Mom puts the glass down and looks at me. She doesn’t seem at all rattled by anything I’ve told her. Which rattles me even more. And then I realize.
“You already knew about Angela,” I say. “How?”
“I have my sources. She hasn’t exactly tried to hide her abilities. For someone who’s worried about Black Wings, she’s not being very careful. And to reveal herself to you like that. It’s reckless.”
I stare at her. At that moment it fully dawns on me how much my mother hasn’t told me.
“You’ve been lying to me,” I say. “I tell you everything, and you’ve been lying to me.”
She meets my eyes, startled by my accusation. “No, I haven’t. There are just some things that—”
“Are there a lot of angel-bloods in Jackson Hole?”
She seems hurt by my sudden question. She doesn’t answer.
I pick up my backpack from where I tossed it onto the kitchen floor and head for my room.
“Hey,” says Mom. “I’m still talking to you.”
“No, apparently you’re not.”
“Clara,” she calls after me in an exasperated voice. “If I don’t tell you everything, it’s for your own protection.”
“That doesn’t make sense. How does being clueless protect me?”
“What else did Angela tell you?”
“Nothing.”
I go into my room and slam the door, take off my coat, and throw it on the bed, fighting the urge to scream, or cry, or both. Then I go to the mirror and summon my wings, gathering them around in front of me so I can see the feathers more closely. They’re fairly white, I think, running my hand over them. Not as the new-fallen snow, as my mother said, but still white.
Not as white as Angela’s, though.
I hear Mom come down the hall. She stops in front of my door. I wait for her to knock or come in and tell me that she doesn’t want me hanging out with Angela anymore, for my own protection. But she doesn’t. She just stands there for a minute. Then I hear her walk away.
I wait for a while, until I’m sure that Mom is safely downstairs again, and then I sneak down the hall to Jeffrey’s room. He’s sitting at his desk with his laptop, typing away, chatting with someone by the looks of it. When he sees me he types something really fast, then jumps up to face me. I turn the music down a notch so I can hear myself think.
“Did you tell her you’d b-r-b?” I say with a smirk. “What’s her name, anyway? No point denying it. It will be more embarrassing for you if I have to ask around at school.”
“Kimber,” he concedes immediately. “Her name’s Kimber.” His expression stays neutral, but I can see a hint of red creeping into his ears.
“Pretty name. The blond girl, I assume?”
“You didn’t come in here just to mock me, right?”
“Well, that’s pretty fun, but no. I wanted to tell you something.” I move a pile of dirty laundry off his beanbag chair and sit on it. My breath catches for a second, like I’m breaking a rule, Mom’s all-important “don’t tell your kids anything” rule, as a matter of fact. But I’m sick of living in the dark. And I’m ticked off, ticked off at everything, at my whole crappy life and all the people in it. I need to vent.
“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say.
He blinks.
“Who?”
“She’s a junior, tall, long black hair, kind of Emo, gold eyes. Loner.”
He looks at the ceiling thoughtfully like he’s calling up Angela’s face in his mind. “How do you know she’s an angel-blood?”
“She told me. But that’s not the right question, Jeffrey.”
“What do you mean?”
“What you should be asking is why Angela Zerbino told me that she was an angel-blood. And if you asked me that, I would answer that she told me because she knew that I was an angel-blood.”
“Huh? How did she know you were an angel-blood?”
“See, now that’s the right question,” I say. I lean forward. “She knew because she saw you take on the wrestling team last month. She watched you wrestle Toby Jameson, who probably weighs two hundred pounds, without even working up a sweat. And she said to herself, wow, that guy’s a good wrestler, he must be an angel.”
His face actually pales. It’s mildly satisfying. Of course I’m leaving out some of the other troublesome details, my stupid thing about the birds and French class and the way I ogled her angel shirt, falling so neatly into her trap. But Jeffrey was the linchpin: She was only certain that we were something more than human after she observed him on the wrestling mat that day.
“Did you tell Mom?” He looks a little green at the thought. Because if I told Mom, that’d be it for Jeffrey. No more wrestling, or baseball in the spring, or football in the fall or whatever he was dreaming up. He’d probably be grounded until college.
“No,” I say. “Although she’s bound to ask the right question herself, sooner or later.” It’s kind of odd, come to think of it, that she hasn’t asked me yet. Maybe her sources already told her that, too.
“Are you going to tell her?” he asks, so softly I can hardly hear him over the music. His expression is truly pathetic, and where a few moments before anger surged through me, now I feel drained and sad.
“No. I just wanted to tell you. I don’t know why. I wanted you to know.”
“Thanks,” he says. He gives a short, humorless laugh. “I think.”
“Don’t mention it. I mean ever. Really.” I get up to leave.
“I feel like a cheater,” he says then. “All the ribbons and medals and trophies I won in California, they don’t mean anything. It’s like I was taking steroids, only I didn’t know it.”
I know exactly what he means. It’s why I dropped out of ballet, even though I loved it, and why I never picked it up again in Jackson. It felt dishonest, doing so easily, so naturally, what the other girls had to work so hard to accomplish. It was unfair, I thought, to take the attention away from them when I had such a huge advantage. So I quit.
“But if I hold myself back, I feel like a fake,” says Jeffrey. “And that’s worse.”
“I know.”
“I won’t do it,” he says. I look into his dead-serious gray eyes. He swallows, but holds my gaze. “I won’t hold myself back. I won’t pretend to be less than I am.”