I don't believe in angels.
It's hard, you know? How can I believe in these ultimate caregivers, these ultimate lovers, whose only purpose is to ease our pain? When you find an angel with a shell, you let me know.
But she didn't have a shell. Or much of anything. She was just a plain kid, no one special. And I think… I think that's what I liked about her. She was normal. She was liked. She was smart and pretty. She was everything I wasn't.
She was a student at NYU. I saw her sitting on her back porch with an NYU sweatshirt, talking on her cell phone. Her hair was dark and curly, and her eyes were such a bright blue that you could see them even in the dark. But it was her smile that got me to stop and look at her as I ran from rooftop to rooftop. It was so big and bright.
A few nights later, I happened to pass by her again. I was never much of a creature of habit, so the fact that she was seemed interesting to me. Sure enough, night after night, she'd be out there sitting on her back porch, with her bright smile and cell phone, sometimes with a notebook or a mug of tea.
It didn't take too long before I found out who it was that made her smile like that. A boyfriend. His name was Brandon. Apparently, he was in the armed forces. She missed him, she said. She loved him too, she said. And I believed her. And sometimes, sometimes… I imagined that she was talking to me.
I wasn't in love with her. I wasn't obsessed with her. It's just so rare for me to hear a girl's voice so happy, so… so absolutely peaceful. I like to think that my brothers and I are saving the world a little at a time, and we're inadvertently making people feel this way. They'll never know it's us, of course. But for those few minutes that I stopped every night to just sit on the roof of her garage and listen to her, I liked to pretend that she knew. That she knew that I do what I do for people like her.
One night, I passed by her house at the same time, but she wasn't there. I thought it was weird, since we had a heavy rain the night before and she had still been out there, laughing about the weather. I jumped down to the ground, but, sure enough, she came out. I hid myself in the shadow of the porch steps.
She was on her cell phone. She said, "Sorry, Brandon, I'm a bit tied up with schoolwork tonight. We'll talk tomorrow, love." They had a short chat, and she laughed as she had always done. I smiled. I had wondered when she ever found the time to get her homework done.
I heard her go back inside after about a million "I love you"s. I poked my head up. The lights were on in the kitchen and living room, so I could look straight in through the window. There was a smile on my face as I saw her put the phone down and take her sweatshirt off. She loved him. She did.
I went around the side of the house, so that I could still keep an eye on her before jumping across the street and heading back home. In the living room, a guy was watching television. He looked up as she walked into the room and asked her something. She gave him an answer.
And then she kissed him.
I stopped in my tracks. That can't be right. Brandon had been on the phone. She missed Brandon. She loved Brandon. So who was this guy who was putting his hands on places that he didn't even look old enough to know the name of yet?
She lied. The girl that I had come to believe that I was doing everything for, the girl who gave me a sort of justification, lied. The girl who was a symbol of everything I was supposed to protect, the girl who had been enough to make me smile quietly night after night, lied. And I suddenly found myself just a little more confused, a little more lost.
I save the world for people like her. Just the night before, I thought that it was a grand thing. And now my skin tingled with a sense of disappointment. I wasn't saving the world for caregivers, for lovers, for students, or for laughter. I was saving it for liars, cheaters, sinners, and heartbreakers. I was saving the world for a world that wasn't worth saving.
And that's why I don't believe in angels.