Unearthly (9 page)

“Didn't I see you at Pizza Hut the other day?” he asks.

He had to bring that up. Heat rushes to my face. He could be looking at my hair right now thinking Bozo, Bozo the clown. Why oh why didn't I wear a stupid hat over my stupid hair?

“Yeah, maybe,” I stammer. “I mean, I was there, I—maybe you saw me. I guess you saw me, right? I mean, I saw you.”

“You should have come over and said hello.”

“I guess I should have.” I glance down at the ground rushing by beneath us, hoping for a topic of conversation. He's wearing fancy black skis with a kind of curve to them, which seem a lot different than mine.

“You don't snowboard?” I ask.

“I can board,” he says. “But I ski more. I'm on the race team. You want a Jolly Rancher?”

“What?”

He sticks his poles under his thigh and takes off his gloves. Then he unzips his jacket pocket, reaches in, and takes out a handful of hard candies.

“I always keep these in my pockets for skiing,” he says.

My mouth is suddenly incredibly dry. “Sure, I'll have one.”

“Red hot or cherry?”

“Red hot,” I say.

He unwraps a candy and pops it in his mouth. Then he holds another out to me. I can't even pick it up with my heavy glove.

“I'll get it.” He unwraps the candy and leans toward me. I try to swipe my hair out of my face.

“Open up,” he says, holding up the candy.

I open my mouth. Very carefully, he lays the candy on my tongue. Our eyes meet for a moment. When I close my mouth, he leans back against the chair.

“Thanks,” I say around the candy. I cough. The candy is surprisingly hot. I wish I'd asked for cherry.

“You're welcome.” He puts his gloves back on.

“So do you have to practice skiing every weekend if you're on the race team?” I ask.

“I come up here on the weekends to ski for fun, mostly, and races, when they hold them here. During the week, I practice nights up at Snow King.”

“Wow, you can ski at night?”

He laughs.

“Sure. They have lights set up along the runs. I love it at night, actually. It's not so crowded. It's quiet. You can see the lights from town. It's beautiful.”

“Sounds beautiful.”

Neither of us says anything for a while. He knocks his skis together gently, sending a shower of snow down onto the hill below us. It's surreal, dangling in midair with him on the side of a mountain, seeing him up close, hearing his voice.

“Snow King's that ski area right inside Jackson Hole?” I ask.

“Yeah. It has only five runs, but it's a good hill to practice on. And when we race for the State Championships the kids from school can watch us from the parking lot.”

I'm about to say something about wanting to see him race, but that's when I notice that the chair is approaching a little hut on the side of the mountain, and the skiers are getting off.

“Oh crap.”

“What?” asks Christian.

“I don't know how to get off this thing.”

“You don't—”

“This is my first day skiing,” I say, panic rising in my throat. The little hut is getting closer and closer. “What do I do?”

“Keep the tips of your skis up,” he says quickly. “We'll come up onto the mound. When it flattens out, stand up and get over to the side. You have to do it pretty fast, to get out of the way of the people coming behind you.”

“Oh man. I don't know if this was such a great idea.”

“Relax,” he says. “I'll help you.”

The chair is seconds away from the little hut. Every muscle in my body feels tense.

“Put your poles on,” he instructs.

You can do this,
I tell myself, sticking my fingers through the slots in the ski poles and gripping them tightly.
You're an angel-blood. Stronger, faster, smarter. Use it, for once.

“Tips up,” says Christian.

I lift my skis. We skim up a short embankment and then, just like he said, we slide onto level ground.

“Stand up!” orders Christian.

I struggle to my feet. The chair hits me in the calves, nudging me forward.

“Now push yourself over to the side,” he says, already skiing away to the left. I try to follow him, planting my poles in the snow and pushing with all my strength. Too late I realize that he meant for me to go to the right while he went left. He turns to check how I'm doing just as I shoot toward him, already off balance. My skis slip on top of his. I flail, and one of my arms catches his shoulder.

“Whoa!” he yells, trying to steady himself, but there's no way. We slide for a ways and then go down in a heap.

“I am so sorry,” I say. I'm facedown on top of him. My red-hot Jolly Rancher is lying next to his head in the snow. His hat and goggles are missing. My skis have come off and my poles are gone. I struggle to get off him, but I can't seem to get my feet under me.

“Hold still,” he says firmly.

I stop moving. He puts his arms around me and rolls us gently to one side. Then he reaches down, pops off the ski that's still under my leg, and rolls away from me. I lie on my back in the snow, wanting to dig myself a hole and crawl into it for the rest of the school year. Possibly forever. I close my eyes.

“You okay?” he says.

I open my eyes. He's leaning over me, his face close to mine. I can smell the cherry candy on his breath. Behind him a cloud shifts from in front of the sun, the sky brightening in that way it has of opening up. I suddenly feel aware of everything: my heart pumping blood through my veins, the snow slowly beginning to melt under my body, the needles on the trees shifting in the breeze, the mixed smell of pine and Christian's cologne and something that could be ski wax, the rattling of the chairs as they pass over the poles of the ski lift.

And Christian, with hat hair, laughing at me with his eyes, a breath away.

I don't think of the fire then, or that he's my purpose. I don't think about saving him. I think, What would it be like to kiss him?

“I'm fine.”

“Here.” He brushes a strand of my hair out of my face, his bare hand skimming my cheek. “That was fun,” he says. “Haven't done that in a while.”

At first I think he means the thing with my hair, but then I realize he means falling.

“I guess I'm going to have to practice the chairlift thing,” I say.

He helps me sit up.

“Maybe a little,” he says. “You did great for a first timer, though. If I hadn't gotten in your way you totally would have made it.”

“Right. So you're the problem.”

“Totally.” He glances up at the guy sitting in the little hut, who's talking into a phone, probably calling the ski police to come drag me off the mountain.

“She's okay, Jim,” Christian calls to the man. Then he locates my skis and poles, which luckily haven't gone very far.

“Were you wearing a hat?” he asks, finding his own and tugging it back onto his head. He readjusts his goggles on top of it. I shake my head, then reach up and gingerly touch my hair, which has once again rejected the ponytail elastic and hangs down in long strands around my shoulders, clumped with snow.

“No,” I answer. “I, no, I didn't have a hat.”

“They say ninety percent of your body heat escapes through your head,” he says.

“I'll try to remember that.”

He lines up my skis in front of me and kneels to help me step into them. I hold on to his shoulder for balance.

“Thanks,” I murmur, looking down at him.

Once again, my hero. And here I'm supposed to be the one saving him.

“No problem,” he says, looking up. His eyes narrow, like he's studying my face. A snowflake lands on his cheek and melts. His expression changes, as if he suddenly remembered something. He gets up and snaps into his own skis quickly.

“Over that direction there's a beginner's run, something not too steep,” he says, pointing behind me. “It's called Pooh Bear.”

“Oh, great.” My sign is a green circle.

“I'd stay to help but I'm already late for running the race course farther up the mountain,” he says. “Do you think you'll be okay getting down?”

“Sure,” I say quickly. “I was doing fine on the bunny hill. I didn't fall once today. Until now, that is. How do you go farther up the mountain?”

“There's another chair, down there.” He gestures to where, sure enough, another bigger chairlift is humming away, taking people up the side of an impossibly steep-looking rise. “And another one, after that.”

“Crazy,” I say. “We could go all the way to the top.”

“I could. But it's not for beginners.”

The moment is definitely over.

“Right. Well, thanks again,” I say awkwardly. “For everything.”

“Don't mention it.” He's already moving away, skiing his way toward the other chairlift. “See you around, Clara,” he calls over his shoulder.

I watch him ski down to the other chairlift and recline gracefully into the seat when it comes. The chair sways back and forth as it rises through the snowy air up the side of the mountain. I watch until his green jacket disappears.

“Yes, you will,” I whisper.

It's a big step, our first real conversation. At the thought my chest swells with an emotion so powerful I feel tears prick my eyes. It's embarrassing.

It's something like hope.

Chapter 7
Flock Together

Monday around seven thirtyish, I drive to the Pink Garter to meet Angela Zerbino. The theater is completely dark. I knock but no one comes to the door. I get out my cell and then realize that I never got Angela's phone number. I knock again, harder. The door opens so fast that I jump. A short, wiry-thin woman with long, black hair peers up at me. She looks irritated.

“We're closed,” she says.

“I'm here to see Angela.”

Her eyebrows shoot up.

“You're a friend of Angela's?”

“Uh—”

“Come in,” says the woman, holding the door open.

It's uncomfortably quiet inside, and it smells like popcorn and sawdust. I look around. An ancient-looking cash register sits on top of a glass snack counter with rows of candy lined up inside. The walls are decorated with framed posters of the theater's past productions, which are mostly cowboy themed.

“Nice place,” I say, and then I bump into a pole with a velvet rope and nearly send the whole line of them crashing to the floor. I manage to right the pole before it starts a chain reaction. I cringe and look at the woman, who's watching me with a strange, unreadable expression. She looks like Angela except for the eyes, which are dark brown instead of Angela's amber color, and she has deep wrinkles around her mouth that make her look older than her body suggests. She reminds me of a Gypsy in one of those old movies.

“I'm Clara Gardner,” I say nervously. “I'm doing a project with Angela for school.”

She nods. I notice that she's wearing a large gold cross around her neck, the kind that has the body of Jesus draped across it.

“You can wait back here,” she says. “She won't be long.”

I follow her through an archway into the theater itself. It's pitch-black. I hear her moving off to one side; then a pool of light appears on the stage.

“Have a seat anywhere,” she says.

Once my eyes adjust, I see that the theater is filled with round tables covered in white tablecloths. I wander over to the nearest one and sit down.

“When do you think Angela might get here?” I ask, but the woman is gone.

I've been waiting for maybe five minutes, completely creeped out by this point, when Angela comes bursting through a side door.

“Wow, sorry,” she says. “Orchestra went late.”

“What do you play?”

“Violin.”

It's easy to imagine her with a violin tucked under her chin, sawing away on some mournful Romanian tune.

“Do you live here?” I ask.

“Yep. In an apartment upstairs.”

“Just your mom and you?”

She studies her hands. “Yes.”

“I don't live with my dad either,” I say. “Just my mom and brother.”

She kind of examines me for a couple seconds. “Why did you move here?” she asks. She sits down in the chair across from mine and stares at me with solemn honey-colored eyes. “I assume that you didn't actually burn your old school to the ground.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

She looks at me sympathetically. “That's the rumor going around today. You mean you didn't know that your family had to flee California because of your delinquent behavior?”

I'd laugh if I wasn't so horrified.

“Don't worry,” she says. “It will blow over. Kay's rumors always do. I'm impressed by how quickly you were able to get on her bad side.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, smirking. “And, my obvious delinquency aside, we moved because of my mom. She was getting sick of California. She loves the mountains, and she decided she wanted to raise us somewhere where we couldn't always see the air we breathed, you know?”

She smiles at my joke, but it's just to be polite. A pity smile.

Another long silence.

“Okay, so enough with the chitchat,” I say restlessly. “Let's talk about our project. I was thinking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We could talk about what it was like to be a woman, even a woman with a lot of power, back in the day. A female empowerment kind of project.” For some reason I think this will be right up Angela's alley.

“Actually,” she says. “I had another idea.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“I thought we could do a presentation on the Angels of Mons.”

I almost choke. If I'd been drinking water I would have sprayed it all over the table.

“What are the Angels of Mons?” I ask.

“It's a story from World War I. There was this big battle between the Germans and the British, who were badly outnumbered but won. After it was over there was a rumor going around about these phantom men who appeared to help the British. The mysterious men shot at the Germans with bows and arrows. One version said that the men were standing between the two armies, shining with a kind of unearthly light.”

“Interesting,” I manage.

“It was a hoax, of course. Some writer made it up and it got out of hand. It's like an early version of UFOs, a crazy story that kept getting told again and again.”

“Okay,” I say, taking a breath. “Sounds like you have it covered.”

I can just picture the look on Mom's face when I tell her that I'm going to do a project on angels for British History.

“I thought it would be interesting for the class,” says Angela. “A specific moment in time, like Mr. Erikson suggested. I also think we can relate it to today.”

My mind races, trying to think up a tactful way to turn down her idea.

“Yeah, well . . . I did really like the Elizabeth thing, but—” I'm floundering.

She grins.

“What?”

“You should see your face,” she says. “You're really freaking out.”

“What? No, I'm not.”

She leans forward across the table.

“I want to research angels,” she says. “But it has to be British, because it's British History after all. And this is the best British angel story there is. And wouldn't it be crazy if it were true?”

My heart feels like it's fallen into my stomach.

“I thought you said it was a hoax.”

“Well, yes. That's what they would have wanted everyone to think, wouldn't they?”

“Who's they?”

“The angel-bloods,” she says.

I stand up.

“Clara, sit down. Relax.” Then she adds, “I know.”

“You know wh—”

“
Sit down
,” she says. In Angelic.

My jaw literally drops.

“How did you—?”

“What, you thought you were the only one?” she says wryly, looking at her nails.

I sink into the chair. I think this classifies as a real, honest-to-goodness revelation. Never in a million years would I have expected to stumble upon another angel-blood at Jackson Hole High School. I'm floored. Angela, on the other hand, is so energized that she's practically shooting out sparks. She scrutinizes me for a minute, then jumps up.

“Come on.” She bounces onto the stage, still smiling that cat-ate-the-canary kind of grin. She waves at me impatiently to join her. I get up and slowly climb the stairs onto the stage, looking out into the empty theater.

“What?”

She takes off her coat and tosses it into the dark. Then she takes a few steps back so that she's about arm's length away from me. She turns to face me.

“All right,” she says.

I'm starting to get pretty alarmed.

“What are you doing?”

“
Show thyself,
” she says in Angelic.

There's a flash of light, like a camera's. I blink and stumble with the sudden weight of my wings on my shoulder blades. Angela is standing with her own wings fully extended behind her, beaming at me.

“So it's true!” she says excitedly. Tears gleam in her eyes. She furrows her brows a little and her wings disappear with a snap. “Say the words,” she says.

“
Show yourself!
”
I shout.

The flash comes again, and then she's standing with her wings out. She claps her hands together delightedly.

I'm still stunned.

“How did you know?” I ask.

“The birds tipped me off,” she says. “What you said in class about them.”

So much for laying low. Mom's going to kill me.

“Birds drive me crazy, too. But I didn't know if that was a freak coincidence or what. And then I heard you were a whiz in French class,” she says. “I take Spanish, myself. I'm so good at it because I speak fluent Italian, on account of my mom's family, all those summers in Italy. It's similar, a Romance language and whatnot. That's my story, anyway.”

I can't stop staring at her wings. It's such a shock for me to see them on someone I don't know, a crazy juxtaposition: Angela with her glossy black hair sweeping over one side of her face, black tank top, gray jeans with holes in the knees, dark eyeliner and lips, purple fingernails, and then these blindingly white wings stretched out behind her, reflecting the stage lights so she's lit with a radiance that is positively celestial.

“I didn't really know for sure, though, until your brother beat the wrestling team,” she says.

“The
entire
wrestling team?” That's so not the version I heard from Jeffrey.

“Didn't you hear about it? He went to the coach and asked to be on the team, the coach said no, tryouts were in November, better luck next year, so Jeffrey said, ‘I'll wrestle the best guys on the team for each weight class. If they beat me, fine, I'll try again next year. If I beat them, I'm on the team.' That's how the story circulated. I have gym first period, so I was right there, but I didn't pay much attention until he was halfway through the middleweight. Practically the whole school turned out to watch him beat the champion heavyweight. Toby Jameson. That guy's a monster. It was an amazing thing to watch. Jeffrey just took him down, didn't even look winded, and when I saw him like that I knew that he couldn't be entirely human. And then later I wore the angel shirt to Brit History and watched your face get all tense and broody when you looked at it. So I was pretty sure I was right.”

“It was that obvious?”

“To me it was,” she says. “But I'm glad. I've never known anybody else like me.”

She laughs and before I can totally process what she's saying, she bends her knees and swoops up off the stage, gliding effortlessly over the darkened theater and up into the rafters.

“Come on,” she says.

I stare after her, thinking of the huge amount of damage I will probably do if I try.

“I don't think you have enough insurance on this place for me to try to fly here.”

She drops lightly back down to the stage.

“I can't fly,” I admit.

“It's hard at first,” she says. “I spent all last year climbing up into the mountains at night so I could jump off ledges and catch some air. It took months before I was really able to get the hang of it.”

That's the first thing anybody has said that makes me feel better about flying.

“Didn't your mom teach you?” I ask.

She shakes her head wildly, as if she finds the idea hilarious.

“My mom's about as human as they come. I mean, what angel-blood would name their kid Angela?”

I stifle a smile.

“She lacks imagination, I guess,” she says. “But she's always been there for me.”

“So it's your dad then.”

Her expression becomes instantly sober. “He was an angel.”

“An angel? So that means you're a half blood, a Dimidius.”

She nods. Which means she's twice as powerful as me. And she can fly. And her hair is a normal color. I'm a pot of envy.

“So your mom's not human,” she says. “That means you're—”

“I'm only a Quartarius. My mom is a Dimidius and my dad's just a normal guy.”

I suddenly feel a little exposed standing there on the stage with my wings out, so I fold them in and will them to disappear. Angela does the same. For a minute we stand contemplating each other again.

“You said in class you'd never met your father,” I say.

Her face is carefully blank.

“Of course not,” she says matter-of-factly. “He's a Black Wing.”

I nod like I completely understand what she's talking about, but I don't. Angela turns away and wanders out of the pool of light on the stage into one of the darkened corners.

“My mother was married once, but her husband died of cancer right before she turned thirty. He was an actor, and she was this shy costume designer. This was his theater. They never had any kids. After he died, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome. She's Catholic, so Rome's a pretty important place for her, plus she has family there. One night she walked home from evening mass, and a man followed her. She tried to ignore it at first, but she had a bad feeling about him. He started to walk faster, so she ran. She didn't stop until she was at the family's house.”