“So what are they?”
She opens her eyes, her irises a flash of eager gold.
“The seventh is ours,” she says.
Okay. “So what does that mean?”
Her face falls, like maybe she was expecting me to know the answer and share it with her. “Well, I know that the number seven is like the most significant of all the numbers.”
“Why, because there are seven days in a week?”
“Yes,” she says, completely straight-faced. “Seven days in a week. Seven notes on the music scale. Seven colors in the spectrum.”
She is seriously obsessed with this. But I guess that comes as no real surprise. It’s Angela.
“Huh. So your vision is brought to you by the number seven,” I joke. I can’t help but think of Sesame Street. This episode is brought to you by the number twelve and the letter Z.
“Hey, C, this is serious,” she says. “Seven is the number of perfection and divine completion. It’s God’s number.”
“God’s number,” I repeat. “But what does it mean, Ange? ‘The seventh is ours’?”
“I don’t know,” she confesses, frowning. “I have considered that it might be an object of some kind. Or a date, I suppose. But …” She grabs my hand. “Here, come with me.”
She pulls me across the quad again, essentially retracing the route I used to get here, all the way out into the arcade, where there’s a group of black statues, a replica of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, six mournful-looking men with ropes around their necks. I don’t know the history or what doom they’re supposed to be going toward, but they’re clearly walking to their deaths, which I’ve always found weird and unsettling to run into in the middle of Stanford’s bustling campus. Kind of a downer.
“I see them, in my vision.” Angela pulls me past the burghers, until we’re standing at the top of the steps looking out at the Oval and beyond it Palm Drive, the long street that’s lined with giant palm trees and marks the official entrance to the university. The sun is setting. Students are playing Frisbee in the grass wearing shorts and tank tops, sunglasses, flip-flops. Others are stretched out under trees, studying. Birds are singing, bicycles whirring by. A car makes its way around the circle with a surfboard strapped to the roof.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think: October in California.
“It happens here.” Angela stops and plants her feet. “Right here.”
I look down. “What, you mean where we’re standing?”
She nods. “I’m going to come from that direction.” She points to the left. “And I’m going to climb up these five little steps, and there’s going to be someone waiting for me, right here.”
“The man in the gray suit.” I remember her telling me.
“Yes. And I’m going to tell him, ‘The seventh is ours.’”
“Do you know who he is?”
She makes an irritated noise in the back of her throat, like I am bursting her “guess how brilliant I am” bubble by bringing up something that she doesn’t know. “It feels like I recognize him, in the vision, but he’s got his back to me. I don’t ever see his face.”
“Ah, one of those.” I think back to the days when I had my first vision, the forest fire, the boy watching it, and it was frustrating as all get-out that I could never see what he looked like. It took me a while to get used to seeing Christian from the front.
“I’m going to find out, obviously,” she says, like it’s not important. “But it’s happening. Right here. This is the place.”
“Very exciting,” I say, which is what she wants to hear.
She nods, but there’s something troubled in her expression. She chews on her lip, then sighs.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She snaps out of it. “Right here,” she says again, like this spot has magical properties.
“Right here,” I agree.