Archon(12)

Right now, it was early fall. Without the trees to say so, most students had only their calendars and the amount of rain in the streets to go by. The Academy Tree was one of the last of its species in Luz. The Vatican needed more space for housing than for giant weeds.

“You’ll get used to it after a while.” Nina took a long drag on her cigarette, tapping the ashes into a cup near Angela’s bed. “I’m surprised you like the sun anyway. Who does? It’s hot, and bright, and yellow, and it makes people shade off into a second-class tan. There’s nothing like that corpse-white hue.”

“Then I guess I am going to be popular for a change. I used to get tans all the time back home, and everyone said I’d end up marrying ‘beneath my family’s expectations.’ The more I liked that, the more they thought I was deranged. So then they sent me to the institution and I forgot what the sun was all about. I didn’t miss it so much until I got back home.”

“Are you?” Nina said. She lay down on the bed, flat on her stomach, a hand still lifting the cigarette to her lips.

Angela swept aside her hair, sitting down on the floor.

Dolls surrounded them from floor to ceiling, crowding the old bookshelves and storage cabinets, their glass eyes cold and scintillating. While most of her paintings remained hidden away in their portfolio cases, two of them hung on the walls, portals to either a dream or a nightmare, whichever happened to suit her fancy at the moment. She felt a kinship to both of them, one day aching for perfect beauty, and the next, for a grayness that wiped away her soul.

“Am I what?” she said, tugging on an arm glove.

“Deranged.”

What did she want to hear, anyway? But Nina was intent on the question, mouth set in a line of excited fear. As if she were watching a horror movie and couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“Well,” Angela said, lifting one of her hands, “Some people think I am.”

She slipped off the glove, allowing her scars and knife slashes to get some air. Nina locked on them without a sound, balancing the cigarette on her fingers, letting its ashes dribble onto the floor. Like she’d forgotten the world. “You sick bitch,” she said, awed.

“You sound like my parents.” Angela ran a finger along a particularly large burn. “My diagnosis was pretty grim from the beginning, you know. My brother was born during a freak storm that nearly swept away the hospital. I was born a few seconds after him, apparently tearing parts of Erianna to shreds on the way out. My mother,” she said, glancing at Nina, seeing there was need for explanation. “She could never have any more children after us. It was a miracle she even survived. And she and Marcus never let me forget it. They didn’t kill me outright. I was part of the Mathers family, and that wasn’t how they did things. Instead, they took a more passive route. Long years of no friends and a lot of harsh homeschooling. Some of the scars are from that.”

Nina opened her mouth, maybe to ask which ones. Then she simply said nothing.

“The paintings are what got me sent to the mental institution. I believed the angels were real—I still do—and I tried to kill myself a few times to get it over with. Because I wanted to be with people or beings that I really understood and cared for. At the institution they taught me how to make human friends and feel okay about the opposite sex, and I had a few brave boyfriends here and there when I got out. But I always wanted to be with him,” she said, pointing at the beautiful angel and his overly large, proud eyes, “and I kept trying. It’s simply my bad luck that I can’t kill myself and wake up in Heaven or Hell somewhere, staring back at him.”

“Why not?” Nina said, whispering.

“Because it doesn’t work.” Angela waved at a drawer in the end table near the bed. “Open that and give me the pocketknife inside, next to the notebook.”

Nina obeyed, tossing the closed knife at Angela.

She caught it with one hand. “Now,” she said, snapping the knife open, “watch carefully.”

“Wait a second,” Nina said, “you’re not going to actually—”

“I mean it. Keep watching.”

Angela pointed the blade’s tip at her heart and pulled her hand back, lifting it higher than she really needed to. Drama would help get the point across.

“Shit—” Nina sat up from the bed, looking like she was either going to scream or lunge for the knife. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor. Her arms shook like twigs in the wind. “What the hell are you going to do—Angela—no—”

Angela brought the knife down against her chest, merciless.