“I haven’t done anything.”
“You obviously have!” she shouts. She holds up her hands, suddenly furious. Her eyes are shiny and she blinks a few times. “I thought you were different, but you’re just like the rest of them.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.” She points to the Post-it on my affirmation wall. “Anger is a kind of murder you commit in your heart. See? You’re starting already.”
“What?” I ask.
“That was Jesus who said that.”
I look from the Post-it to her. Her cheeks are framed with palm-size patches of redness.
“Angel, I’ve read exactly one line of this Bible. And you know what? I liked that line. In fact, maybe I’ll read more.” I lift the Bible and pantomime reading. “Oh, now interesting! This is soooo much better than science. Evolution is wrong! Praise the Lord!”
Angel’s face twists into the start of a smile. “No, fuck you, you’re not going to make me laugh.”
“Just listen to this, Angel. ‘Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’ Isn’t that interesting? I think it is. You can think something’s interesting without drinking the lemonade.”
“Kool-Aid.”
“Whatever.”
She sits opposite me against the wall. “I guess.”
Farther down the skyway, I can hear the faint voices of Rashida and Tracy arguing over a game of Old Maid in their cell. “I went to youth group, too.”
Angel looks up. “Are you trying to make me disown you?”
“I’m not ashamed,” I say. “It’s not as bad as you make it out to be. They’re just looking for answers.”
“Are you going back there?”
“Maybe,” I say. “But probably not.”
“Why?”
“They’re not looking for the same answers as me.”
She nods slowly. “You know why I really hate Tracy? She’s just as fucked up as the rest of us, but she hides behind religion, like that somehow erases the fact that she knifed her English teacher’s wife.”
“She did?” I ask.
Angel nods. “Tracy looks sweet as pie, but behind that face, she’s all kinda crazy-ass. She had a crush on her teacher and when she saw him in the school parking lot with his wife one day, she went ape shit. The lady almost died.”
“But we’ve all done stuff, Angel,” I say, picturing the pool of blood steaming in the air around Philip Lancaster’s body. “I heard this girl Taylor tell a story during youth group. She said she had an epiphany during surgery. That she felt God. And I just think, as long as I live, I’ll never feel as sure as her about anything.” I rest my chin on my knee. “I know what you say about the Christian girls, but she believed it was true. She was so sure.”
“Yeah, I heard that story before. Gets all kindsa mileage with the Jesus Freaks. Personally, I think it’s bull. Those blind-but-now-I-see moments, miracles, all those things you see on the news about the Virgin Mary on toast, I don’t got time for that shit. There’s no easy explanations for nothing in the world.”
“Religion’s not necessarily easy.”
“It is, though, because if there’s ever any errors, you can blame it on having faith. ‘Oh yeah, according to carbon dating the Earth’s older than four thousand years, unlike what the Bible says, but we’ll ignore that because we just have faith.’”
“Not everyone who’s religious talks like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“All nasally.”
“Well, they do in my head,” Angel says.
“You hear a lot of things in your head, don’t you?”
She lets a little grin touch her mouth and runs her long fingernails over the gaps between her cornrows. “If God is real,” she says, “he’s part of science. But he’s never shown up. He’s like a deadbeat dad you wait for all day after T-ball practice. He’s not in DNA. Not in the Large Hadron Collider. Not in thousands of years of fossils. Not a shadow of him. But if he ever does show up, it’ll be science’s job to explain him. Until then, we deal with what we’ve got in front of us.”
I look at what’s in front of me. A blinding prison jumpsuit. Arms with no hands. Angel.
My head jerks up. “Then teach me.”
“What?” she asks.
“Teach me about the universe.”
? ? ?
Angel moves around the cell excitedly, drawing up book lists and websites I need to visit.
“During your next rec time, you’ll check out the complete works of Carl Sagan.”
“Who’s that?”