Angela wants to eat outside, find some picnic table in the mountains, maybe Jenny Lake, she says, but I can’t handle it. It makes me think of Tucker. Just being outside makes me yearn for Tucker. I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I may never go outside again. So we go to the Garter. The stage is set for Oklahoma!, complete with rows of fake corn, a broken-down wagon, trees, bushes, and a yellow farmhouse, a blue sky in the background. Angela spreads out a blanket in the middle of the stage and we sit down on it and eat our lunch.

“I’ve been studying about Black Wings,” she says, taking a big bite of a green apple.

“Is that safe? Considering what Mom said about the consciousness thing, and all that?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think I’m more conscious of them than I was before. I just know more.” She pulls out a new notebook, one of those plain, black-and-white composition books, the pages covered front and back with all that she’d gleaned about angels. Angela typically writes in a tight, loopy cursive, but the writing in her notebook is always hastily scrawled and smeared, like she can’t get the words down fast enough. She flips through the pages. I think about my own journal, which I started with such passion and determination the first week I got my vision. I haven’t touched it in months. She puts me to shame, really.

“Here,” she says. “They’re called the Moestifere, the Sorrowful Ones. I found this old book in a library in Florence that mentioned them. Sad demons, it translated.”

“Demons? But they’re supposed to be angels.”

“Demons are angels,” explains Angela. “It’s more of an artistic distinction, really. Painters would always depict angels with beautiful, white, bird wings, and so the fallen angels had to have wings, too, but it wasn’t enough to simply give them black feathers. They made them bat wings, and then it evolved to the whole horns and tail and pitchfork image that people think of now.”

“But that guy we saw in the mall, he looked like a regular man.”

“Like I said before, I think they can look however they choose to. I guess it’s how they make you feel that’s important, right? Suddenly bawling your eyes out, for example, would be a bad sign.”

“The sorrow in my vision, my mom said it could be a Black Wing.”

Angela’s expression is sympathetic. “Have you been having the vision more now?”

I nod. I’ve been having it about once a day, every day, for the past week. It only lasts a few minutes, a flash really, nothing substantial. Nothing more than what I already know: the Avalanche, the forest, walking, the fire, Christian, the words we say to each other, the touching, the hug, the flying away. I’ve been trying to ignore it.

“Mom keeps saying I need to train, but how? I can fly fine. I can carry stuff; I’m getting stronger, but it’s not my muscles that need to get stronger, right? So how can I train? What am I supposed to do?”

She chews on my questions for a minute, then says, “It’s your mind you have to train, like your mom said that one time, you have to separate yourself from all the crap, get down to the core, focus. We can do it together.” She smiles. “I’ll help you. It’s time, C. I know this thing with Tucker sucks, but you can’t really turn your back on this. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So let’s do it,” she says, clapping her hands together and jumping up like we’re going to start right this minute. “No time to lose. Let’s train.”

She’s right, as usual. It’s time.

Chapter 19

Corduroy Jacket

So we train. Every morning I rise with the sun, and I try not to think about Tucker. I shower, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and try not to think about Tucker. I go downstairs and make myself a smoothie—Angela has us on a raw food diet; she says it’s purer, better for the mind. I go along with it. I even add the seaweed, which, oddly, makes me think about Tucker. And fishing. And kissing. I gag it down. After breakfast there’s meditation on the front porch, which is pretty much a vain attempt not to think about Tucker. Then I go inside and spend some time on the internet. I look up the weather report, the direction and speed of the wind, and, most important, the level of the current fire danger. In these last days of August, it’s always on yellow or red alert. Always imminent.

On yellow days I pass the afternoons flapping around the back woods with the duffel bag, exercising my wings, adding more and more weight each time, trying not to think of Tucker in my arms. Sometimes Angela comes with me and we fly side by side, weaving patterns into the air. If I work hard enough, push myself long enough, I’m able to banish Tucker from my mind for a few hours. And sometimes I have the vision and don’t think of him at all for a while.

Angela’s got me documenting the vision. She has a spreadsheet. On the days that she isn’t hanging out, helping me, she usually calls around dinnertime, and I can hear the music from Oklahoma! in the background, and she grills me about the vision. She gave me a little notebook that I keep in the back pocket of my jeans, and if I have the vision I’m supposed to drop everything (and when I have the vision, I usually drop everything, anyway) and write it down. Time. Place. Duration. Every facet of the vision I can remember. Every detail.

It’s because of this that I begin to notice the variations. At first I assume the vision’s exactly the same every time, over and over again, but when I have to write it down I realize that there are small differences from day to day. The gist is still the same: I’m in the forest, the fire approaches, I find Christian, and we fly away. Every single time I wear the purple jacket. Every time Christian wears his black fleece. These things seem constant, unchangeable. But sometimes I climb the hill from a different angle, or I find Christian standing a few steps to the right or left from the day before, or we recite our lines: “It’s you,” “Yes, it’s me,” in a different way or a different order. And the sorrow, I notice, changes. Sometimes I feel the ache of it from the first moment. Other times, I won’t feel it until I see Christian, and then it crashes over me like a breaking wave. Sometimes I cry, and sometimes my attraction to Christian, the magnetism between us, overwhelms the grief. One day we fly away in one direction, and the next day we fly away in the other.

I don’t know how to explain it. Angela thinks the variations could be tiny alternate versions of the future, each based on a series of choices I will make on that day. This makes me wonder: How much of this is choice? Am I a player in this scenario or a puppet? I guess, in the end, it doesn’t matter. It is what it is: my destiny.