It's not like Angel's some unfeeling robot. She can see the shock and betrayal on her friend's faces, and it hurts her down to her core. But she doesn't find it difficult to press those feelings down, compress them into something too tiny to distract her. She'd perfected the process years ago. Everyone needs a way to survive.
And Angel had needed to survive more than most.
oOoOoOo
Angel was seven the first time she got hit. Lucky for her, it wasn't more than a light backhand that barely left a red mark, but it was enough to knock her small frame onto the floor, where she curled into a ball and cried for help, shivering with sobs.
It was her mother's boyfriend, the first one since her father had died. Manny was his name. Everything about him was square, from his eyes to his jaw to his clenched fists. Everything was hard, unyielding edges.
Angel had disliked him on the spot, though to be fair she would have disliked anybody who had first tried to take the place of her father after his death. Still, there was something that scared her about him, that instinctively made the skin on her arms cold and her normally chatty mouth close tight. But Mama had forced her to be polite to him, pinching Angel's ear to get her to step out from behind Mama's legs. And she'd tried, she really had. He made Mama sing while she cooked again, made her smile and twirl around in her skirts around the apartment like she hadn't in so long.
So a month after Angel had met Manny, when she was knocked flat onto the living room carpet, she honestly hadn't been trying to provoke him at all. She just didn't know when to stop pushing. Angel never did.
She'd been playing on the floor with her dolls, old Barbies that had been handed down from an older cousin. Manny had been sitting on the armchair, smoking pensively as he stared out the window.
Angel didn't really like the Barbies. They didn't look like any girls that Angel had ever seen, huge blue eyes and extreme proportions that made Angel look at her own childish body with shame. And there were other aspects of their appearance that hurt as well. Maybe it wouldn't have hurt quite as much if they were the only barbies Angel had ever seen. But she'd been to the store with Mama before, seen the rows and rows of shiny pink boxes filled with white dolls. Her eyes had roamed the stacks, trying desperately to find even one that looked anything like her, but the darkest one she could find was still shades lighter than her. So she had to be content with her own, a pair of blonde, blue eyed white girls with vapid smiles that seemed to mock the self hate they inspired in her.
Angel had sighed loudly then, wishing that dolls weren't capable of making her feel like this.
"What?" said Manny, and Angel had casted her mournful eyes up to his.
"Why don't they ever look like me?" Angel asked him.
Manny huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh. "It's cause they can't have us thinking that we're as good as them, Angel. They won't let our men get real money, and they won't let our girls think they're pretty."
Angel didn't need to ask to know who "they" were.
Now Manny leaned forward, breath blowing smoke into Angel's face. She didn't let herself cough or lean away, too scared of being disrespectful. "But you know what we do, Angel? You know how we get back at those fuckers?"
"What do we do?" She asked.
"We take it all back from them. We steal our money back from them, and you take back your pride. That's how you show them what's what." Manny leaned back, evidently satisfied with his lesson.
But Angel's brow furrowed, stuck on a part of his sentence. "What do you mean, steal the money?"
Manny sighed and rolled his eyes, fingers twitching restlessly around his cigarette. "I mean steal the damn money."
Then Angel's look of puzzlement became a look of indignation. "Stealing's wrong. That's what Mama says."
Manny's jaw clenched in annoyance. "Look, who gives a fuck about if it's wrong or not? They took it in the first place."
Angel didn't notice the color rising in his face. "But it's wrong. You shouldn't do wrong things." She said stubbornly.
"You know what? You're starting to annoy the fuck out of me, little girl."
Angel didn't notice the way his fingers had started to curl into fists, either.
"But it is." She insisted.
That's when his hand had flashed out and struck her like a snake, pushing her down on her back. Angel cried out loudly, and her mother skidded in through the doorway soon enough, gathering Angel to her chest and stroking her hair.
"What's wrong, hija? Baby, tell me what happened." She had pleaded.
Angel had almost incoherent with sobbing at the time, so she had simply pointed at Manny while she hiccuped violently. She felt a flash of triumph as Mama's face turned to Manny sitting in the armchair, now calmly dragging at his cigarette. If there was anything that Angel counted on, it was Mama's temper. But her face didn't grow furious as Angel had hoped. Mama simply sighed and made shh-ing noises to Angel.
"Manny, couldn't have you just let her alone? She's only seven, she doesn't understand when she's being a brat."
"The she'd better fucking learn," he said with a coolness that contrasted his words.
Mama sighed and scooped Angel up in her arms and took her to the kitchen, where she gave her some ice and rubbed some flower scented lotion into the darkening mark on Angel's cheek.
By the time Angel was nine, she didn't cry for Mama when Manny hit her anymore. She'd learned to run to the kitchen and patch up her own wounds. She'd thrown away the Barbies, too. Whenever she looked at them, she could only see Manny's fist and feel a phantom ache on her cheek.
Angel was nearing ten when Mama broke up with Manny for the first time. Angel didn't have to ask what pushed her over the edge. Mama didn't own concealer thick enough to cover the dark purple bruise on her left temple.
Life was good for a long while. Mama went out with a guy named Estavan for a while. Angel liked Estavan. He used to sneak her a peppermint candy every time he saw her, and he had a crooked smile that was as sweet as the candy he gave her. Angel was never sure why he stopped coming around, but she didn't question it. It made a kind of sense. Angel was young but she already had the feeling that nothing good was going to last long in her life.
A few months after Mama had kicked him out, Manny showed up at the back door and wouldn't leave until Mama saw him. Angel slipped out the back door and walked to the playground. She knew that nobody would go looking for her.
It was exactly a week later that Angel realized that the armchair had started to smell like Manny's smoke again.