Angela woke, her bright eyes glowing in the morning sun. Breathing hard, she sat up in her makeshift bed and looked around. Her mother was across the room, already awake and dressed. Angela leaned up against the wall, taking in a deep breath to calm her racing heart.
"Another nightmare?"
Angela nodded and padded over to the bathroom, where she turned on the murky brown water and began to wash her face with harsh soap stolen form a local motel the last time her mother had gone on a cheap business trip. The two-room apartment was smaller than Angela's old bedroom before her father died, but that was all the two of them could afford. After her father died quite expectedly from a long and heart-wrenching bout with cancer (from smoking all of his life), it was a shocking blow that Angela and her mother were not included in his will. The house, the millions of dollars, and all of their possessions were handed straight over to his lawyer.
There had been a battle, of course; Angela's mother took it straight to court, but they couldn't afford a decent lawyer and lost miserably, deeper in debt than before. Angela's mother hadn't worked a day in her life and suddenly was stuck in a factory making minimum wage because she'd dropped out of high school at sixteen to get married to a much older man.
For the past year Angela slept on a cot in the corner of her mother's room, who slept on a smelly old mattress from the Salvation Army. The bedroom also served as a living room, because the only other room in the apartment was the kitchen. The water never heated, and sometimes it was brown, but they'd learned to appreciate what they had for the first time. Mice and bugs weren't as disgusting as they used to be and bruised apples were just as good as the rest of the bunch.
Angela dressed herself in the clothes she'd gotten from Goodwill and the only pair of shoes she'd managed to salvage, surprisingly still in decent shape. Ignoring her mother's dry attempts at conversation, Angela grabbed an old piece of fruit for breakfast and left quickly. She tightened her schoolbooks to her chest, looking down at the ground as she headed for the bus stop.
She made it just in time, running to make it on the bus before it sped off. Out of breath, she climbed the steps and lowered her head. It started immediately. "Freak girl!" someone yelled, throwing a wad of paper at Angela.
"Witch!"
"Little rich bitch is too good to look at us!"
"Where's your daddy now?"
"Turning in his grave, with all his money!"
Angela kept her head down. She didn't normally take the bus for this very reason�the kids always taunted her. Before her father died she had a private tutor and had heard the stories of how cruel public school kids could be, but she never imagined it'd be like this.
The first few weeks weren't bad. She had friends and even had a guy ask her out until she mentioned to one of her friends some of her�abilities. Angela had been born different. Someone had created her special; she was an angel. Earthbound Angels were quite different from Heaven Angels, but had quite a few distinct abilities. They were normal, at least they believed they were, with the ability to see the future (usually in dreams). Some of the more blessed Earthbounds had the ability to move objects with their mind and all of them could speak telepathically. Every angel also had a hard-to-recognize trait of flotation. When Angela walked, her feet hovered no more than a quarter inch above the ground; the same if she sat, lay, or even stood on her hands. It took effort to actually touch the ground, and took even more effort to rise higher.
Angela, upon her sixteenth birthday nearly two years previous, was summoned to a weeklong training session to better understand her powers. Before then Angela always knew she was a bit different, but she figured there were many other people like her. She still didn't completely understand who she was, but she knew what she was capable of. She could read people's physical features and within a few minutes knew exactly who they were, where they were from, and quite a bit about what kind of person they were. By listening to their speech she could tell when they were born and most of their life. She could calm people through her hands and could clear their minds with a snap of her fingers.
Sitting in the back corner of the bus, she leaned her head against the glass (which actually didn't touch her skin) and sighed. Before long�before long school would be over and she'd never have to hear the taunts that were still going around her. They called her a freak and a witch, but if she really were a witch, she'd have blown them to bits ages ago.
"Angela Kennedy?"
Confused, she looked around. Next to her a boy sat, looking directly at her. "Are you Angela Kennedy?" he asked. She nodded.
"Yeah. Who�"
"I am the Maker of Dreams, Man of the Night; I can make your wish come true, only if your promise is you." Angela froze. She'd heard of him before. She'd never seen him and wasn't quite sure who he was and what he did, but she did know he'd made a lot of people happy before. She nodded calmly, agreeing to his proposition. "Perfect," he said. "Take this crystal, wear it to bed. It'll show you what to do." Angela took the necklace with a spherical clear crystal grasped by a silver hand. She put it on. A question rose and she turned, but he was gone.
The bus stopped, arriving at the school.