So Angel began going out more, staying out later. “We trust you,” Mike said over and over, and Angel, thrilled and uneasy with the sudden freedom, would look for confirmation to her mother, who would lift her head, nod, then lay her head back on Mike’s chest. Not long after, they announced with clasped hands that they were engaged.
Mike’s personality began to change the summer before Angel’s sophomore year, when he was tasked with designing picnic ramadas in a park in Roswell. This was a big deal, he emphasized to Marissa. “I do this right, and it’s a whole new ball game. They’ll give me more projects, a promotion. We can move out of this craphole.” He looked around Marissa and Angel’s little living room, with the bent venetian blinds and the shelf of Disney animals, the friendly polka-dotted rug and the suede-like microfiber couch that Angel and Marissa had chosen together with great enthusiasm several years earlier, but that hadn’t, admittedly, held up well.
He started spending days at a time at the job site four hours south in Roswell or in meetings in Santa Fe. When he got home, he was grouchy and constantly on his cell phone. The board hadn’t liked his design—too ambitious, unrealistic for the budget—and now he was being asked to work with another architect senior to him. “Collaborate,” he spat. “They’re giving me a fucking babysitter.” He and Marissa began fighting—about money, about the state of the house, about the hours Angel was keeping. It was true that she was spending two and occasionally three nights a week out. A few times last summer, Marissa, bleary and nearsighted, had come out of her bedroom at the sound of Angel quietly letting herself into the house at dawn. “What time is it? Have you been drinking?”
“No. God,” Angel would say, pushing past her mother into her own bedroom. And, doubtless because it was the easiest course, Marissa decided to believe her.
One evening during one of Mike’s trips away, Angel had come home from Priscilla’s house to find her mother, in too-short sweatpants and her hair in a rough ponytail, standing over a pile of laundry in the hall. Marissa was inspecting what Angel realized in horror was a pair of her own—Angel’s—underpants.
“Are you having sex?” Marissa demanded. She looked angry and old, her skin discolored and dry, her mouth warped into an ugly little curl.
“That’s disgusting, Mom.” Angel snatched her dirty underpants from her mother’s hand and slammed her bedroom door.
Her head throbbed. What kind of sick Sherlock did her mother think she was? Of course she’d been having sex. And how hypocritical! It wasn’t Angel who dangled her disgusting, lacy panties from every towel rack in the house. It wasn’t Angel who left her stupid diaphragm on the edge of the bathtub, where it winked lewdly at Angel like a fleshier and less amiable version of one of those Scrubbing Bubbles from the commercial. It wasn’t Angel who hung on the neck of her smug, jerky architect boyfriend, and who cracked sly innuendos as though Angel were too stupid to pick up on them.
She waited all that night for her mother to come in after her, to lay down the law, and, in the nights that followed, she kept waiting. She was ready to be defensive and angry, but she was also relieved to have been found out. Maybe her mother would start behaving like an actual mother—ground her, keep her safe in the house—and Angel would have no choice but to get off this increasingly troubling train she’d found herself on.
But Marissa didn’t come into Angel’s room. And in the weeks following, did Marissa, even knowing what she knew, ever once talk to Angel about birth control? About abstinence? Did it, in those days, ever occur to her to just not let Angel go out every night? No, it did not, because Marissa was preoccupied with Mike, who, it turned out, hadn’t given up the lease on his Santa Fe apartment—the revelation had resulted in a massive fight and a smashed kitchen chair—and was now staying half the week there. Marissa was spending her energies dressing up for him, trying to cajole him back into his former good mood, then breaking glasses and yelling at him and at Angel, too, when her attempts failed.
So Angel went out more and more to parties in people’s parentless houses or in empty buildings and construction sites or at the end of long roads in the empty desert. She lost herself in hysterical drunken laughter with friends, in the pleading pressure of someone’s body against her own, and also in the long, sad days after that were muffled by irritability and hangover, when memories of things she’d said and done would detonate in the smog with radioactive clarity and, always, shame. Her own stupid plays at self-assuredness were laughable and wrong, and, tense with humiliation, Angel would relive moments from the previous night’s party and the many parties leading up to it: laughing meanly at Priscilla for saying taken for granite or calling some other girl a bitch behind her back or giving some guy a blow job through the pee-hole of his boxers.