"Yeah. We. A long time ago." Shelby wouldn't look at her.
"Okay." Luce focused on breathing. She could handle this. But the whispers ying around the wall of girls made her skin crawl, and she shuddered.
Shelby sco ed. "I'm sorry the idea disgusts you so much."
"That's not it." But Luce did feel disgusted. Disgusted with herself. "I always ... I thought I was the only--"
Shelby put her hands on her hips. "You thought every time you disappeared for seventeen years that Daniel just twiddled his thumbs? Earth to Luce, there is a Before You for Daniel. Or an In Between, or whatever." She paused to give Luce a sideways squint. "Are you really that self- involved?"
Luce was speechless.
Shelby grunted and turned to face the rest of the hall. "This estrogen force eld needs to dissipate," she barked, waggling her ngers at them. "Move along. All of you. Now!"
As the girls scurried o , Luce pressed her head against the cold metal locker. She wanted to crawl inside it and hide.
Shelby leaned her back against the wall next to Luce's face. "You know," she said, her voice softening, "Daniel's a crap boyfriend. And a liar. He's lying to you."
Luce straightened up and went at Shelby, feeling her cheeks ush. Luce might be pissed o at Daniel right now, but nobody talked smack about her boyfriend.
"Whoa." Shelby ducked away. "Calm down, there. Jeez." She slid down the wall to sit on the oor. "Look, I shouldn't have brought it up. It was one stupid night a long time ago and the guy was clearly miserable without you. I didn't know you then, so I thought all the lore about you two was ... supremely boring. Which, if you must know, explains the huge grudge I've held with your name on it."
She patted the oor next to her, and Luce slid down the wall to sit too. Shelby gave a tentative smile. "I swear, Luce, I never thought I'd meet you. I de nitely never expected you to be ... cool."
"You think I'm cool?" Luce asked, laughing quietly to herself. "You were right about me being self-absorbed."
"Ugh, just what I thought. You're one of those impossible-to-stay-mad-at people, aren't you?" Shelby sighed. "Fine. I'm sorry for going after your boyfriend and, you know, hating you before I knew you. I won't do it again."
This was weird. The thing that could have driven two friends instantly apart was actually drawing them closer together. This wasn't Shelby's fault. Any ash of anger Luce felt about it was something she needed to take up with ... Daniel. One stupid night, Shelby had said. But what had really happened?
Sunset found Luce walking down the rocky steps to the beach. It was cold outside, colder still as she got closer to the water. The day's last rays of light danced o thin sheets of cloud, staining the ocean orange, pink, and pastel blue. The calm sea stretched out in front of her, looking like a path to Heaven.
Until she got to the wide circle of sand, still blackened from Roland's bon re, Luce didn't know what she was doing down there. Then she found herself crawling behind the tall lava rock where Daniel had tugged her away. Where the two of them had danced and then spent the precious few moments they'd had together ghting about something as stupid as the color of her hair.
Callie had once had a boyfriend at Dover whom she'd broken up with after a ght over a toaster. One of them had jammed the thing with an oversized New York bagel; the other one had ipped out. Luce couldn't remember all the details now, but she remembered thinking, Who breaks up over a kitchen appliance?
But it was never really about the toaster, Callie had told her. The toaster was just a symptom, something that represented everything else that was wrong between them.
Luce hated that she and Daniel kept getting into ghts. The one on the beach, over her dye job, reminded her of Callie's story. It felt like a preview of some bigger, uglier argument on the way.
Bracing herself against the wind, Luce realized she'd come down here to try to trace where they'd gone wrong the other night. She was idiotically looking for signs in the water, some clue carved into the rough volcanic rock. She was looking everywhere except inside herself. Because what was inside Luce was just the vast enigma of her past. Maybe the answers were still somewhere in the Announcers, but for now, they remained frustratingly out of her grasp.
She didn't want to blame Daniel. She was the one who'd been na?ve enough to assume that their relationship had been exclusive across time. But he'd never told her otherwise. So he'd practically set her up to walk right into this shock. It was embarrassing. And one more item to tick o on the long list of things that Luce thought she deserved to know and that Daniel didn't see t to tell her.
She felt something she thought was rain, a drizzly sensation on her cheeks and her ngertips. But it was warm instead of cold. It was powdery and light, not wet. She turned her face toward the sky and was blinded by shimmering violet light. Not wanting to shield her eyes, she watched even when it grew so bright it hurt. The particles slowly drifted toward the water just o shore, falling into a pattern and limning the shape she'd know anywhere.
He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed He seemed to have grown more gorgeous. His bare feet hovered inches o the water as he approached the shore. His broad white wings seemed to be edged with violet light and were pulsing nearly imperceptibly in the rough wind. It wasn't fair. The way he made her feel when she looked at him--awed and ecstatic and a little bit afraid. She could hardly think of anything else. Every annoyance or nagging frustration vanished. There was just that undeniable pull toward him.
"You keep turning up," she whispered.
Daniel's voice carried over the water. "I told you I wanted to talk to you."
Luce felt her mouth pucker up. "About Shelby?"