“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but please?”
I blink for a moment, glance over at her dad standing twenty feet away from me.
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
The school letsme check out Angel without incident or parental approval since Willa put the whole family on the kids’ lists. Nate brings her up to the office and she looks unhurt, though also unhappy. Her eyes are puffy like she’s been crying; she takes after her dad in that her pale complexion hides nothing.
I pull her into a side hug. She’s already as tall as me, probably taller in her platform sneakers, which is startling.
I nod at Nate who gives me a meaningful glance, the meaning of which I cannot decipher beyond “godspeed.”
“Should we go to my fancy new house?” I ask and she smiles. Not her gap-tooth grin, but I will take it.
“Yes, but Artie is going to be so jealous, we have to bring him later.”
“Deal.”
She throws her backpack in the back seat and sits with me in the front, grabbing and unlocking my phone from the console to put on a playlist. “Who told you my password?”
“It’s my birthday, it’s been your code for a million years.”
“A million,” I agree, and don’t point out that it’s Artie’s birthday too. “So, do you want to talk about it?”
The song is almost halfway over before she gives a heavy sigh. “It’s stupid.”
“I bet it’s not.”
“This guy in my science class was talking about how probably none of the girls in the class would be owners of big companies, and I told him that Vanessa is a CEO and my mom is a lawyer so, like, obviously that’s not true.”
“Obviously.”
“And he said that she probably onlygotto be CEO because of nepotism and that Mom would probably quit being a lawyer because she just had a baby. But, literally, that’s so dumb because she became a lawyer when she hadtwobabies and—” Angel throws her hands up and makes a frustrated groan. “I told him that he’s an idiot and should stop listening to his sexist senator dad and his golf partners and pick up a book for once. And then he calledmesensitive and told me I couldn’t take a joke.”
I give her a sympathetic look and shake my head at the bull headed confidence of a kid so obviously repeating after his parents. Kids aren’t born misogynists.
“I hate when people say that.” In fact, when I was in high school and people said that I couldn’t take a joke, I was getting suspended for fighting. So it appears Angel is at least more level-headed than I was. Her mother is to thank, I think.
“Me too! Gah, it’s like,” Angel looks out the windshield, searching for the words, “sometimes I get so mad and I don’t know where the feelings should go. I almost started crying in there, so I just left the class and he was acting like I was so unreasonable for calling him out for being an asshole.”
I don’t chastise her for cussing because her mom’s not here, plus, I also think he sounds like a little asshole.
“Nate didn’t have a class so I went in there and he let me use his phone.”
We’ve reached the end of the story, and I am quiet while I think hard about what to say. I don’t want to rile her up more because it’s obvious to me she’s feeling big feelings. It was always my impulse to channel big feelings into rage, and that got me into trouble. In fact, it’sstillgetting me into trouble.
I pull up to the apartment and scan us into the parking garage beneath the building before turning my shoulders to face her.
“I’m sorry, Little. That sounds really, really shitty,” I say, and her shoulders sag a little.
“Thanks,” she says, but isn’t looking at me. She looks so beaten down, my heart hurts for her. “I think I was embarrassed.”
I squeeze her arm three times. “Come on.” She follows me out of the car, quiet while we make our way to the penthouse.
She’s confounded by me having to use a key to even hit the button for the top floor and her jaw drops open when the metal doors slide open into our foyer.
“The elevator opensintoyour house?”
