Living the Dream (5 page)

I leaned forward to get a better look. Cody had jet black hair, pale brown skin and that bland expression teenagers adopt to hide their worries. We saw her returning the dogs to houses that looked like millionaires’ mansions, then jogging back through the super-smart part of Potomac village.

Cody’s home was in an annex attached to another of Potomac’s super-size millionaire pads. The tiny cottage was painted pale primrose yellow with slate-grey shutters. One of those cool American post-boxes you see in movies was nailed to the gate. Inside the cottage everything was crazily mismatched. I thought the vibey colours and vintage patterns were fun and funky.

Cody herself, however, was not a vibey colour girl. After she’d changed out of her dog-walking clothes, everything she put on was in a different shade of grey. (Who knew there were so many!) I absolutely loved her style though: short tops layered over longer tops, a short skirt over leggings, thick socks under big basketball boots which Cody, or somebody, had hand-painted with teeny skulls. I wasn’t sure the skulls were a healthy sign.

Cody went to find her mum who was in her dressing gown looking out at the falling leaves, sipping her morning coffee.

“Remember you need to eat some food before you take your tablets,” Cody said anxiously. “You do know black coffee doesn’t count? Has Elliot left already? The car’s gone.”

“Elliot’s her mum’s boyfriend,” Sam explained. “He’s Mr Billmeier’s chauffeur and general dogsbody.”

Cody grabbed a bagel from the bread bin, slathered on cream cheese and pointedly gave half to her mum.

“Who’s talking about breakfast!” her mum joked. “You can’t survive at school on half a bagel either.” Her smile was bright, but kind of shaky. You could feel the effort it was taking for her to behave like a normal mum.

“No time for breakfast,” Cody said. “I got two detentions for being late this month already.” She kissed her mum’s cheek. “See you later. And EAT, or there’ll be BIG trouble!”

We sped through Agency film footage showing Cody at her high school, where she seemed like a totally different person - shy, aloof, somehow set apart from the giggly teenage girls in their pastel sweaters. Cody did have one friend called Sheridan. She wore a studded belt through her skin-tight jeans, printed with the word MISFITS. Her dyed red hair fell over her eyes in that moody emo style and her sooty-black eye make-up made her look just a
teensy
bit like the Undead. Their friendship seemed a bit one-way to me, with Cody listening to Sheridan’s endless boyfriend troubles.

We fast-forwarded to Cody’s birthday, when she and her mum went hiking on a local nature trail. Later Cody bought them lunch at The Old Angler’s Inn. They sat out on the deck where it was sunny. Her mum sparkled desperately all through the meal. It was painful to watch.

She isn’t well
, I thought.
That’s why she can’t pay for the birthday lunch
.
That’s why Cody works as a dog walker to pay the bills.

Later Cody and her mum curled up by a cosy wood fire in their cottage, watching a movie. Then Elliot, the boyfriend, came back, wanting to watch the Washington Redskins play so Cody’s mum quickly switched channels.

Because it was her birthday Elliot had brought Cody a tub of her fave Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. On balance, I thought I preferred Elliot’s dog, a young lab called Buddy, to Elliot.

“Hey, Julia,” Elliot said with his mouth full. “Got a job opportunity for you. The help quit up at the house, and the Billmeiers have a big party coming up. I told Mr Billmeier you’d help out.”

Julia flushed all the way down to her neck. “Oh, I don’t—”

“It’s just house cleaning, Jools,” he said impatiently. “Absolutely no stress involved and we need the cash. You don’t seem to realise, but those doctors’ bills don’t pay themselves.”

Julia’s eyes went very bright. “Of course I know that. I - I’ll go see the Billmeiers tomorrow.”

“Mum,” said Cody. “You don’t have to—”

“No, Elliot’s right!” Cody’s mum was sitting bolt upright like she was about to take an exam. “It’s a job opportunity, like Elliot says, and I’ll make the most of it. I keep our house nice, don’t I? I’ll keep the Billmeiers’ house nice too,
no problemo
!”

Elliot gave her a sudden dark look. “Don’t go letting me down now, Jools, OK?”

Michael paused the film, explaining what I’d half guessed. Cody’s mum had been in and out of hospital most of Cody’s life. Julia was what doctors call “bipolar”: This meant she had extreme, totally uncontrollable mood swings. Julia’s “highs” were super-fun, at least to start with. Every meal was a feast, every day was a party, until the party vibe got too wild and Julia spun out of control, crashing down into depression. In her depressed state, she often couldn’t take care of herself, let alone look after Cody. Then she’d be put on some new medication and for a while she’d be OK again.

Once she took on the cleaning job for the Billmeiers, Julia grew increasingly fragile. We watched clips of a tense Thanksgiving. Cody’s mum tried to cook a huge turkey with the traditional pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes and whatever, but only ended up burning herself and bursting into floods of tears. You’d think Elliot might have helped, but he just stormed out.

Cody smoothed antiseptic cream on Julia’s burns, put her to bed still sobbing, then went to stack the dishwasher. She spent the rest of Thanksgiving watching TV all by herself, except for Buddy the labrador who rested his head on her lap with an adoring expression.

Suddenly her mum appeared, protecting her head in her arms as if she was dodging flying missiles. “Baby, could you put your hands on my head?” she begged. “It always helps when you put your hands on my head.”

“I’m coming, Mom,” Cody said quickly. “Go back to bed and I’ll be right there.”

Julia hung on to her sanity by a thread until the first week of spring when she had a total collapse and was admitted to hospital. Elliot wasn’t willing to take responsibility for Cody, so she was taken into care.

In the next clip Cody was perched on a bolted-down plastic chair in an institutional-type waiting room, looking like the survivor of a bomb-blast, absolutely shell-shocked. A tired-looking woman was with her, presumably her social worker.

Cody kept saying, “When can I see my mom? Can I at least call her?”

Michael paused the movie on Cody’s frozen face.

“Don’t they have friends or relatives who can take her in?” I asked, dismayed. But Julia had cut herself off from her family, and her friends had too many problems of their own to take on a teenage girl.

“Cody has a guardian angel though?”

“At this present moment, no,” Michael admitted. “In fact finding a guardian angel for Cody is proving to be something of a challenge.” I was shocked to the core when they told me Cody had worked her way through FIVE guardian angels.

“We’re looking for a permanent GA obviously,” said Sam. “But Cody has quite special cosmic needs.”

“She does?” I said, surprised.

Michael’s assistant sailed on without actually explaining. “So it’s even more vital we get the right match or we could end up doing more harm than good. We’ve got Cody on twenty-four hour Angel Watch, but what she needs is one-to-one cosmic support.”

I looked back at the pinched, wide-eyed face on the screen. Humans react to stress in different ways. Some fight, some take flight; other people, like Cody Fortuna, retreat deep inside themselves, trying to protect what little they have left.

“I’ll do it.” The words jumped out of my mouth. I wasn’t even sure it was me who said it. I had that tiny hot potato sensation in the centre of my chest I get when Helix is online.

Michael frowned. “Before you race to sign up there’s something you should know.” He gave Sam a glance I couldn’t read.

“Cody Fortuna thinks she’s under a curse,” Sam said.

Lola came running up to me as I hurried out into the sunshine. “How’d it go?”

I beamed at her. “Good! I’m leaving tomorrow!”

Lola was gobsmacked. “You’re leaving to save the world?”

We stared at each other, confused. A lot can happen to an angel in an hour. Completely distracted by Cody’s troubles, I’d forgotten why I’d gone to see Michael in the first place!

“I got totally sidetracked!” I admitted sheepishly. “Sam and Michael were concerned about an American girl who’s been taken into care. It turned out the poor kid didn’t even have a guardian angel. I said I’d be a stand-in until they get her a permanent GA. I forgot all about saving the planet. I’m a total birdbrain.”

Instead of giving me a hard time, Lola shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. Sounds like you didn’t have a choice. This girl’s obviously overdue some cosmic support.”

“She hasn’t got any other kind going, that’s for sure,” I sighed. “Have you got a minute, Lollie?”

Lola checked her watch. “I’ll give you ten,” she said with a slight smirk, “then I have a study date in the library with Brice.”

We found a sunny spot on the library steps. Michael and Sam had filled me in on a few more biographical details before I left so I shared some of Cody’s unusually troubled life with Lola.

Cody’s dad, Martin Fortuna, was part Navajo Indian. For the first two years of Cody’s life the three of them lived in Tucson, Arizona, a few miles from the Navajo reservation where Martin grew up. Julia met Cody’s dad when he walked into the tiny art gallery where she worked. It was love at first sight. Julia told her friends that Martin was her lucky charm. She felt so safe with him, she said she knew she’d never have another bad spell as long as she lived.

In the early days of their marriage Martin often drove Cody and her mum out to the reservation to hang out with his relatives. But when Cody was two and a half, something triggered one of Julia’s bad spells. When Julia got ill, she often thought people were plotting against her. Someone would say something she didn’t quite catch, nothing to do with Julia at all, but her mind would seize on it as proof that her worst fears were true. Somehow she got it into her head that her Navajo in-laws were jealous of her and actually wanted to harm her and her child. She was so terrified she immediately made plans to leave for Washington DC, hundreds of miles away.

Martin found out and the couple had an ugly fight. Julia screamed at her husband that his “retarded relatives” would never see their child again. A distraught Martin yelled at her in Navajo as his wife and little daughter drove away for ever. From then on, each time they got thrown out of their lodgings, or the car got a flat tyre, or she lost another job, Julia said it was because Cody’s father had cursed them. In the past three years Cody and her mum had moved house EIGHT times.

“If it was an actual bona fide curse, it’s too late for Martin to take it back. He died in a car smash a few weeks later.” I took a breath. “Am I mad, Lollie? For taking her on, I mean? This kid’s burned her way through five guardian angels. Maybe she really is under a curse?”

“Remember when we did curses in Dark Studies?” Lola asked. “The teacher said when someone’s under a curse, it’s like they’re trapped in a circle of darkness they can’t step out of, however hard they try.”

I gasped. “That is SO totally Cody! Except her circle is like, pure grey. Seriously, Lola, she has an entire wardrobe full of grey clothes.”

“Which makes you the perfect guardian angel for Cody!” For the first time since she returned from her mission, Lola’s eyes had their old sassy sparkle.

“It does?” I said doubtfully.

“It totally does! You’re everything Cody has forgotten how to be. Positive, sparkly, vibey…”

I threw my arms around her. “Lollie, thank you!”

“What did I do?”

“Everything!” I told her.

It was true. Thanks to Lola, I suddenly knew what I had to do. I had to be the angel version of Cody: what Cody
could
be, what she hopefully
would
be, when her grey world finally exploded into fabulous Technicolor.

I was due to leave first thing tomorrow. That meant I only had a few hours to put my plan into action.

“Gotta go!” I told Lola urgently. “I need a pair of hand-painted basketball boots for my mission.”

Lola gave a surprised laugh. “Any special design?”

“Whatever’s the opposite of skulls,” I told her.

Chapter Eight

W
hen I walked back into my room, loaded with carrier bags, I gave a huge sigh of relief. It was just my normal room. No wall-to-wall books, and not a trace of Ambriel.

I started unwrapping my purchases, deciding which to pack in my flight bag and which ones to wear the next day. I hadn’t been shopping, not proper shopping, for aeons and I’d bought a teensy bit more than basketball boots.

Nine times out of ten, angels go absolutely unnoticed by humans. A good celestial agent shouldn’t draw attention to herself. She definitely shouldn’t do anything obviously angelly. (For instance, appearing to a scared little child and announcing: “For lo, I am the angel Melanie!” to use a v. embarrassing example from my first mission.) Our job is simply to help humans wake up and remember why they’re on Earth. We’re just like the cosmic catalyst or whatever.