What if he says we belong together?

Well, then you’ll have to deal with that. But at least you won’t be running away.

I think it’s more of a brisk walk.

Whatever.

I’m having an argument with myself. And I’m losing.

So not a good sign.

Chapter 3

Other People’s Secrets

Mom comes out of her office the moment she hears me step through the front door.

“Hey,” she says. “How was school?”

“Everybody talked about my hair, but it was fine.”

“We could try to dye it again,” she suggests.

I shrug. “It must mean something, right? God wants me to be blond this year.”

“Right,” she says. “You want a cookie, blondie?”

“Do birds fly?” I scamper after her into the kitchen, where, sure enough, I smell something wonderful baking in the oven. “Chocolate chip?”

“Of course.” The buzzer goes off, and she puts on an oven mitt, takes the sheet of cookies out of the oven, and sets it on the counter. I pull up a stool on the other side of her and sit. It feels so normal it’s weird, after what’s happened, all the drama and fight-for-your-life stuff and serious soul-searching, and now . . . cookies.

The night of the fire I came home assuming we’d have this big tell-all, and everything would be out in the open now that the stuff from my vision had happened. But when I got home, Mom was asleep, asleep on the most important night of my life, and I didn’t wake her, didn’t blame her because we were both, at the time, so literally fried, and she’d been attacked, almost died and all. But still. It wasn’t exactly how I thought my purpose would go.

It’s not like we haven’t talked. We have, although mostly it was a debriefing of what’s already happened. No new information. No revelations. No explanations. At one point I asked, “So what happens now?” and she said, “I don’t know, honey,” and that was it. I would have pressed her about it, but she kept getting this look on her face, this bleak expression, her eyes so full of pain and sadness, like she’s so incredibly disappointed in me and how my purpose turned out. Of course she would never come right out and say that, never tell me that I’ve screwed up everything, that she thought I would be better than that, that she thought I’d make the right choices when my time came, that I’d prove myself worthy to be called an angel-blood. But the look says it all.

“So,” she says as we wait for the cookies to cool. “I thought you’d be home a while ago. Did you go to see Tucker?”

And already I need to make a big decision: to tell her about Angel Club, or not tell her.

Okay. So I think about how the first thing out of Angela’s mouth when it came to rules was not to tell anybody, especially the adults, and then I think about the way Christian refused, just like that, said that he tells his uncle everything.

Mom and I used to have that. Used to. Now I have no desire to share this stuff with her, not about Angel Club, not about the weird recurring dream I’ve been having, not about how I feel about what happened the day of the fire or what my true purpose might have been. I don’t want to get into it right now.

So I don’t.

“I was at the Pink Garter,” I say. “With Angela.”

Not technically a lie.

I brace myself for her to tell me that Angela, while full of good intentions, is going to get us all in deep trouble someday. She knows that any time spent with Angela is time spent talking about angel-bloods and Angela’s many theories.

Instead she says, “Oh, that’s nice,” and uses a spatula to slide the cookies onto a wire rack on the counter. I steal one.

“That’s nice?” I repeat incredulously.

“Get a plate, please,” she tells me, and I do. Then, as I’m sitting there with a mouthful of chocolatey goodness, she says, “It was never my intention to shelter you from other angel-bloods forever. I only wanted you to live normal lives for as long as possible, to know what it’s like to be human. But now you’re old enough, you’ve been through your visions, you’ve had a glimpse of the evil in this world, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to start learning what it truly means to be an angel-blood. Which means hanging out with others like you.”

I wonder if she still means Angela, or if now she’s talking about Christian. If she assumes being with him is my purpose. Not very women’s lib of her, I think, if she believes my entire purpose on this earth is to hook up with some guy.

“Milk?” she asks, then goes to the fridge and pours me a glass.

And this is the point where I finally get the guts to ask her. “Mom, am I going to be punished?”

“Why?” She reaches for a cookie. “Did you do something today I should know about?”

I shake my head. “No. My purpose. Am I going to be punished because I didn’t, you know, fulfill it? Am I going to hell or something?”

She halfway chokes on the cookie, then takes a quick sip of my milk.

“That’s not really how it works,” she says.

“How does it work, then? Will I get a second chance? Is there anything else that I’m going to be expected to do?”

She’s quiet for a minute. I can practically see the wheels turning in her head, deciding how much she’s going to tell me. This aggravates the crap out of me, of course, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. So I wait.

“Every angel-blood is given a purpose,” she says after what feels like an eternity. “For some that purpose manifests itself in a single event, a singular moment in time where we are led to be at a specific place at a specific time, to do a specific thing. For others . . .” She glances down at her hands, choosing her words carefully. “Their purpose can involve more.”

“More?” I ask.

“More than a single event.”

I stare at her. This has got to be the strangest conversation any mother and daughter has ever had over milk and cookies. “How much more?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. We’re all different. Our purposes are all different.”

“Which was it for you?”

“For me . . .” She clears her throat delicately. “It was more than one event,” she admits.

Not good enough.

“Mom, come on,” I demand. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”

Inexplicably, she smiles this tiny smile, like she finds me funny. “It’s going to be okay, Clara,” she says. “You’ll figure it out when you’re supposed to figure it out. I know that’s frustrating to hear. Believe me, I know.”

I swallow the rising craziness that’s churning in my stomach. “How? How do you know?”

She sighs. “Because my purpose lasted more than one hundred years.”

My mouth drops open.

One hundred years.

“So . . . so you’re saying that it might not be over?”

“I’m saying that your purpose is more complicated than simply completing a task.”

I jump to my feet. I can’t keep sitting down for this. “You couldn’t have told me this, oh, I don’t know—before the fire?”

“I can’t give you the answers, Clara, even if I know them,” she says. “If I did it might change the outcome. You just have to trust me when I say that you’ll get the answers when you need them.”

And there’s the look again, the sadness. Like I’m disappointing her right this minute. But I also see something else in her luminous blue eyes: faith. She still has faith. That there’s some kind of plan for our lives, some kind of meaning, or direction, behind all of this. I sigh. I’ve never had her kind of faith, and I’m afraid I never will. But I find that even though I obviously have some issues with her, I do trust her. With my life. Not only because she’s my mother, but because when it really counted, she saved it.