She had no friends yet. No real friends. Melissa, who was two years older and a senior, could make friends anywhere. She was that kind of girl. Dana wasn’t. She knew she was a difficult person to like because she was inside her own head a lot of the time. The switch from nine years of Catholic school to tenth grade in a public school wasn’t helping. Dana was unnerved by the lack of structure here—she was used to everyone being in uniforms and everyone following the rules. She was struggling to fit in at school, while Melissa acted like she’d been freed from prison.
Dana set the Bible aside and got up feeling stiff and sore, so she unrolled her yoga mat. That was something new to try. Melissa had gotten hooked on it back in San Diego and swore that yoga was a pathway to enlightenment. Dana was just happy enough to have something to untangle the knots in her muscles. The mountain pose was an easy place to start. She stood tall with her feet together, shoulders relaxed, weight evenly distributed through her soles, arms at her sides. Then she took a deep breath and raised her hands overhead, palms facing each other with arms straight. She reached up toward the ceiling with her fingertips. And held them there, concentrating on breathing and letting her muscles relax.
Yoga was probably another thing the girls in school would think was weird.
There was a definite animosity in school that everyone accepted as normal. It was some kind of invisible dividing line between military brats like themselves and townies. She’d seen it in San Diego and it was definitely here in Craiger—although it never seemed to touch Melissa. Her sister was always able to go back and forth between those groups, and people just seemed to accept her. And like her. It was never that easy for Dana.
If anyone at school here knew what Dana was dreaming about lately, they’d really stay away. They wouldn’t just treat her as a stranger.… They’d know she was a freak.
That was why she’d kept the dreams to herself.
After all, how could she ever explain that she’d seen the devil?
She hadn’t told Melissa the whole truth tonight, either. She hadn’t told her that she’d been having these dreams ever since they’d moved here—not just once but almost every night. There was something about the town. It wasn’t right in some way that Dana simply could not describe. Or understand.
She tired of the mountain pose and got facedown on the mat to do the cobra. She placed her hands flat with her thumbs directly under her shoulders, legs extended with the tops of her feet on the mat. Then she tightened her pelvic floor—an action that always made her feel a little weird and self-conscious—tucked her hips downward, and squeezed her glutes. Then very slowly and steadily she pushed against the floor to raise her head and shoulders and upper torso while keeping her lower stomach and legs in place. At the point of maximum lift, she tried to push her chest toward the opposite wall. The idea was to do the movement, relax, and repeat, but she held it, feeling the muscles in her lower back unclench. There were two small pops as something in her spine moved into place. That shift deflated a ball of tension that had been sitting in her lower back all day.
Okay, so maybe there was something to the yoga stuff after all.
She relaxed, and repeated, again holding the pose.
Through the wall Melissa sang along with the raspy-voiced lead singer. Talking about being taken by the wind. Talking about being promised heaven. That triggered another flash of the dreams Dana was having. The dreams were different and they came in fragments, like she was trying to adjust an antenna on a TV station just out of range. There were bits of images, snatches of words, but no real story in any of them. One thing was constant, though, and it made Dana feel strange, confused, and even a little guilty: in her dreams, the devil always looked like an angel. So pure and handsome. Dana knew that Lucifer had been the Angel of Light. It was confusing, because in Catholic school she’d always imagined the devil as hideous and ugly. What if he wasn’t? What if he was beautiful? Maybe, she thought, that would explain why it was easy for some people to fall under his spell.
The angel she dreamed about had kind eyes and gentle hands and a smile that was a little sad. He sat on the edge of her bed and whispered secrets to Dana, secrets she could not remember when she woke up.
But she knew it was important to the devil that she believed him. That she believed he was not evil. That he was misunderstood. That he was really good.
Deep in her heart Dana wondered if there was even such a thing as evil. After all, if God created the universe and everything in it, then he had to have created evil and the devil, also. And why would he have done that? Didn’t it make more sense that the devil was helping God by chasing confused people in the direction of faith and salvation?
She was sure the nuns in her old school would be furious with her for that kind of thought.