She watched, chest heaving, as Daniel dove into the water.
He came up far away and began swimming toward shore. He glanced back at her once, about midway, and gave her a definitive wave goodbye.
Then her heart swelled as he circled his arms over his head in a perfect butterfly stroke. As empty as she felt inside, she couldn’t help admiring it. So clean, so effortless, it hardly looked like swimming at all.
In no time he had reached the shore, making the distance between them seem much shorter than it looked to Luce. He’d appeared so leisurely as he swam, but there was no way he could have reached the other side that quickly unless he’d really been tearing though the water.
How urgent was it for him to get away from her?
She watched—feeling a confusing mix of deep embarrassment and even deeper temptation—as Daniel hoisted himself back up onto the shore. A shaft of sunlight bit through the trees and framed his silhouette with a glowing radiance, and Luce had to squint at the sight before her eyes.
She wondered whether the soccer ball to her head had shaken up her vision. Or whether what she thought she was seeing was a mirage. A trick of the late-afternoon sunlight.
She stood up on the rock to get a better look.
All he was doing was shaking the water from his wet head, but a glaze of droplets seemed to hover over him, outside him, defying gravity in a wide span across his arms.
The way the water shimmered in the sunlight, it almost looked like he had wings.
NINE
STATE OF INNOCENCE
On Monday evening, Miss Sophia stood behind a podium at the head of the largest classroom in Augustine, attempting to make shadow puppets with her hands. She’d called a last-minute study session for the students in her religion class before the next day’s midterm, and since Luce had already missed a full month of the class, she figured she had a lot to catch up on.
Which explained why she was the only one even pretending to take notes. None of the other students even noticed that the evening sun trickling in through the narrow western windows was undermining Miss Sophia’s handcrafted light-box stage. And Luce didn’t want to call attention to the fact that she was paying attention by standing up to draw the dusty blinds.
When the sun brushed the back of Luce’s neck, it struck her just how long she’d been sitting in this room. She’d watched the eastern sun glow like a mane around Mr. Cole’s thinning hair that morning during world history. She’d suffered the sweltering midafternoon heat during biology with the Albatross. It was nearly evening now. The sun had looped the entire campus, and Luce had barely left this desk. Her body felt as stiff as the metal chair she was sitting in, her mind as dull as the pencil she’d given up using to take notes.
What was up with these shadow puppets? Were she and the other students, like, five years old?
But then she felt guilty. Of all the faculty here, Miss Sophia was by far the nicest, even gently pulling Luce aside the other day to discuss how far behind Luce was in the writing of her family tree paper. Luce had to feign astonished gratitude when Miss Sophia walked her through an hour’s worth of database instructions yet again. She felt a little ashamed, but playing dumb was far superior to admitting she’d been too busy obsessing over a certain male classmate to devote any time to her research.
Now Miss Sophia stood in her long black crepe dress, elegantly interlocking her thumbs and raising her hands in the air, preparing for her next pose. Outside the window, a cloud crossed over the sun. Luce zoned back in on the lecture when she noticed there was suddenly an actual shadow visible on the wall behind Miss Sophia.
“As you all remember from your reading of Paradise Lost last year, when God gave his angels their own will,” Miss Sophia said, breathing into the microphone clipped to her ivory lapel and flapping her thin fingers like a perfect angel’s wings, “there was one who crossed the line.” Miss Sophia’s voice dropped dramatically, and Luce watched as she twisted up her index fingers so the angel’s wings transformed into devil’s horns.
Behind Luce, someone muttered, “Big deal, that’s the oldest trick in the book.”
From the moment Miss Sophia had kicked off her lecture, it seemed like at least one person in the room took issue with every word that came out of her mouth. Maybe it was because Luce hadn’t had a religious upbringing like the rest of them, or maybe it was because she felt sorry for Miss Sophia, but she felt a growing urge to turn around and shush the hecklers.
She was cranky. Tired. Hungry. Instead of filing down to dinner with the rest of the school, the twenty students enrolled in Miss Sophia’s religion class had been informed that if they were attending the “optional”—a sad misnomer, Penn informed her—study session, their meal would be served in the classroom where the session was being held, to save time.
The meal—not dinner, not even lunch, just a generic late-afternoon fill-up—had been a strange experience for Luce, who had a hard enough time finding anything she could eat in the meat-centric cafeteria. Randy had just wheeled in a cart of depressing sandwiches and some pitchers of lukewarm water.
The sandwiches had all been mystery cold cuts, mayo, and cheese, and Luce had watched enviously as Penn chomped through one after another, leaving tooth-marked rings of crust as she ate. Luce had been on the verge of de-bologna-ing a sandwich when Cam shouldered up next to her. He’d opened his fist to expose a small cluster of fresh figs. Their deep purple skins looked like jewels in his hand.
“What’s this?” she’d asked, sucking in a smile.
“Can’t live on bread alone, can you?” he’d said.
“Don’t eat those.” Gabbe had swooped in, lifting the figs out of Luce’s fingers and tossing them in the trash. She’d interrupted yet another private conversation and replaced the empty space in Luce’s palm with a handful of peanut M&M’s from a vending machine sack. Gabbe wore a rainbow-colored headband. Luce imagined yanking the thing from her head and pitching it in the trash.
“She’s right, Luce.” Arriane had appeared, glowering at Cam. “Who knows what he drugged these with?”
Luce had laughed, because of course Arriane was joking, but when no one else smiled, she shut up and slipped the M&M’s into her pocket just as Miss Sophia called for them all to take their seats.
What felt like hours later, they were all still trapped in the classroom and Miss Sophia had only gotten from the Dawn of Creation to the war in Heaven. They weren’t even at Adam and Eve. Luce’s stomach rumbled in protest.
“And do we all know who the wicked angel was who battled God?” Miss Sophia asked, like she was reading a picture book to a bunch of children at the library. Luce half expected the room to sing out a juvenile Yes, Miss Sophia.
“Anyone?” Miss Sophia asked again.
“Roland!” Arriane hooted under her breath.
“That’s right,” Miss Sophia said, head bobbing in a saintly nod. She was just left of hard of hearing. “We call him Satan now, but over the years he’s worked under many guises—Mephistopheles, or Belial, even Lucifer to some.”
Molly, who’d been sitting in front of Luce, rocking the back of her chair against Luce’s desk for the past hour with the express purpose of driving Luce insane, promptly dropped a slip of paper over her shoulder onto Luce’s desk.