficult, but extra-super, you-might-die-if-you-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing difficult. I stare down at it with wide eyes.

“Oh come on, don’t chicken out now,” Christian practically dares me. “You’re an angel-blood. You’re virtually indestructible, remember? This will be a snap, trust me.” I never did react well to being called a chicken.

Without saying another word I launch myself down the slope, whooping as I go. It’s a black diamond for a reason, I find. The hill is killer steep, for one thing. And it’s covered in nearly waist-deep fluffy powder that feels like a ton of concrete settling over my skis. Within about thirty seconds I’m completely out of control. In less than a minute I crash and burn. Total wipeout.

Christian whooshes up to me, spraying snow.

“Just so you know, this is the last time I ever trust you,” I say.

“But you’re so cute all covered in snow.”

“Shut up and help me find my ski.”

We search through the powder for a while, but don’t locate my missing ski. After ten fruitless minutes I’m convinced that the mountain has eaten it.

“Thank you so much, Christian.”

“Don’t worry, they might find it — come summer,” he says with a snicker.

He doesn’t expect the snowball I fling at him. It explodes into powdery bits on his chest.

“Hey!” he protests, looking down.

I lob another one at him. This one nails him right in the head. Whoops. “Oh, sorry, seriously. I wasn’t aiming at your. .” My voice trails off as he calmly sticks his poles in the snow, reaches down to remove his skis, which he then also thrusts upright in the snowbank.

“What are you doing?”

“Preparing,” he replies.

“For what?”

“For this,” he says, and then he yells and runs at me.

I scream as he picks me up and tosses me into the snow.

“Not in my coat!” I cry as he stuffs a handful of snow inside my collar. Icy water trickles down my neck. I grab a handful of snow and smear it into his face, pushing back his goggles, then use a burst of my angel strength to hurl him off me, flipping him onto his back and throwing my legs over his. He tries in vain to stop me, but I manage to pin down his arms and get a few clumps of snow into the neck of his jacket. I crow in victory.

“Time to surrender,” I laugh.

He smiles up at me. “Okay,” he says.

Oh.

I stop. We’re both breathing heavy, snow clinging to our hair, melting on our clothes. I stare down at him. Snow floats around us. His eyes are flooded with golden warmth. He’s letting me do this. He’s as strong as I am, or even stronger, but he’s stopped fighting me.

He sucks in his bottom lip for a second, the quickest, tiniest motion, to moisten it.

All I would have to do is close my eyes and let go.

Try it, he says without words, so softly it’s like the brush of a feather in my mind. Let’s find out what’s next.

But there’s hesitation in him too; I feel it.

I sling myself off him awkwardly, and do my best to pretend that what almost happened didn’t almost happen. He sits up and starts brushing snow from his shoulders. Then from the top of the hill a voice suddenly booms down on us. Ski patrol. “Everybody all right down there?”

“Yeah,” Christian calls back. “We’re fine.” He looks at me and his expression suddenly changes. “I found it,” he says, reaching into the snow beside him. “It was here all along.”

“What?” I ask a bit dazedly.

“Your ski.”

That and something else.

“You look like you’ve been having fun.” This from Tucker, who I happen to bump into in the lodge at lunchtime. I feel my cheeks burn, and for a moment I can hardly take a breath, although I try to act calm. Christian, thankfully, is off getting us some food.

“Yep, fun, fun, fun,” I finally respond. “I think I know what I’m doing now. On the slopes, I mean. I’m solidly blue square. Not sure I’m up to black diamonds yet.” He grins. “I’m glad you finally decided to come up. You hardly ever use that fancy season pass your mom bought you at Christmas.” This is a serious accusation, coming from him. A season pass is more than two thousand smackers. Not using it is like tossing money into the fireplace. It’s a crime.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been kind of preoccupied lately.”

He immediately shifts gears into super-supportive-boyfriend mode.

“Everything going okay?” he asks. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s all right. Having a harder time getting around, I guess.”

“Anything I can do, you holler,” he says. “I’m here for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to ski later? I’m teaching Tiny Tot lessons until four, but then we can carve up this mountain. I bet I could still teach you a thing or two.”

“That sounds great, but. .”

“You probably have to get home to your mom,” he assumes, his eyes sympathetic.

“No, I. .”

Christian picks this minute to appear behind Tucker, carrying a tray.

“Sorry that took so long. I put everything on it,” he says, nodding at my cheeseburger. “I didn’t know what you liked.”

Tucker turns, looks at Christian, looks at the food, looks at Christian again. “She doesn’t like onions,” he says. He turns back to me. “You came up here with him?”

“Uh, he asked me and I thought it sounded like a good idea. I kind of needed to get out of the house for a while.”

Tucker nods absently, and I’m suddenly aware of how my hair is still wet from the snow melting into it, my cheeks flushed, my skin bright, and it’s not just from the cold.

Get a grip, Clara, I tell myself. Nothing happened. You and Christian are friends, and Tucker gets that, and it’s okay to go skiing with your friend. Nothing happened.

Sorry, Christian says in my head. I’m getting you in trouble, aren’t I?

No. It’s all good, I reply, mortified that he can hear me thinking right now, picking out the guilty thoughts from my brain.

“I was a bit afraid to ask her, frankly,” Christian says to Tucker.

Tucker crosses his arms. “Is that right?”

“I went skiing with her last year, and she almost killed us both.” Hey, I protest silently . I did not almost kill us. Don’t tell him that.

“Come on, don’t bother denying it,” Christian aims at me.

“It was my first time on a chairlift. Cut me some slack,” I shoot back.

“Well, she was just telling me that she’s getting so much better now,” Tucker says.

“I took her up to Dog Face,” Christian tells him. “You should have seen the wipeout she had. Killer.”

“Oh yeah? I didn’t know she ever fell,” Tucker says.

It’s like watching a train wreck, this conversation.

“Partial yard sale,” Christian says. “Biffed it big-time.”

“Hello? I’m standing right here.” I punch him on the arm.

“It was pretty damn—”

“It was not funny,” I cut him off. “It was cold.”

“You’re supposed to be immune to cold,” he says. “It’s good practice.”

“Right. Uh-huh.” I try not to smile. “Practice.”

“Sounds hilarious,” Tucker says. He glances at his watch. “Okay, so I have to go. Some of us have to work.” He leans in and kisses my cheek, which is a bit awkward with the ski boots and the full winter gear and all, but we manage. “So, meet me at four at the bottom of the Moose Creek quad? I can take you home, if Chris here doesn’t mind.”

“No problem,” Christian says like it doesn’t bother him at all. “At four o’clock, she’s all yours. That still leaves us what, three good hours of skiing?”

“Great,” Tucker says. Then he says to me, “Try not to hurt yourself, okay?” Tucker hardly talks on the drive home.

“You okay?” I ask him, which I know is the dumbest question ever, but I can’t help myself. The silence is killing me.

Suddenly he pulls over to the side of the road and puts the old farm car in park.

“You finish each other’s sentences.” He turns and stares at me with quiet accusation in his eyes. “You and Christian. You finish each other’s sentences.”

“Tuck. It’s no big—”

“Yes, it is big. It’s more than that. It’s like you can read each other’s minds.” I put my hand on his arm, search for the right words.

“He was making you smile,” he says softly, refusing to look into my eyes again.

“We’re friends,” I say.

His jaw tightens.

“We’re connected,” I admit. “We’ve always been kind of connected. It’s because of the visions. But we’re just friends.”

“Do you hang out with him, as friends? Outside of that Angel Club thing of Angela’s?”

“A few times.”

“A few times,” he repeats slowly. “Like how many? Three? Four?” I make a mental count of the times he’s shown up on the roof of my house. “Maybe five.

Six. I don’t keep count, Tuck.”

“Six,” he says. “See now, that’s more than a few. I’d say that counts as ‘quite a few.’”

“Tucker—”

“And you didn’t tell me because. .”

I sigh. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be—” I can’t say it.

“Jealous,” he fills in. “I’m not.”

He leans back against the seat, closes his eyes for a minute, then blows out a long breath.

“Actually, you know what? I’m crazy jealous.”

He opens his eyes and looks at me with a kind of puzzled amusement. “Wow. I hate being that guy. All afternoon I’ve been about a horse hair from going all Bruce Banner and Hulk-smashing a locker. I bet that’s attractive, right?” I can’t tell if he’s serious, so I act like he’s joking. “Actually, it’s kind of cute, in a caveman sort of way. Green is definitely your color.”

He looks at me steadily. “You can’t blame me, though. You had the hots for Prescott all last year.”

“But that was because I thought he was my. .” Again, I can’t say it.

“Your destiny,” Tucker says. “Why does that not make me feel any better?”

“See, now who’s finishing my sentences? He and I are friends,” I insist again. “I admit I was a bit obsessed by the idea of Christian last year. But it was an idea. I didn’t even know him.

You’re the real deal.”

He laughs. “I’m the real deal,” he scoffs, but I can tell he likes it.

“Christian is my past. You’re my future.”

Now I’m talking in clichés.

“You’re my right now,” I say quickly, and that’s not any better.

The side of his mouth lifts in an attempt at a smile. “Sheesh, Carrots, did you just say I’m your Mr. Right Now?”

“Sorry.”

“Man, do you ever have a way with words. Be still my heart.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“So you and Prescott are friends. Friendly, friendly friends. That’s fine. I can be cool with that. But tell me one thing: did anything happen between you and Christian, for real, not in your visions or what your people want from you or anything like that, but in real life, anything I should know about? Even before we started dating?”

Uh. . I think we’ve established that I’m not the best liar. Most of the time, when confronted by the choice between fessing up and concocting a whopper, even if it’s for a good reason, like protecting my family or keeping the world from finding out about the angel stuff, I freeze, my face gets all wooden, my mouth gets dry. In other words, I choke. Which is why I surprise myself right then by looking straight up into Tucker’s vulnerable blue eyes, those eyes that say he loves me but he wants to know the truth, no matter how much it hurts, and I say in this perfectly calm and steady voice: “No. Nothing happened.” And he believes me.

I feel sorrow then. Just a flash, there and gone in the space of a few heartbeats, so fast that Tucker doesn’t notice the single tear that slips down my face.

This time I don’t even consider that it might be a Black Wing. It’s me.

I brush it away.