“Only my personal hero. If he were alive today, and like way younger, I’d walk to his laboratory and get down on one knee and propose marriage right there. I’m serious. You’ll understand when you read him. And oh! I can show you his documentaries online. I hope you like turtlenecks.”
We’re stuck in our cell for the night, but Angel gives me a lecture on the Big Bang, how one moment there was nothing and the next there was an explosion of red-hot radiation that roiled out in every direction and took millions of years to cool, to form stars, to form planets, to form the animals of the earth.
“And everything we are,” Angel says at the end, “every organism, everything the universe is, comes down to that one moment. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah.” I smile. “Amazing.”
Chapter 39
The next day, when the bell rings for afternoon classes and I walk to Reading Is Power with the other girls in my class, we wait in a line in the carpeted hall while the previous class packs up and files out of the classroom. They line up against the opposite wall, gripping their binders and talking in low voices. Behind me, Rashida rattles on about a show she was watching during rec time and I nod along, half listening, because I spot Tracy in the other line, face buried in her tiny Book of Psalms.
“Hey,” someone whispers from behind her. “Bible girl.” I glance down the line and see Krystal, her dark hair up in a tight ponytail and her fingernails newly lacquered in neon teal. Her eyes are locked on Tracy.
“What?” Tracy whispers back.
“Are you?” Krystal asks, holding her fingers up in a circle.
“Am I what?”
Krystal laughs, shoving her hand in her jumpsuit pocket. “What are you doing later?”
“Homework,” Tracy says, “then some Bible study.”
“Maybe we could get together,” Krystal says. “I could help you study that Bible.”
“Really?” Tracy asks, her eyes turning bright.
The other girls are watching this exchange curiously, some with trepidation stamped on their faces, but none of them say a word. Inside the classroom, Miss Bailey is talking to a student from the other class.
Krystal sidles up to Tracy and places a hand on her shoulder, and I recall the solid feeling of her hand on my arm in the TV room, how it made my stomach squirm, but Tracy doesn’t seem to notice. “You should really come to youth group—”
“Leave her alone,” I say, taking a step over the hard carpet.
“What are you doing?” Rashida whispers behind me, and I can’t answer her because I don’t know what I’m doing, only that I am almost definitely making a terrible mistake.
Krystal turns her head, taking a step toward me. “What did you say?” Her brows are high on her forehead, her face overwhelmed by Crayon yellow circles under her eyes.
“I said, leave her alone. She didn’t do anything to you.”
“Minnow, it’s fine,” Tracy says, her fingers absently playing at the tiny cross on her neck. “Nothing’s the matter.”
“Yeah, Minnow,” Krystal says, imitating Tracy’s high voice. “We’re just having fun.” With the pads of her fingers, she pushes me in the chest and I stumble backward. The girls on either side of me shift their weight agitatedly.
“Why don’t you go have fun with someone your own size,” I say. “Benny, for instance.”
Krystal shakes her head. “What are you doing?” she asks. “You keep saying things like that, you keep getting in my way, I’ll be forced to deal with you.” She glances at my stumps. “And you’re not gonna win.”
My chest starts to ache with the same adrenaline feeling from the night under the bridge, like my heart has morphed to the size of a small engine, and I’m suddenly running off something more powerful than blood. “If you think I’m gonna stand here and let you—if you think for even a second I’ll let you hurt any of them—”
Very slowly, Krystal reaches a hand inside her pocket. She pulls out something long, off-white, and devilish. It hangs from her fist, limp as a dead rabbit.
“Lock sock,” I hear the girls whisper. “Lock sock.”
I put the words together slowly, the knotted tube sock, the sure outline of a metal combination lock in the bottom. Krystal starts to swirl the lock sock in front of her.
“You don’t have your trained gorilla here to fight for you. You better step back,” Krystal says.
Instead, I take a fumbling step toward her. I think about what Angel would do. I walk the remaining few feet between us.
“Don’t mess with me, Krystal. I got Velcro shoes and you know what that means. I’m crazy,” I breathe these last words because my lungs are shuddering. “I won’t hesitate fucking you up. My charge is assault, not conspiracy to commit like you, pansy ass.”
Krystal’s face stretches, livid. “I will kill you, hooker,” she screams, but beneath it, her voice quavers and in her face, for the first time, I see the unconscious tightness of the skin beneath her eyes. She’s afraid, and it almost knocks me backward. The feeling isn’t anything like what I imagined.