The Idle Hour Cantina is her turnaround point. It’s five thirty now, and the sun is slipping down the sky. Angel walks briskly back down the length of the village. She’ll make dinner—she needs to tell her dad they’re low on vegetables—and she’ll do her homework. She’ll stick a star into her planner.
At the curve, her phone vibrates in her pocket. She is filled with that buoyant fizz she always gets when someone tries to reach her. It has to be her grandmother. But, no, even better: it’s Lizette from school.
What u up 2
She smiles. Lizette Maes is a year older and significantly more badass than any of Angel’s old friends at Espa?ola Valley High School, yet for some reason Angel cannot divine, she’s decided she approves of Angel. As far as Angel knows, Lizette is an orphan, and has lived with her brother and his girlfriend ever since her mother OD’d three years ago, but she never seems to feel sorry for herself, doesn’t even seem to care. This makes Angel feel babyish, because if she were an orphan, she’d always be thinking about it. Look at her now: both parents alive and still she spends half her time feeling neglected and unloved.
Angel replies to the text hungrily, like a castaway snatching at any hope for communication. Nothing much. You? Last week Brianna had a mini breakdown over some text-speak that had made it into a few of their reading responses, and ever since Angel’s been trying to spell and punctuate her texts properly, but it’s hard to do without looking uptight, and Angel especially doesn’t want to appear uptight to Lizette. Bored lol, she adds.
Angel keeps her phone out, waiting for Lizette’s reply, but there isn’t one. She shouldn’t take it personally—Lizette is, if anything, undependable. But why ask what someone’s up 2 if you don’t actually care? Then Angel wonders if that text had even been intended for her. Just because Angel no longer has friends outside of Smart Starts! doesn’t mean Lizette is equally pathetic. She probably has tons of friends. Maybe she’s going out tonight. The thought makes Angel feel even lonelier.
In the last month, she hasn’t called or texted one single person she used to hang out with. Why would she? She’s zitty and bloated, and their lives have moved on.
“Sex complicates things, both practically and emotionally,” Brianna told them in class yesterday, and boy, is she right on that first count. But for the first few months of her sexual career, emotionally, at least, things were pretty simple for Angel. Her crushes were light and transient, swiftly extinguished.
Even when Ryan Johnson from her geometry class asked her to be his girlfriend last spring and again in the fall—actually phrased it that way—and seemed truly sad when she rejected him, Angel hadn’t, herself, felt any complication at all.
Angel isn’t like the knocked-up teens in movies whom audiences can sympathize with because they’ve had sex once and even then it was with their best guy friend or some jerk taking advantage. Angel enjoyed letting it be known around school that she was doing it—that she was active, as Brianna would say. It made her feel voluptuous and powerful and musky and mysterious.
Angel has never been, strictly speaking, boy crazy. Not like Priscilla, her best friend since fourth grade—former best friend—who’s been dying for a boyfriend forever, even, last year, spent part of her birthday money on a subscription to a bridal magazine.
“A bridal magazine? Are you joking me?” Angel asked, lounging on Priscilla’s bed and flipping through the glossy pages. “Don’t you still get Highlights?” She didn’t, and Angel knew that because when they were younger Priscilla had always passed her back issues on to Angel, who loved the Hidden Objects feature and whose mother would never waste money on a magazine except People, which was practically a necessity for any informed citizen. “You don’t even talk to Kevin Gabaldon, Cilla. Don’t you think you should, like, say hi before you order the cake?”
Priscilla pressed her already thin lips almost out of existence. “Just ’cause your mother didn’t value marriage. Ever heard of thinking about the future, Angel? It can take, like, four years to plan a good wedding, and if I have all the dresses and decorations picked out, I’ll have a head start.” She leaned over Angel, placing a finger on a page featuring a blond bride running through a lush garden, lifting her skirts and laughing over her bare shoulder, looking ever so slightly demented, the quarry in some hilarious chase. “Plus, I like the pictures.”