my feet, oh misery, blubber, blubber, but how can I go on living without Rafe and his devil-may-care ways and his dark and only-a-little-abusive love? Upchuck. So unrealistic, I always thought.
Joke’s on me, I guess.
But Christian and I were kind of assigned to each other. He’s not interested in me because of my devastating good looks or my winning personality. He wants me because he’s been told to want me. I feel things for him because he’s like this big mystery to me, and because I’ve been told to want him, and not by just my mother but by the higher powers, the people upstairs, the Big Guy. Plus Christian’s hot, and he always seems to know the right thing to say and he gets me.
Joke’s really on me.
And why — this is what I can’t understand — do the people upstairs care about who I love when I’m seventeen years old? Tucker is my choice. My heart, making its own decisions.
I suddenly feel the urge to cry, the biggest surge of sorrow I’ve felt in a long time, and I think, God, will you just leave me alone?
“Everybody okay?” Wendy says, nervously, from the backseat.
“Peachy,” I say.
And then Tucker says, “What’s that?”
I stomp on the brakes and we screech to a stop.
Someone’s standing in the middle of the road. Waiting for us, it seems. A tall man wearing a long leather coat. A man with coal-black hair. Even from fifty yards away, I know who is it. I can feel it.
Not my sorrow, then.
Samjeeza’s.
We’re toast.
“Clara, who is that?” Tucker asks.
“Bad news,” I mutter. “Everybody buckled in?”
I don’t wait for an answer. I don’t know what to do, so I go with my gut. I slowly take my foot off the brake, and move it to the gas. Then I floor it.
We pick up speed fast, but at the same time we are in slow motion, creeping along in some alternate time as I clutch the steering wheel and focus on Samjeeza. This car, I figure, is my only weapon. Maybe if I knock him into next week with it, we’ll be able to get away, somehow.
It’s our only chance.
Tucker starts to yell and clutch at the seat. My head gets cloudy with sorrow, but I push through. The beam from the headlights falls on the angel in the road, his eyes glowing like an animal’s catching the light, and in that last crazy moment, as the car bears down on him, I think I see him smile.
For a second everything is black. There’s white dust floating around my head, from the air bags, I think. Beside me, Tucker suddenly comes to, inhales deeply. I can’t see him too well in the dark, but there’s a bright silver web of cracked glass on the passenger window. He groans.
“Tucker?” I whisper.
He lifts a shaky hand to his head, touches it gingerly, then looks at his fingers. His blood looks like spilled ink against the sudden whiteness of his skin. He moves his jaw back and forth, like someone punched him.
“Tucker?” I hear the note of panic in my voice, almost like a sob.
“What the heck were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry, Tuck. I—”
“Man, those air bags really hit you, don’t they?” he says. “How about you? You hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Wendy?” he calls.
I crane my head around so I can look toward the backseat, but all I can see from this angle is a bit of her long hair in front of her face. Tucker starts wrenching on the door, trying to get out, to go to her, but it’s partly crushed and refuses to open. I try my door — same problem. I close my eyes, try to clear my head of the fuzzy cobwebs that are collected there.
I grasp the door handle firmly and pull it, then press my shoulder into the door and push as hard as I can. There’s a pop, then metal shrieking, giving way, and suddenly the door comes completely off its hinges. It falls to the ground. I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out, hurry to the other side of the car, pull the door smoothly off for Tucker, throw it into the weeds at the side of the road. He stares up at me for a second, his mouth slightly open. He’s never seen me do anything like that before.
I’ve never seen me do anything like that before either.
I hold out my hand. He grabs it, and I pull him out of the car. He moves straight back to Wendy’s door, which opens easily. He tries to pull her out, but something’s keeping her there.
“Her seat belt,” I say.
He curses, still dazed, and fumbles around for the latch, then lifts her out. She doesn’t make a sound as he carries her to the side of the road, lays her gently on the gravel at the shoulder.
He takes off his tuxedo jacket and slips it beneath her head and back.
“Wake up, Wendy,” he orders her, but nothing happens. I kneel down next to him and watch the rise and fall of her chest. I listen for the beating of her heart, slow and steady, the most welcome sound in the world.
