“I’ll . . . I’ll check it out,” I say. “If I have time.”
After he leaves, I turn the cover of the book. It still has the price sticker from a secondhand bookstore in Missoula, revealing he’d paid a whole two dollars, but I’m still grateful for it in a way I can’t quite articulate.
There’s plenty in the book I don’t understand, and those parts stay behind, bolted to the pages, but there are things I can skim from the surface like fat from a milk pail, and I sort through all the information with something like fingers, fingers inside my mind.
I read one paragraph over and over again.
“I don’t know about ghosts,” Tess says, “but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we’re alive. A very easy way to feel ’em go is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at all.”
I lie on my bed and stare up at the bunk above me, but the effect isn’t at all the same. Even looking out the milky skylight doesn’t do it. And, I wonder for the first time, when will I see the stars again? Where can I find some on short notice? I want to know if it would work for me, like it did for Tess. I want to know if there’s even anything left inside me that could fly so effortlessly.
Chapter 48
“Hey,” Angel whispers after lights-out. “Check it out.”
She’s crouched beside my bunk, holding a key card between two fingers.
“Did you steal that?” I ask, squinting at her groggily.
“Hardly,” she says. “You know I’m in good with the guards.”
“What did you do?” I ask warily.
“Christ, I’m not dealing drugs or something. So maybe I worked out a deal with Benny that I wouldn’t open up anybody’s head for a month, and maybe I made good on the bargain today, and she had to make good on hers or risk me telling Mrs. New she watches soap operas in the back office when she’s supposed to be supervising group therapy, but whatever, a good magician never reveals her secrets.” I can tell Angel is excited, but not the agitated kind of excitement like after she takes her medication.
I push aside the covers of my bed. “Where are we going?”
She looks over her shoulder at me. “A holy place.”
? ? ?
We tiptoe out of the cell—Angel must have spent some time planning this, because somehow it’s unlocked—and walk up a set of stairs that end at a heavy metal door. It’s been propped open by a brick.
“We have to be quiet,” Angel whispers. “If we wake any of the girls, Benny’ll have my balls.”
She shoves her bulk into the door, and a warm breeze touches my face.
We stand on the jail roof, a flat surface covered in popcorn-looking concrete that crunches beneath my shoes. Before us, Missoula stretches in a flat grid of lights, bisected by the slick black of the river. Red taillights twine through streets in an infinite swirl.
“It’s perfect conditions to see the Perseid meteor showers.” She walks across the roof to sit on the edge, her legs dangling over the side. She tilts her head skyward.
I duck instinctively when I see the first light flinging itself across the sky. A dozen more streak past in the first minute and, even though they are less brilliant than out in the forest, the way they have to fight through a gauze of light from the city, they still could almost be missiles crashing toward us.
“Those are meteors,” she says. “They’re balls of rock that fling across the galaxy. The Earth’s atmosphere, it’s like this invisible cocoon. Millions of meteors hit the atmosphere every day, but we’re protected.”
“Why’d you bring me up here?” I ask.
“It’s part of your education about the universe.”
I shake my head.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“The Prophet said the Community was covered in a bubble that God made, and these lights were bombs the Gentiles sent toward us.”
“So? The people in olden times thought meteors were the tears of God. They needed something to explain it.”
“Why?”
“I guess people can’t be content without answers, even if they’re wrong. We’d rather have a lie than a question that we can never know the answer to.”
I nod. “You know one thing the Prophet never answered? That nobody ever wondered about but me? People. What made us. Where we came from.”
“But you know that already,” Angel says. “From the stars.”
“What?”