At school, Angel does not have to think about her grandmother. The ruckus and noise and the sheer inconsequentiality of the daily schedule is a comforting distraction. If Angel is taking GED practice tests （up ten points on Reasoning Through Language Arts!）， she’s not thinking about her grandmother at home staring at daytime television, her head cocked strangely. Angel isn’t thinking about her father making some sad lunch of canned beef stew, or their lurching conversations, her father’s attempts to be comforting and upbeat, a performance that can’t possibly convince either of them.
Angel has all but quit keeping her emotions journal; she doesn’t want to think about the sheer injustice of it all. Just as things were becoming bearable, just as she’d hit a kind of rhythm in her days and Connor started sleeping through the night, just as her father was beginning to be engaged, this disaster hits.
Angel hasn’t told anyone at school. Instead she applies herself with renewed devotion to counting her sleep hours, Connor’s sleep hours, to noting the time and length of his feedings, even color-coding her own meals by food group with her gel pens. In this way the school day passes in manageable, unthinking chunks, until the time comes to zip shut her backpack and to gather Connor’s baggie of soiled clothing and to load him into his car seat.
But as she gazes out the classroom window at the stark city, everything she hears and sees and does is filtered through her new understanding that she will lose her grandmother.
Lizette has hardly spoken to Angel since their Finland project. For three weeks—how has it only been three weeks, when so much has happened?—she’s sat at the desk nearest the whiteboard, bent over her workbook, but she just seems to be drawing circles in the margins. She hasn’t once antagonized Jen—not even when Jen distributed flyers for the day care center at her church—and when Brianna calls on her, her replies are muted.
Angel misses her. She hates that even in the midst of this crisis, she is distracted by longing. She has tried positioning herself in Lizette’s way when class is released, but Lizette moves smoothly past her. Lizette no longer saves her a seat at lunch, and she speaks to Angel with the same cool, offhanded ease with which she speaks to anyone else. Angel doesn’t understand how it was all shut off so entirely. She is humiliated that she ever allowed herself to be so vulnerable. And there’s no one she can talk to about it.
Angel can’t shake the feeling that she, Angel, is responsible for the horror that has swamped her family. Not because God hates lesbians and thinks they don’t deserve grandmothers—Angel can’t believe that, not when God is love and mercy and goodness—but because there must have been something wrong about her joy, about the way the hours fell away in Lizette’s presence. That fact is, Angel’s attention was completely absorbed by Lizette—by the exhilaration of those afternoons in her bed, yes, but also by the marvelous, singular person of Lizette.
And when her mother asked after her grandmother, Angel hadn’t heeded the warning, hadn’t even been able to recognize it as a warning, simply because it came from her mother.
So Angel deserves this swollen, hot-faced rejection. She deserves this hurt. Perhaps she even deserves to lose her grandmother.
Lizette rests her head in the crook of one arm and bounces the tip of her pen off her notebook. Her shining hair falls heavily across her cheek. Angel imagines lifting that hair, drawing it behind Lizette’s ear to expose the clean curve of jaw, but then turns back to her workbook, biting down on her own pen until her teeth ache. The intensity of Angel’s attention must surely reach Lizette, must feel as weighted as a hand pressed against her skin. But Lizette continues to tap her pen.
Angel stands. She palms her phone, slips it in the pocket of her hoodie. She doesn’t even peek through the nursery window. In the bathroom, she leans against the wall and checks her phone.
There’s no word from home, from her grandmother, from her father. No word from her mother, either, big surprise. As usual, Angel is thinking more about them than any of them are thinking about her. She hasn’t told her mother about Yolanda, because she can’t stand the thought of Marissa swooping in, too late, all concern and readiness to help and smug pleasure at having seen what Angel did not, when until now she’s been so entirely unconcerned about anyone other than herself. She doesn’t deserve to know what’s going on with them. Unless she calls. If she calls, then Angel will tell her. Why won’t her mother call?