Strange Angels

aquariums, staring lidless before they opened their mouths and made that awful ratcheting sound. The thumps of snakes hitting the glass echoed in my head, along with the smell of red beans and rice, body odor, and incense.

We were a long way away from Florida. The proprietor of that little occult store had given me the genuine willies, what with her filmy eyes and the shifting mass of stuff trailing behind her—a cloud of disturbance regular people wouldn’t see, but would feel like a cold draft. She’d given me a long, measuring look before Dad snapped his fingers and informed her that she was talking to him, thank you very much, ma’am.

I should have told him about the owl. The sudden certainty was chilling, and my fingers turned numb, prickling with cold.

“Um. Causes of the Civil War. Uhhh . . .” The kid in front of me stumbled, and Bletch had him. She spent the rest of the class period picking on him, even though he eventually came up with the right answers—when she let him get a word in edgewise. By the time the chimes rang for the end of the round, even the back of his neck was red. I felt bad about it, but I didn’t let it slow me down.

The halls were the usual crush, jocks snapping like sharks, cheerleaders simpering, and the rest of us just trying to get by. A contingent of stoners clustered around a locker, and I’m sure I saw a brown paper bag change hands. I glanced back—nope, no teachers in sight. A girl from art class looked right past my tentative wave and swished away, her backpack sagging dispiritedly from one shoulder.

I hate being the new girl.

The cafeteria was a surf-roar of noise and the smell of floor wax and industrial food. I had some change for the bank of pay phones between the caf and Death Alley leading down to the office, so I plugged it in and dialed the number written in my Yoda notebook—the last in a string of similar numbers scrawled in pencil or blue pen. The phone had been on when we moved in, listed under the last tenant’s name, and it was easier just paying the bill for a while. I couldn’t be expected to memorize every goddamn phone number. Or at least, that’s what I’d told Dad when he ragged me for having them written down.

He told me to watch my mouth and stopped bugging me about it. Domestic harmony, thy name is Anderson.

The handset rang in my ear. Once. Three times. Five.

He wasn’t home, or he was working out, not picking up. I thought about skipping the rest of the day, but he’d be pissed off and I’d just get another lecture about the value of education. If I dared to point out that education wasn’t everything and high school wouldn’t teach me how to exorcise a room or put down a zombie, I’d just get another lecture about how I was supposed to be normal.

Just because he hunted things out of fairy tales didn’t mean I had any right to skip school. Oh no. Even if he was pretty blind without me, since only the maternal side of his family was the one gifted with what Gran always called “the touch.”

Some touch. I haven’t figured out if it meant “crazy” or just “spooky.” The jury, you could say, is still out on that one.

Dad never seemed sad or unhappy about missing out on the woo-woo train. Then again, Gran never did stand for much of what she called “moping,” and I couldn’t imagine her being any different when Dad was a kid. Weird as it is to think about him being gawky and adolescent—but I’ve seen the pictures.

Gran was big on pictures.

I hung up after fifteen rings and stood staring at the phone, chewing on a hangnail. It hurt like hell, and there was a healing scrape on my left-hand knuckles from the heavy bag. Other girls don’t have fathers who yell at them to work through the pain, to hit harder, to get in there and kill it kill it kill it! Other girls never filled thermoses with holy water or handed ammo through a window while their fathers held off skittering things like giant mutant cockroaches. That had been Baton Rouge, and that had been bad. I’d had to drive Dad to the hospital and lie about how he got the chunk taken out of his calf.

Sometimes it was hard to tell where the lying to the normal world ended and the bullshit posturing necessary in the Real World began. There’s so much paramilitary hanging out under the edge of the Real World that the macho bull snorting reaches epic proportions.

The phone just kept ringing.

“Screw it,” I said under my breath, under the surf-roar of noise echoing from the cafeteria. I didn’t even get my fifty cents back; the machine ate it.

For a second I stood there, just looking at the phone like it might suddenly give me a good idea. It smelled like damp wool and wet concrete in here, as well as formaldehyde carpet and the exhalation of two thousand kids. Not to mention sweaty stocking feet and food pried from underneath Ronald McDonald’s bumpers. School smell. It’s the same pretty much everywhere in the U.S., with only slight regional differences in the foot-sweat and served- roadkill departments.

The crowd noise from the caf hurt my ears and made my head ache like one of Mom’s migraines. I was hungry, but the thought of going in there and elbowing through the line, then finding a place to sit where I wouldn’t be required to look at anyone or share a table with some jackass kids just seemed like too much hassle.

If I went home and Dad was there, I’d get The Lecture. If I went home and he wasn’t there, I’d just wait and worry. If I went through geometry and art class this afternoon I’d go bazonko nuts, even though art class was generally the most enjoyable part of the day. And forget about the waste of time they called “civics class.” I’d seen more real-life civics on afternoon CNN. That is, if you define civics as “blowhards with expensive hair.”

None of these classes taught you anything real. I’d rather be with Dad on stakeout or doing what he called “intel runs”—going to occult shops or bars, places where people who knew about the Real World, the dark world, got together and spoke in whispers between shots.

Like the tea shop where Dad’s old buddy August hangs out in New York, where you step up to get into the bar’s dark gloom—and you step up again to get out. Or the bar in Seattle where the proprietor has tusks growing out of his lower jaw and a warty broad face that looks like something that lives under a bridge and eats goats. Or the nightclub in Pensacola where all the flashing strobes of light look like screaming faces when they hit the floor. And that country store out on a back road near Port Arthur, where the woman sitting in her rocker on the front porch will have what you need in a paper bag sitting right next to her, while the dust streaks and twinkles on the window, even at night. There are places like that all over—where you can buy things that shouldn’t or don’t strictly exist.

If you’re willing to pay. Sometimes in money. Most times in information . And other times in something less tangible. Favors. Memories.

Even souls.

Maybe I could do some recon of my own, find Dad a good place to plug in. The watering holes for the Real World are hidden from the normal world, but they always stick out like a sore thumb to me. I think it’s because Gran always had me play “what’s on the table”— that game where you shut your eyes and try to remember everything she’d set out for lunch or dinner, canning or quilting.

That sounded better than putting up with the same bullshit everyone my age has to put up with. So I turned and went the other way, toward the doors that would lead out to the soccer fields and baseball diamond. I could cut across the fields and maybe slip out through the greenbelt—Foley was one of those schools with an open campus, a rarity anymore. I had that extra twenty, enough to sit in a café or coffee shop where nobody would bother me before I put on my serious face and started following the tickle of intuition.

The cold outside was like a slap to already-stinging cheeks. It still smelled like iron, the way a penny tastes when you suck on it. I walked with my head down, my boots crunching frozen weeds, my nose immediately running.

What a choice. Skip school and freeze your ass off, or go back inside the building where it’s warm and get bored literally to death.

“Hey! Hey, you!”

I ignored the voice, swiping at my nose with the sleeve of my sweatshirt jacket. Footsteps crunched behind me. I didn’t hunch my shoulders—that’s a dead giveaway that you’ve heard someone. If it was a teacher, I was going to have to come up with a reason why I was out here, and I began to think about exercising my creative lying muscle.