“Well what?”
“Did that help you make up your mind?”
By way of an answer, I twisted my fingers into his soft nut-brown hair and pulled him toward me.
“I guess it did,” he said with undisguised pleasure.
That day taught me that I wanted more than his company; I craved his touch. There wasn’t a doubt left in my mind. I could feel my face burning where he had touched me, and all I wanted was for him to do it again. Just hours earlier I had truly believed there was no option but to cut myself off from him because I could see no way to make him understand who I really was. Now
I saw that there was another way. It would be seen as a serious transgression and punishable by who knew what, but it felt less frightening than parting from him. If it meant sparing us the pain of separation, I would face the consequences.
All that was required of me was to let down my guard and let Xavier in.
“I want us to be together,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more.”
Xavier stroked my palm and entwined our fingers. His face was so close the tips of our noses were touching. He leaned in to whisper in my ear. “If you want me . . . you’ve got me.”
I couldn’t stop myself from sighing aloud as he kissed a path from my ear down to my neck. The physical surroundings of the classroom melted like snow in the sun.
“There’s just one thing,” I said, pushing him away with some difficulty. He was watching me with those piercing blue eyes, and I almost lost my train of thought. “This isn’t going to work unless you know the truth.” If I cared about Xavier as much as my beating heart told me I did then he deserved the truth. If it turned out that the truth was too much for him to deal with, then maybe it meant my feelings weren’t returned and I would have to accept that. Either way it was time for the charade to end. Xavier had to see the uncensored version of me; not the idealized version in his head. In other words, he had to know me, warts and all.
“I’m all ears,” he said looking at me expectantly.
“Not now. This isn’t going to be easy, and I need more space than we’ve got here.”
“Then where?” he asked, mystified.
“Are you going to the beach bonfire this weekend?” I asked quickly as students began to drift in for the next class.
“I was going to ask if you wanted to go together.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll tell you everything then.”
Xavier kissed me swiftly and left the classroom. I gripped the edge of the nearest desk feeling short of breath, as though I’d just run a marathon.
Defying Gravity
All week long the beach bonfire loomed in my mind. What I planned to do terrified me, but I was also strangely excited. Once the decision was made, it felt as though a great weight had lifted from my mind. After all the time I’d spent in internal debate, I now felt surprisingly sure of myself. In my head I rehearsed over and over the words I would use to tell Xavier the truth, making subtle adjustments each time.
Xavier was now behaving as though we were a couple, which I loved. It put us in our own exclusive world that no one else had access to. It meant that we took our relationship seriously and believed it had a future. It wasn’t some infatuation we were likely to outgrow. We were making a commitment to each other. Every time I thought about this, I couldn’t keep my face from cracking into a broad smile. Of course I remembered Ivy and Gabriel’s warning and their belief that there was no chance of a future for us, but somehow that didn’t matter anymore. I felt like the skies could open and rain fire and brimstone, but nothing could wipe the smile from my face. That was the effect he had on me—an explosion of happiness in my chest, scattering like little beads and making my whole body shiver and tingle.
A life with Xavier was full of promise. But would he still want that when I revealed my identity to him?
I tried to conceal my elation from Ivy and Gabriel. It had taken them long enough to recover from my last escapade with Xavier, and I didn’t think they could handle another one.
Whenever I sat down with them I felt like a double agent and kept wondering whether my face might betray me. But just because my siblings could read human minds, didn’t mean they could read mine, and my acting skills must have improved because my new enthusiasm passed without comment. It struck me that I finally had an understanding of the expression “the calm before the storm.” Everything seemed to be going smoothly, but I knew that appearances could be deceptive. There was an explosion waiting to happen. Tension, anger, and guilt were bubbling below the surface of our happy-family act, ready to erupt the moment Ivy and Gabriel discovered my betrayal.
“One of my juniors asked me today if there’s such a thing as Limbo,” Gabriel said over dinner one night. I found it ironic that the conversation had turned to punishment for sins.
Ivy put down her fork. “What did you say?”
“I said nobody knows.”
“Why didn’t you say yes?” I asked.
“Because good deeds have to be voluntary,” my brother explained. “If a person knows for sure they’ll be judged, then they’ll act accordingly.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “What’s Limbo like anyway?” I knew enough about Heaven and Hell, but no one had ever told me about the eternal midpoint.
“It comes in several different forms,” said Ivy. “It can be a waiting room, a train station.”
“Some souls say it’s worse than Hell,” Gabriel added.
“That’s ridiculous,” I scoffed. “What could be worse?”
“Eternal nothingness,” said Ivy. “Year upon year of waiting for a train that’s never coming, waiting for someone to call your name. People start to lose all sense of time, it blurs into one never-ending stretch. They beg to go to Heaven, try to throw themselves into Hell, but there is no way out. The souls wander aimlessly. And it never ends, Bethany. Centuries can go by on earth and they will still be there.”
“Sounds like crap,” was all I could think to say. Gabriel and Ivy looked surprised for a moment before bursting into laughter.
I wondered if an angel could be exiled to Limbo.
At Tuesday lunchtime I sat with Molly and the girls on the lawn in the afternoon sunshine.
Around us green buds tipped the branches of the trees, bringing everything back to life. The imposing main building of Bryce Hamilton loomed behind us, casting a shadow over the benches arranged in a circle around the broad trunk of an ancient oak with ivy twining around its trunk in an amorous embrace. If we looked west, we had a view of the ocean in the distance stretching to the horizon, clouds drifting lazily overhead. The girls lounged on the lush grass, letting the sun warm their faces. I was feeling bold and ventured to tug my skirt up above my knees.
“Way to go, babe!” The girls applauded my progress, commenting that I was becoming
“one of them” before falling into their usual routine of gossiping about teachers and absent friends.
“Miss Lucas is such a cow,” Megan complained. “She’s making me redo my Russian
Revolution assignment because it was too ‘sloppy.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think it means you did it in the half hour before it was due,” Hayley said. “What did you expect—an A plus?”
Megan shrugged. “I reckon she’s just jealous because she’s hairy as a yeti.”
“You should write a letter of complaint,” a girl named Tara said with a serious expression.
“She’s totally discriminating against you.”
“I agree she’s defs picking on you,” Molly began, and then fell suddenly silent, her gaze locked on a figure striding across the lawn.
I turned to identify the source of her fixation and saw Gabriel making his way toward the music center, some distance from where we sat. He cut a solitary figure with his faraway look and a guitar case slung over one shoulder. He had abandoned school protocol regarding dress sense some time ago, and today he was wearing his torn jeans with a white T-shirt under a pinstriped vest. No one had dared to query it. And why would they? Gabriel was so popular there would have been uproar among the students if he resigned. I noticed that Gabe looked so at ease with his surroundings. He had an easy gait and his movements were fluid. He seemed to be coming in our direction, which made Molly sit bolt upright and frantically smooth down her wild curls. Gabriel, however, suddenly cut across in a different direction. Lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t as much as glanced in our direction. Molly looked crestfallen.
“What can we say about Mr. Church?” Taylah speculated when she spotted him, eager to resume their usual sport. I had been quiet for so long, absorbed in my fantasy of being stranded on a secluded island somewhere in the Caribbean or held captive on a pirate ship, waiting for