Angela arrived in Taylor's room the next night and he wasn't there. She took the liberty to look through the drawer he kept his knife in and found it wasn't there. She smiled to herself and had just shut the drawer when the door opened and Taylor came in. She was getting her timing down pat. Pretty soon when he opened the door she'd be just arriving in the room.
"Angel?" he asked.
She hated the name but coming from him she loved it. She refused to let her mother call her Angel (although she still tried to do it often) and if anybody else even slipped it out she went haywire. It was just too close to the truth. But Taylor knew the truth and it seemed he was doing it more of out of respect for her than anything else.
"Yeah, Taylor, I'm here."
"I knew you were. Where are you?" She walked over and took his hand. "Oh. I don't want you to ever stop touching me." She looked at him, confused, but he couldn't see it. "I mean I always want to know where you are."
"All right," she whispered. "It'll take some determination, but all right."
"Why would it take determination?" he asked. He walked with her over to the bed and sat down.
"Because I don't normally feel," she said. "This is me normally." She stopped concentrating on his hand and he felt her let go. "Can you sense that?"
"Sense what?"
"Close your eyes," she whispered. He did. "Your hand is still holding mine. You can still sense me there, but you can't feel me. You know you're still gripping my hand, but you're not touching me." He nodded. "It's a gift I have. It's my floatation. I don't touch things, ever, I float above them." He opened his eyes.
"I can still feel you," he said. "You don't have touch me."
"You're gifted," she told him. "In more ways than you think. Not everybody can sense me. When I walk in a room you know I'm there, don't you?" He nodded. "You know where my eyes are and you look straight into them, don't you?" He nodded. "Not everybody can do that."
"Do you really think you can help me?" he asked her, his voice lowering. "Can you make me better?"
"I know I can," she told him. "And the only reason I know I can is because you're asking me to." She ran her free hand along the side of his face and his eyes closed again. This was the calmest he'd been in years and he was enjoying every moment of it. "I saw you got rid of your knife." He nodded. But I still have my pills, he thought. "Where?"
"Where what?" he asked.
"Where are your pills?"
"You can read my mind?" he asked, his eyes flying open and staring straight into her. She sighed.
"I can only read what you let me read," she said. "Nothing you wouldn't say to me. You can control what I hear, just as if you were talking to me." He was furious. He let go of her hand, got up, and started to the door. Under the bed, in the white drawer, behind the book, he thought. She immediately lifted up the comforter on his bed, opened the drawer, and moved the book that was in there. He turned around, hearing the drawer open, and jumped back against the door.
"Oh my God," he said. Angela held up the bottle of prescription sleeping pills, but all he could see was the bottle hovering in the air. "Oh my God, Angel, put it down. Put it down." He put his hands over his eyes. She replaced the bottle and closed the drawer. "Okay. I'll talk to you."
"Why are you fighting with Zac?"
"He caught me," Taylor said, sliding down the door into a sitting position. "He caught me with the gun, but I told him it was a water pistol�it was a year ago on the eighth." She looked at the calendar. "Come here, please." She walked over and sat next to him, holding his hand again. "He didn't believe me�it was obvious that I was lying�and he threatened to tell our parents. We started fighting about it. Then the fight grew to other things, and other things, and now we're so on edge we fight about everything. Until he mentioned it yesterday I'd forgotten why we started fighting to begin with, but now I know."
Do you still have the gun? She has through her mind, knowing if she spoke the words aloud he'd get defensive. This way he didn't realize he was answering.
No.
"How come you don't eat anymore?" she asked. "Last night was your first full meal in two months."
"If I don't eat, I don't have to go downstairs and face them," he said, looking over at her. She nodded, even if he couldn't see it. "I don't have to sit there and lie to them. They don't know I tried to do it." They know you want to do it now, she told him. He nodded. "Yes, they do." They worry about you, Taylor. "I know." They love you, Taylor. "Then why the hell would they let it get this bad?"
"You know why." He sighed.
"Because I never told them," he said. "I'm�I'm not going to have to tell them, am I?"
"Yes." He looked completely dejected. "You don't have to do it right now, Taylor, but you still have to tell them."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"How come I feel so comfortable around you?" he asked. "I mean I'm telling you things I haven't even let myself know, and I'm just saying them like I'm talking about the weather! I'm not like this. I don't talk to people like I talk to you."
"It's because I'm an Angel," she said. "I'm the only thing that will calm you down. You're supposed to feel comfortable around me."
"So, since you're an Angel, are you, like, perfect?" he asked. She smiled.
"No. I'm actually very far from it," she said. "You're thinking of the Heaven Angels. They're perfect."
"So you're not?"
"Well�let's just say I'm closer to perfection than the next person. I'm still human, but I'm human to the next level." He nodded.
"Like, what can you do?"
"Oh, lots of little things," she said. "By running my hand over your face I can soothe your soul." She trickled her fingers down his face and he smiled. I like it when she does that, he thought. "I can snap my fingers and make you forget who you are, my kisses are healing and without your conscious knowledge I can control every action in your body, but I can only do all of those things if you let me."
"How would I not let you if I didn't even know you were there?" he asked.
"You've done it already."
"Oh," he said. "And how exactly are you here?"
"Well I can't tell you exactly," she said. "It's too confusing. I'll try to say it in a way you can understand: when I go to sleep at night back home in Atlantic City, I leave my body there, asleep, and I come here. I guess you could call this my soul if you want to give it a definition, but it's not really my soul. Are you confused?" He nodded. "Just try not to think about it. It doesn't matter how I'm here, just that I'm here."
"All right�" Someone knocked on his door.
"Taylor, are you coming down for dinner?" his father asked.
"Are you?" Angela asked. He shook his head. "Why not?"
"I'm not hungry," he said. She placed her hand on his stomach and suddenly he was starving, and doubled over in pain.
"Taylor, I'm not going to keep begging you every night to eat."
"Fine," he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. "I'll be down in a minute." Angela let go and the pain subsided, but he was still hungry. Don't you ever do that again, he told Angela. He stood up, pulling her up with him. "What was that?"
"That is all of the hunger you've had since you stopped eating all at once," she said. "Don't make me do it again." He opened the door and stepped out, Angela's arm around his waist so he would know where she was. Zac was just leaving his room next door.
"Who were you talking to?" Zac asked.
"What's it to you?" Taylor snapped.
"Ugh, you really are crazy," Zac said and went downstairs. Taylor found Angela's hand on his waist for support. Do they really think I'm crazy? His desperate question reaffirmed Angela's wonder about his depression.
"No," Angela whispered as they went to the stairs. "Don't listen to anything he says." They went downstairs and into the dining room for dinner. Taylor sat down and Angela, upon seeing that his sister Jessica was back, stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders.
"So nice of you to join us, Taylor," his mother Diana said. "And we didn't have to hunt you down to get you to do it."
"You know that really doesn't help," Taylor said. "That just makes me want to go back upstairs." And put that gun back to my head, he added in his mind. Angela began to rub his shoulders.
After dinner Taylor went back upstairs to his room, Angela following close behind. After he closed the door she brought him to the bed and laid him face down on it. She began to give him a relaxing massage, knowing he could desperately use one. His family was the biggest cause of his stress. Although they worried about him, they didn't know how to treat him. This was new for all of them; Taylor was the second oldest, and he was the first one to have any kind of normal teenage depression, however in his situation normal teenage depression wasn't the beginning of it. His career wasn't like it used to be, and he didn't know how to fix it.
"We might as well be Tupperware," he told Angela. "All I'm doing is making the kind of music I want to make and because it's not the kind we used to make nobody wants to listen to it anymore. We've grown and we're talented, and I'm not just saying that because it's me. It's true. We can make good music, it's just not what they want to hear. I don't want to be that MMMBop boy for the rest of my life."
"Do you wish you never wrote that song?" Angela asked.
"Yes."
"Truthfully."
"No. If I haven't written that song, then I wouldn't be able to do what I want today," he said. "Ow!"
"I'm sorry, you've got a massive knot right here," she said.
"Can you get it out in a non-hurtful way?" he asked.
"Not as effectively as I can this way. Suck it up, Taylor, it's just a little pressure," she told him. She was smiling. "So tell me about your family. Do you get along with your parents?"
"No," he said. "Not anymore."
"So what happened?" she asked.
"I started being like this. I wouldn't come down to eat, I did everything I could do get out of work, and I just started to snap at everyone. I didn't care. I was going to end my life. None of them really seemed to know what was going on except for Zac, so he wouldn't leave me alone and I would lash out at him. My parents would yell at me for hitting him, I would yell back, and then I'd lock myself in here until they went away."
"Do you think it will get better if you got better?"
"I don't know."
"Well it doesn't hurt to try."
"Taylor who are you talking to in there?" Zac yelled from outside the door.
"I'm on the phone, Zac!" Taylor yelled.
"No you're not! Mom's on the phone!"
"It's called a cell phone, you little bastard."
"Taylor�" Angela warned. He sighed. Can I not talk out loud for a while? He asked. "Okay." So you can really hear me in here, can't you? "Yes I can." But you can't hear everything? "No. It'd be much too confusing. You decide what you want me to hear. I mean if you don't want me to know the intimate details, like your first girlfriend�" Kaitlyn. "Or how old you were when you first kissed a girl�" Twelve. "Or anything else, then you don't have to tell me." She smiled. "Who's Kaitlyn?"
"Okay, we don't have to talk about her, all right?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "Was she the girl�?"
"Angel!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let's move onto something else. What do you want to talk about?" You. "Me? Why me?" You're interesting. I've met a lot of people, believe me, but I've never met anybody like you. "That's because I'm an Angel, Taylor. It's not like you meet someone like me every day."
"Are there really thousands of people like you?"
"Yes. We're spread pretty evenly throughout the world. I have no idea why I was sent to take care of you, I mean you're in LA and I live all the way out in Atlantic City. I don't know why the Maker just couldn't get someone from California to do it�" She stopped rubbing his back.
"Who's the Maker?" Taylor asked.
"The Maker of Dreams," Angela said. "The Man of the Night�he can make your wish come true, only if your promise is you�" She wasn't talking to Taylor anymore. "Only if your promise is you�what does that mean?"
"Maybe he wants you to do something for him," Taylor said.
"Yeah, that's what I thought, but what would that be? I thought it was this, but this is hardly for him."
"What do you mean?" Taylor asked. She wasn't about to tell him she was a fan and she wanted nothing more to be this close to him. He trusted her and that would just break that trust, and that couldn't happen.
"You're tired, aren't you?" she asked.
"No, not really�" She ran her hands from the middle of his back, up to his shoulders, over his head and by the time she let go he was asleep. She slid off of him and stared up at the ceiling, thinking.