“No,” says Jen, face flushing. “Like half of you are Catholics, and Catholics aren’t Christian, exactly.”
“Are you joking?” Angel surprises herself with her cry of incredulity, but, after all, she is something of an expert after her father’s Good Friday shenanigans. “Anyone who believes in Christ is a Christian. It’s the main definition.”
Now Lizette looks over her shoulder at Angel and gives a wry half-smile. Angel’s happiness is like a ball popping to the surface of a clean pool. It bobs there, glinting in the sunlight. Jen stares forward, face splotched.
“That is true,” says Brianna. “And anyway, I’m agnostic. But, girls, let’s please stay on task. What’s something else you can do to make your futures better?”
“Sleep,” says Tabitha sadly, aged seventeen and due next month, already possessed of a nineteen-month-old who is known in the baby room for his powerful lungs and disinclination to nap. “I never get no sleep.”
“Good. Yes, sleep is essential. Self-care in general. Other thoughts?”
Ysenia raises her hand.
Brianna nods encouragingly. “Ysenia.”
Ysenia is a pretty girl who, in Angel’s opinion, shouldn’t try so hard. A tiny pimple on her chin is more noticeable for having been spackled over in foundation, and her mascara is clotted so thick that it seems an effort to hoist her eyelids open. Her black hair is streaked in dramatic blond highlights that her sister does for her with an at-home kit Ysenia claims is just as good as a salon. “Marry a rich guy,” she says.
This sounds good to Angel. Her mother once told her that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich guy as a poor one. Not that Marissa would know—along with the rest of his personality deficiencies, Mike isn’t rich. The problem, her mother conceded with a sigh, is meeting one.
Angel starts to add rich guy to her own list, but catches Brianna’s expression. Instead of that smile of bright approval with which she usually rewards classroom participation, Brianna presses her lips and gives an equivocating waggle of her head. Marry a rich guy is, apparently, the wrong answer.
“Well,” Brianna says, “that’s one thought, Ysenia. I like that you’re thinking of The Practicals, of how to get the resources you need to live day to day. But if you’re dependent on someone else for those things, then you aren’t developing the skills you need to provide for yourself. And if that rich guy, I don’t know, leaves or dies or divorces you, or proves to be a bad partner so that you have to leave him, then you’re right back where you started.”
“But he’d have to give me alimony,” Ysenia points out. “He’d have to pay child support.”
“Sure,” snorts Christy, scratching flakes of neon orange nail polish off her stubby thumbnail. “Because guys pay child support. Guys are super at that.”
“He’d be rich. Of course he’d pay. It would be no big deal if he was rich.”
“If he was rich,” Christy says, “he’d have lawyers and he’d know how to get out of it. You wouldn’t see a cent.” She goes back to denuding her nails. Her desk and thighs are covered in orange flakes.
“True,” chimes Trinity.
Brianna’s head is tilted thoughtfully. Angel presumes she is trying to work out how to validate Ysenia’s point and at the same time crush it and move on. The girls are aware that Brianna handles them with kid gloves, acknowledges points of view that are foolish or plain wrong, lets slip pretty gaping lapses of logic, just to instill in them some sense of self-efficacy. Sometimes they say dumb stuff on purpose, just to watch her perform the intellectual acrobatics necessary to at once validate and correct. It can be very entertaining.
Angel is pretty sure they’re all imagining this man in his slim wool suit and narrow black shoes, looking like a Banana Republic model, and it strikes her as unfair that they’re passing these judgments on him just because he’s square-jawed with soft-focus eyes and a leather wallet filled with platinum cards.