Hallowed

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.