Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block

Author:Francesca Lia Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

I don’t go to school. I lie in the bed of ruined pictures for hours. The shed is dark. Smells of soil and sawdust. Blue and yellow sunflower bruises bloom on my arms.

I remember the time when I was a kid and I first met the little black-haired boy named Angel Juan. He was the first person that made me feel I belonged—like I wasn’t just some freaky pain-gobbling goblin nobody understood. Then he had to go back to Mexico with his parents, Marquez and Gabriela Perez, and his brothers and sisters, Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro, Angelina and Serafina. I didn’t see him for years. But it was okay. I had myself. I knew that I could feel things. Not just smashing anger and loneliness. But love too. It was inside of me. And then on my birthday a few years later Angel Juan came back.

Now it’s different because he doesn’t have to go away. He wants to. And also we’ve done it—the wild love thing. So I feel like I need him to put me back together every night. After his kisses and hugs it feels like without them my body will fall apart into pieces.

I get up and take the shoe boxes out from under the bed. They are filled with newspaper clippings I used to have on my walls—before Angel Juan. “Whales Die in Toxic Waters.” “Beautiful Basketball God Gets Disease.” “Family Burned in Gas Explosion.” “Murderer Collects Victims’ Body Parts.” Even after Angel Juan I cut them out when we had a fight or something but I’d always hide them under my bed. Pictures of all the pain I could find. A pain game.

“What a world!” says the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz before she melts.

The only way I used to be able to stand being in this world was to hold it in my hands, in front of my eyes. That way I thought—it can’t get me or something. But when I had Angel Juan I only wanted to touch and see him. He was the only way I’ve ever really been able to escape.

Now it’s the pain game again.

Night.

Across the garden my family is together eating vegetarian lasagna, edible flower salad and fruit-juice-sweetened apple pie. They are laughing in the beeswax candlelight, talking about the next movie they are going to make and looking out over the ruins of the magician’s castle through stained-glass flowers. I wonder if they wonder where I am. They probably think I’m having a picnic at the beach in the back of Angel Juan’s red pickup truck. Or maybe by now they all know that Angel Juan is gone. Maybe he told them before me.

There is a knock on my door.

It’s him. He’s back. I made this whole thing up. He is here with his pickup truck full of blankets and Fig Newtons for a moonlight picnic.

But then I hear my almost-mom Weetzie Bat’s voice.

“Honey-honey,” she says. “Aren’t you going to eat tonight?”

I don’t move. It’s like I’m a statue of me.

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