The pit is still wedged up under her rib cage. “She really is.”
“And so’s this little guy.” Brianna shakes Connor’s foot again. “We should wrap up in the classroom, Angel. We have to be back here before we know it.”
“There was just something I wanted to ask.” Angel reaches out to touch Brianna’s cardigan sleeve, but doesn’t make contact. This isn’t going at all the way she’d hoped, but she plows forward because she’s waited too long as it is. “I wanted to ask, would you be Connor’s godmother?”
Brianna’s distant, private expression shifts. A gleam of alarm—fear, almost—and then her face is sunny, enameled, professional. Angel didn’t understand until now that the face she knows so well is a professional face. The corners of her own smile tremble.
“Oh, Angel. That’s so nice.”
“Thanks,” says Angel.
“I’m afraid I can’t accept the offer.” Brianna now turns professionally sympathetic, mouth downturned.
“Okay,” says Angel, stung. “Sure.” Every part of her feels cottony and numb. It had never occurred to Angel that her teacher might decline. Angel had assumed Brianna would be flattered. She’d assumed that she’d be grateful for the honor. Angel pictured Brianna pulling her in for a hug, both of them happy and safe in the understanding that they’d be bound together long into Connor’s adulthood.
“I hope you understand.” Brianna tips her head and adjusts her loose dress. The flowers are large and pink and ugly. They belong on a grandmother’s curtains, a grandmother with less taste than either of Angel’s grandmothers. “It’s nothing personal, Angel. I just have to be careful of boundaries. When Ysenia asked, I told her the same thing.” Brianna smiles again, a quick, indifferent stretching of her mouth.
When Angel was a child, four or five, she discovered that she was possessed of a minor, yet astonishing, magical power. If—say, when she’d just woken from a nap—she watched the closed blinds or the dots on the couch, and yielded to a certain tug on her eyes and allowed her vision to slide out of focus, then the stripes of the blinds or the white dots on the couch would lift, levitate apart from the object, until eventually Angel blinked, and everything snapped back into place. This power was a marvelous secret that the universe offered up just for her.
She depended on her secret power. When her mother was giggling with this or that boyfriend in the living room, or, just as frequently, weeping and yelling, Angel would go to her room, lie with her cheek against her comforter, and focus her attention on not focusing at all. Her vision would blur but for the tiny pink fleur-de-lis pattern on her sheets, and the sounds outside her bedroom door would fade. Two or four or five fleurs-de-lis would rise off the percale, hovering there until Angel released them. Angel could control and dismantle the world in her tiny, secret way.
Then, when they were nine, Priscilla had shown Angel a large softcover book of 3-D Magic Eye illusions, colorful stereogram images that looked like wrapping paper but concealed silhouettes of sports cars and cats.
Priscilla, bossy as ever, had shoved the book into Angel’s face and launched into detailed instructions. “It’ll take a while, but you’ll get it.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Angel said, cutting her off.
“Well, what is it, then?” Priscilla challenged.
“A mushroom.” Angel traced the outline, her forefinger passing through the translucent, floating image.
Angel was astonished to learn that others shared this gift, then stricken, because she now saw her superpower for what it was, a phenomenon as common as it was unimportant, good only for selling cheap books and posters of tacky mall art.
This is how she feels now, standing with Brianna in the dark conference room. This precious, secret thing—the intimacy she’s felt for Brianna—has been exposed as tawdry, unreciprocated, shameful. She thought Brianna cared for her, when Brianna was just doing her job.