He smirks. This guy is a master at smirks. “You don’t try very hard to hide the fact that you don’t like me.”
I look away, embarrassed that it’s so obvious. “I like you, Phen.”
“Right,” he says sarcastically.
“Well, I want to like you, anyway.” That much is true.
“Why?” he asks. “Why do you care?”
“Because Angela cares.”
“Ah. I guess that makes you a good friend.”
“I guess.”
“So you’re trying to like me, but you can’t quite manage it,” he says with a laugh. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know what you are,” I answer. Might as well be honest.
He lifts his arms palms up, in a gesture that says, What you see is what you get.
“No,” I say. “You’re an angel.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
“But you don’t act like an angel. You don’t feel like one. You don’t talk like one.”
“I see. Do you know many angels?” he asks.
Oh, crap. I do not want this conversation to become about me and the angels I know. The angel, singular. I turn away, watch the last wedge of the sun disappear behind the horizon. Below us in the square, the people are like tiny dark ants against the stone, milling around, and I suddenly feel so removed from them, like we’re different species, them and me, and I’m alone, watching them but unable to be part of their world.
“We’re not all alike, you know,” Phen says then. “Angels.”
“I get that. But you look like one of us, and you’re not. So I guess I don’t understand what you’re playing at, or what you want with Angela.”
I look up at him. All the humor is gone from his eyes. He rakes his fingers through his hair, then sighs heavily.
“I never fit in with the others,” he says after a thoughtful pause. “Never. The joyous ones with their optimism, their duties, their never-wavering faith in what He wanted. The Watchers who loved the humans so much it killed them to watch them die like pretty butterflies. The sad ones, who hated the humans for their free will, and hated Him for giving it to them. I don’t love or hate humans. I respect them. They shape themselves, in a way that we angels do not. They tell lies and sleep around and curse, and they try to define themselves so valiantly. Who am I? they keep asking. Why am I here?”
I don’t know what to say to this. That’s all I’ve really been asking myself for the past two years. Is that what makes me human, I wonder, that I keep asking this question?
“I think Angela is beautifully human, even if she is more than that. So are you. And yes, I’m an impostor. I make myself seem young and I pretend. It’s the only way I can feel anything.”
He sounds tired, sad. Maybe I’ve been overly judgmental about this whole thing, I think. I haven’t had an open mind, that’s for sure. But I still can’t read him. I can’t look into his heart and know whether his intentions are good or bad. So, almost without thinking, I turn and put my hand over his on the rail.
His eyes flash up to mine. His skin is cool, smooth, but hard, like touching a statue. He gives me a sorrowful smile.
“It takes a great deal of energy, being human, even if it’s only on the outside,” he says, and for a moment he lets me see the layer of him that’s under the surface: his spirit, a blurring like someone is smudging charcoal around him. His soul is gray. Cold. Almost colorless. I feel how weary he is with himself, how resigned that this existence is all that there will ever be for him, day after day after day, until the end of the world, and even then he doesn’t know what will happen or if anything will truly change.
“Humans fear death so much, but there is no death,” he whispers. “There is only the illusion of it. We can never cease to be. We must stay like this. Forever.”
Trust an angel to make eternity sound like a huge bummer.
“You should leave Angela alone,” I say then, firmly. Because Angela deserves someone good. Phen may not be evil. But he’s not good. She deserves someone who will be crazy about her for her, her zany intelligence and spurts of kindness, her little quirks. Not just for her “humanness.” She deserves someone real.
Phen pulls his hand away, smirks again, and the blurring around him stops, solidifies. He’s done showing me the truth.
“I tried to resist her,” he says. “Have you ever tried to say no to her?”
“You clearly didn’t try hard enough.”
“It’s a tad hypocritical,” he says, his voice harder, “you disapproving of me for pretending to be something I’m not.”
“Oh yeah? And why is that?”
“Because you’re not human either. But you want to be.”
My breath catches. It’s true. I’m more angel than human. But he can’t know that. Can he?
“I’m human,” I protest. I want to lie, tell him that I’m only a quarter angel, that my angel blood is so diluted that it hardly matters, that I’m a smidge away from being completely normal, but I’m afraid he’ll see right through me and that will only make things worse. I fortify the mental wall I’ve built between us. “I’m not pretending anything.”
“You’re a child pretending to sit at the grown-ups’ table,” he says.
“If I’m a child, then so is Angela,” I shoot back.
“Indeed.” He sighs like this place suddenly bores him, tugs his hand through his hair again. “We should go find her. It’s getting dark.”
ANGELA
The Vatican didn’t go well. I can see it all over Clara’s face when I get back from the bathroom. She doesn’t like Phen. She’ll never like him. She thinks he’s too good, too special, too angelic for me. I’m only a Dimidius, after all.
“Where does she get off, judging me?” I rant to him later, after I’ve snuck out and basically attacked him back at his flat. He strokes my hair, trying to pacify me, but I’m still mad. “I mean, it’s not like she’s so flawless.”
“She’s worried about you,” he says.
I glance up at him. “Don’t do that. Don’t act like you’re endangering me or something. I thought we were past that.”
“I’m an angel,” he says simply. “What we have isn’t normal. Clara wants something normal for you.”