“It wasn’t anything,” he mutters. “We were thirteen.”
“I know,” I say quickly. “She said it was like kissing her brother.”
Christian stares into his coffee cup. Finally he says, “If you want to find out what’s going on with Angela, you should ask her.”
“Good idea.” I pull out my cell and dial Angela’s number for like the twentieth time today, put it on speaker so Christian can hear as it goes straight to voice mail. “I’m busy right now,” Angela’s voice says in the recording. “I may or may not call you back. Depends on how much I like you.”
Beep.
“Okay, okay,” Christian says as I hang up. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a mystery.”
I let out a frustrated breath. “I’ll see her in class Tuesday,” I say. “Then we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Tuesday is three days away—you sure you can wait that long?” Christian asks playfully.
“Shut up. And anyway, it’s probably nothing. I bet you ten bucks it has to do with her purpose, not some guy. Something about ‘the seventh is ours.’”
“‘The seventh is ours’?”
“It’s what Angela says in her vision. She’s been driving herself crazy trying to figure out what it means. She keeps going to the church to make herself have the vision, but she hasn’t got much beyond the location on campus where it’s going to happen and ‘the seventh is ours,’ at least not that she’s told me lately.”
“That’s cryptic.” Christian’s eyes are thoughtful. “Wait,” he says, officially catching up. “What’s this about church? Angela makes herself have the vision? How?”
I tell him about the labyrinth and Angela’s theory that it will, under the right circumstances, induce visions. Christian sits back in his chair and stares at me like I’ve told him that the moon is made of cheese. Then he presses his fingers to his eyes as if he has a sudden headache.
“What?” I ask him.
“You never tell me anything, you know that?” He drops his hand and looks at me accusingly.
I gasp. “That is not true. I tell you loads of stuff. I tell you more than anybody. I mean, I didn’t blab to you about this thing with Angela, but it’s Angela, and you know how she is.”
“How she is? What happened to ‘there are no secrets in Angel Club’?”
“You never agreed to that,” I point out. “You had the biggest secret of us all, and you never breathed a word.”
“Is there anything else I don’t know?” he asks, ignoring my very good point about his blatant hypocrisy. “Besides the stuff with this Phen guy that you can’t tell me about?”
“I saw my dad,” I say. “But this only happened yesterday, okay? I was going to tell you today. Right now, as a matter of a fact. See, I’m telling you.”
Christian pulls back, surprise all over his face, his mind reeling with it in a way that makes me feel surprised all over again by what happened. “Your dad? Michael?”
“No, my other dad, Larry. Yes, my dad, Michael. He said he’s been given”—I inflate my voice to sound all authoritative and official—“the task of training me. We went back to my house and spent a couple hours in the backyard whacking each other with broomsticks.”
“You were in Jackson yesterday?” Christian looks dazed. He’s in that phase where he’s repeating everything I say because he can’t process it fast enough. “Training?” he says. “Training you to what?”
I become aware that we’re sitting in a public place and we shouldn’t be openly discussing any of this. I shift to talking in his mind. To use a sword.
His eyes widen. I look away, sip the last dregs of my cold coffee. The enormity of what I just told him—that I’m going to be expected to use a sword, too, to fight, maybe even to kill somebody—is really settling in for the first time.