A/N: I fell in love with Angela Weber in the book series (movies, too!). After reading Midnight Sun not too long ago for the first time (I know I'm way behind lol), there was one line that just got the gears in my noggin' turning...and, voila! The result is this story :)
Please enjoy!
P.S. Any feedback is always appreciated!
"I felt strangely comforted for a moment, hearing Angela's hopeless yearning. A sense of kinship passed through me, and I was, in that second, at one with the kind human girl."
—Edward Cullen, "Midnight Sun"
The house was empty. Angela Weber knew that as soon as she walked through the front door. Only the grandfather clock ticking in the corner of the foyer challenged the silence that met her.
Fear uncurled within her. Mommy, she thought like a child. Is it the hospital again—or worse? Angela dropped her backpack in the hall, forgetting the open door, and ambled slowly into the kitchen, afraid of what message awaited her. There was note on the refrigerator written in her dad's slanted writing:
Gone to the hospital. Don't worry. Make your dinner. Be back when I can.
Love, Dad.
P.S. Don't wait up.
She crumpled the yellow sticky note and flung it at the nearby trashcan. It missed. She snorted in disgust. It seemed that, lately, all of her conversations with her dad had been carried on with a banana refrigerator magnet as intermediary. The banana speaks, she thought. It defended the refrigerator, stopping her from opening the door. She just couldn't bring herself to eat.
Angela the Bird they called her at school. Lauren Mallory, one of her so-called "friends," being the driving force behind the nickname. Angela had always been thin, but now her bones seemed hollow. Her wrists and joints were bruised with shadow. She was almost as thin as her mother, wasting away with cancer in the hospital. A sympathy death perhaps, she wondered half-seriously. She had always been compared to her mother. She had the same, stormy grey eyes, long, curly auburn hair, and deceptively pale skin that tanned quickly at the slightest encouragement. Would it be ironic if she died, too—fading out suddenly when her look-alike went?
Angela drifted from the kitchen, not quite sure what to do with herself. How could she wash dishes or wipe counters when God knows what was happening with her mother at the hospital? She shrugged off her raincoat, leaving it hanging haphazardly over a nearby chair. Her dad kept saying everything would be alright, but what if something happened and she wasn't there, all because he couldn't admit to her that her mom might be dying?
She tugged at the hem of her chunky sweater, twisting a lock of her hair; her hands couldn't keep still. She should be used to this by now, she realized. It had been going on for over a year: the long stays in the hospital, the short stays at home, weeks of hope, then sudden relapses, and the cures that made her mother sicker than the pain. But it would be a sin to be used to something like that, she thought. Unnatural. You can't let yourself get used to it, because that's like giving in.
She paused in the dining room. It was sparsely furnished with a long antique trestle table and chair that almost all matched, but the walls were a fanfare to her mother's life. They gave a home to the large, bright, splashy oils that Tina Weber painted; pictures charged with bold emotions, full of laughing people who leapt and swirled and sang. Like Mom, Angela thought—like Mom used to. And that's were they differed, for Angela wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It wasn't even good poetry, or so Angela convinced herself. She didn't have the talent, her mother did. I should be the one who's sick; she has so much to offer, so much life.
"You're the dark one," he mother had said sometimes with amused wonder. "You're a mystery."
I want to be like them, Angela thought almost pleadingly as she stroked the crimson paint to fell the brush strokes, hoping to absorb its warmth.
The living room was cool and shadowed. The glints of stale sunlight on the room she could see through the window resembled light playing on the surface of water, and the room's aqua colors hinted at an undersea world. Perhaps she'd find peace here. She sank into the couch.
Just enjoy the room, she told herself; the room that had always been here, and always will; the room that hadn't changed. I am five, she pretended. Mom is in the kitchen making an early dinner. They are going out tonight to a party, and Natalie is coming over to babysit. I'll go and play with my dollhouse soon...
But it wouldn't last, so Angela opened her eyes and stretched. Her fingertips grazed the sleep cheapness of a newsprint. The morning paper was still spread on the couch. She glanced at it with little interest, but the headlines glared: MOTHER OF TWO FOUND DEAD. Her stomach lurched. 'Throat slashed,' the article said, 'drained dry of blood.'
"That's absurd," she said aloud. Her fingers tightened in disgust, crumpling the page. "What is this—the National Enquirer?" She tossed the paper away, wrenched herself to her feet, and headed for her room.
But the phone rang before she reached the stairs. She flinched but darted for the hall extension and picked it up. It was a familiar voice, but not her father's.
"Ange, it's horrible," Jessica Stanley, one of her best friends, laments across the phone lines with typical drama. It should be comforting.
"What's horrible?" Angela gasped with a pounding heart. Had the hospital phoned Jessica's house because she wasn't home?
"We're moving!"
"What?" A moment's confusion.
"Dad got that job in Oregon."
"Oregon? My gosh, Jess. Venus!"
"Almost."
Angela sat down in the straight-backed chair beside the phone table. It wasn't her father. It wasn't death calling, but... "When?" she asked.
"Two weeks."
"So soon?" Angela wrapped and unwrapped the phone cord around her knuckles. This can't be happening, she thought.
"They want him right away. He's flying out tonight. Can you believe it? He's going to look for a house when he gets there. I got home and Diane was calling up moving companies."
"But, you said he wasn't serious."
"Shows how much he tells me, doesn't it? Diane knew."
Angela grasped for something, anything, to say. Couldn't something stop this? She was slowly losing her mother, and now her best friend, too? "Isn't she freaked at the rush?"
"Oh, she thinks it's great. It's a place nuclear fallout would miss, and she can grow lots of zucchini."
"What about your mom?"
"She wouldn't care if he moved to Australia. But she's pretty pissed that he's taking me."
"Can't you stay with her, Jess?" Please, please, Angela begged silently.
"Oh, you know. That's a lost battle. I'll cramp her style."
"Jess! Your mom isn't that bad."
"She moved out, didn't she?"
No use fighting that argument again, Angela thought. "Oregon." She sighed.
Jessica groaned. "Yes! This is awful. It's the wilderness, or something. I'm not ready for the great trek, Ange. I could stay with you," she added hopefully.
"I'll ask," Angela said, although there wasn't a chance. They knew that was impossible right now.
"Thanks, but I don't think that would fly with my dad."
What will I do? Angela thought. "You can always visit." It seemed a pathetic suggestion.
"Big deal!"
"Yeah."
"Can you come over?" Jessica asked hopefully.
"No. I better stay here for the time being."
"Oh... Is something wrong?"
A paused, and then, "...She's in the hospital again."
"Oh, hell."
This is where Jess shuts down, Angela recalled. Why can't she talk to me about it? Why does she have to back off every time? She's my best friend, damn it, not like every one else at school who are too embarrassed to make eye contact with me anymore. She searched for what she wanted to say. Something to keep Jessica on the line.
There was silence.
"Listen," Jessica said, clearing her throat, "you don't really feel like talking now. Call me later when you've heard something. Okay?"
No, it's you who doesn't want to talk, Angela thought, but she found herself saying, "Uh-huh."
"Okay. Talk to you then." But she didn't hang up right away. "Ange, listen, I love you and all that mush. Like sisters, y'know." It tumbled out fast to cover the unaccustomed shyness. "Call me. I mean it."
"Sure." Angela smiled wryly. They wouldn't talk about it.
"Bye, Jess."
"Bye, Ange. Hold tight," Jessica whispered before she hung up.
She does care, Angela reassured herself. She just don't know how to deal with it. Who does? But Angela was angry anyway. They could always talk before. Usually Jessica's choice of topic, but they could talk. And now, Jessica was leaving. Was the world coming to an end? They had been friends forever. What was wrong with the way they were? "Why did you have to go and change every damn thing?" she felt like yelling at God. "Am I being punished? What have I done?"
It all made her so tired. I'm ready to take a nap, she decided. She went upstairs. Sleeping had taken the place of eating lately. After stripping down to just her white tank top and boy-shorts, she threw back her floral bedspread and curled up under it, buried her face into a pillow, and soon her body was slowly becoming weightless and her mind slipped into a soothing blanket of nothingness.