Angels Unaware

or the girls wear—the thing?” He drew his hand across his own chest to show what he meant.
“You mean binders?” I asked bluntly. He nodded. “Jewel doesn’t believe in binders. She says they keep you from breathing right. Now go back to sleep. I’ll just sit here and read my book.” I opened my Rubaiyat and pretended to read.
He was quiet for a long time after that and I thought he’d fallen back asleep. But then in the middle of the verse, And this I know: whether the one true light, kindle to love, or wrath consume me quite, his voice broke into my thoughts.
“Where will you go when you go away, Darcy?” he asked.
I put the book down and looked at him. His eyes were on the ceiling. “Lots of places.”
“Where first?” he persisted.
“Are you just asking so as you can laugh at me and get me back for laughing at you?”
“No,” he said. “I am not like you. When I ask, it is only because I want to know.”
“All right then. Kathmandu. That’s where I want to go first.”
“Yes, Kathmandu,” he said, as if it was familiar to him. “The capital city of Nepal, population: two hundred thousand; form of government: a kingdom, with Hinduism and Buddhism the major religions; climate: from tropical to Arctic, depending on altitude; currency: the rupee, with one hundred paisas in a rupee; language: Nepali, with English taught in some schools…”
I was dumbfounded, but not for long. Soon my amazement turned to anger. Why, somehow, he’d snuck into my room that I kept locked at all times and read my K volume of the Encyclopedia. “Where’d you find out all that?” I demanded.
He folded his hands behind his head and continued to stare at the ceiling. “I looked it up in school.”
“But why?”
He hesitated. “The first day I came here, you asked me if Italy was near Kathmandu.”
I waited. “Well? What reason is that?”
He started to speak and closed his mouth again. “Maybe someday you will go to Italy.”
“What would I want to go there for?”
“To see the Colosseum perhaps.”
“I don’t want to look at old buildings. We got plenty of old buildings right here in Galen.”
“Or the Vatican.”
“I’m not one of those Catholics. I never even met one.”
“The Sistine Chapel.”
“The what chapel?”
He breathed a defeated sigh. “It is very beautiful there. That is all I can say.” His eyes left the ceiling and moved past me to the window. “That was the good thing about being sick. I dreamed I was home again in Italy. It was so real to me. I wish it was real and not just a dream,” he said wistfully.
And it was this very wistfulness that made me suddenly furious with him. “Well, if you want to go back so much, why don’t you? Nobody’s begging you to stay, and nobody’ll remember you two days after you’re gone.”
“Perhaps that’s true,” he said. “I would not have spoken of it at all, but I kept picturing you there. It really is the most beautiful country in the world.”
“Oh, horseshit! Everybody thinks that about the place where they were born.”
He looked at me pointedly. “And do you think that about Galen?”
“Oh, shut up and rest. Else you’ll get sick again and I’ll be forever nursing you.”
After that, his recovery was quick, so that he was able to help with preparations for my surprise party.
I had known about my surprise eighteenth birthday party for some time, and I thought it was the most ridiculous thing that Jewel had thought up to date. And since my birthday was on Halloween, I had the sneaking suspicion they were going to make double fools of themselves by dressing up in costume.
Even now, so many years after, my eighteenth birthday stands out clearly in my memory. It was one of those increasingly rare mornings when I went to school. After school was out, I took a walk so as to give them time to get everything ready, and while I walked, I practiced my look of surprise that I would put on the moment I stepped through the door. Surprise is not an easy thing to pretend, and much harder than pretending to be mad or sad. I tried raising my eyebrows, but that felt unnatural. I tried jumping a little, but that looked practiced. So I decided on some more subtle gestures.
It had always been my habit to take long solitary walks in the autumn, usually at the time the sun was almost gone and its leaving turned the sky to dirty pink and navy blue. A flock of geese cut a dark triangle across the muted sky and for a few minutes their cries drowned out all other sounds.
The leaves blew up in the wind and circled around my ankles. It would be dark soon, but not just yet. I felt sad all of a sudden. Or not sad, but melancholy, which is a sweeter kind of sadness, and in a perverse way, enjoyable. Maybe it was the days growing shorter that brought on the feeling because when the days got shorter, it always followed that the nights got longer, and it’s not easy to shake the feeling that terrible things are about to happen when night begins to last forever. Or maybe it was just that I was never able to lose sight of my own mortality that made me so strange to people and even to myself.
I started across a pumpkin patch, remembering how I’d often crossed the very same patch as a child. I loved the season as much now as I had then, but I had been more joyful when I was young. I used to dive into leaves and kick them up and build houses out of them, and I thought nothing of the dirt that coated them or the bugs that lived beneath them. I suppose, it’s a sign of maturity to start thinking about dirt. I remembered, too, a time when I would drop my chewing