“It’s okay.”
Angel wants to remind Lizette that she knows better, but doesn’t want to scare her away, not now that she’s acknowledging Angel again. “Still,” she says uneasily.
“Fine. We’ll blow it out the window if you care. There isn’t even that much smoke.” She pushes open the window with such aggression Angel fears it might shatter.
Lizette lights the joint and takes a deep drag. A thread of smoke rises, hangs in the air a moment before the draft blows it toward the center of the room. Angel thinks about her milk.
“Ooh,” Lizette singsongs as Angel accepts the joint.
She inhales, holding the smoke in, then splutters, spraying saliva.
Lizette takes the joint back and laughs meanly. “I thought you were a bad girl.”
“I’m not.” Angel squeezes her voice out beyond the deep unbearable tickle, coughs again. “I never said I was. Why are you being like this?” The more she talks, the angrier she gets. “Anyways, I used to smoke all the time, like last summer. Just because I’m not dying to brain-damage my kid doesn’t make me a goody-goody.”
Angel stands and scoops her shirt and her underpants off the floor, untangles them with shaking hands. She can’t put them on fast enough, and her clumsiness angers her still more. Fuck Lizette.
She leans over the crib, and the babies’ heads loom. She lifts Connor with extraordinary gentleness.
“Don’t leave,” says Lizette from the bed, resigned or contrite or maybe just tired. She’s on her side, head propped on a hand, stretched out like a pinup. “I’m sorry.”
Angel doesn’t answer, but sits on the chair with its filthy blue upholstery, her back to Lizette. She closes her eyes and kisses Connor’s head, his sweat sticky against her lips. The world blurs around her. In her arms, Connor pulses, dissolves and re-forms, dissolves and re-forms.
“Hey. Come here. Weed always makes me want to fuck.” Lizette pulls on her arm, dragging Angel to her feet and to the bed.
“I need to put him down. Hang on.”
But Lizette keeps pulling, her fingers in the waistband of Angel’s underpants, pushing them down roughly so they’re twisted around her thighs, and Angel has to wrench herself away. “Hang on,” she says.
But after she’s put Connor in the crib and reluctantly joined Lizette in bed, Angel isn’t mad anymore. She lies back against the flat pillow, marveling at how quickly her anger fades, marveling that she can be at once bodiless and only body. Even Connor’s cries, when they start, don’t break her concentration.
Angel and Lizette stand at the front of the room, their poster propped on the ledge of the whiteboard. They are last to present, after Russia, China, and Italy.
“Go ahead, girls,” Brianna says, and Angel’s stomach flips like a chilled fish. Lizette has hardly spoken to her today, but now she turns and smiles warmly, as if there’s never been strangeness between them. Instead of her usual sweatshirt, Lizette has dressed up in a green satiny button-down. She tugs at the cuffs.
“Finland is a country in Scandinavia,” Angel begins, and then the presentation spills from them in a steady, measured flow.
“Finnish kids are the happiest kids in the world, and they have the least homework but they still succeed on tests and whatnot.”
Their presentation and accompanying visuals are good—almost embarrassingly good, compared to those of their classmates, most of whom just slapped printouts from Wikipedia on their boards. Because Angel and Lizette needed this project as a pretext, they’ve worked hard on it, harder than either of them realized. Angel is soaring.
“Since 1930 every new baby gets a bunch of baby stuff, for free from the government,” says Lizette. “Clothes and towels and everything. Like, everything you need for the first year.”