Rapture

“Got it.” Luce laughed, frowning inside. “Stay away from Max.”

“What’s your type, anyway? I mean, I know you’ve moved on from gangly old Jeremy.”

“Nora.” Luce gave her a little shove. “You are not allowed to bring him up all the time. That was late-night roommate private conversation. What happens in pajamas stays in pajamas.”

“You’re totally right.” Nora nodded, putting up her hands in surrender. “Some things are sacred. I respect that. Okay. If you had to describe your dream kiss in five words or less . . .”

They were walking around the second bend of the U-shaped dorm. In a moment, they would turn the corner and approach the end of the hall, called the Caboose, where Jordan and Hailey’s room was. Luce leaned against the wall and sighed.

“I’m not embarrassed about having, you know, no experience,” Luce said quietly—these walls were thin.

“It’s just, do you ever feel like nothing has happened to you? Like you know you have a destiny, but all you’ve seen of life so far is unexceptional? I want my life to be different. I want to feel that it’s begun. I’m waiting for that kiss. But sometimes I feel like I could wait forever and nothing would ever change.”

“I’m in a hurry, too.” Nora’s eyes had gone a little fuzzy. “I know what you mean—but you do have at least a little control. Especially when you stick with me. We can make things happen. Our first semester’s barely even started, kid.”

Nora was eager to get to the party, and Luce wanted to go; she really did. But she was talking about that inde-scribable thing that was bigger than having a good time at a party. She was talking about a destiny that Luce felt like she had as much control over as the outcome of a coin toss—something that was and wasn’t really in her hands.

“You okay?” Nora tilted her head at Luce. A short auburn curl flopped down over her eye.

“Yeah.” Luce nodded nonchalantly. “I’m good.”

They went to the party—which was just a bunch of open dorm room doors and freshmen walking into and out of them. Everyone had plastic cups filled with this super-sweet red punch that seemed to replenish itself automatically. Jordan DJ’ed from her iPod, shouting,

“Holla!” every now and then. The music was good. Her sweet next-door neighbor David Franklin ordered pizza, which Hailey improved by adding fresh oregano from the herb garden she’d brought from home and installed in the corner by the window. These were good people, and Luce was glad to know them.

Luce met twenty students in thirty minutes and most of them were boys who leaned in and put their hands on the small of her back when she introduced herself, as if they couldn’t hear her otherwise, as if touching made her voice clearer. She realized she was keeping an eye out for the coin-toss guy from the laundry room.

Three cups of punch and two slices of amazing thin-crust pepperoni pizza later, Luce had been officially introduced to and then spent the next ten minutes trying to avoid Max. Nora was right: He was good-looking, but way too flirtatious for someone with a crazy girlfriend back home. She and Nora and Jordan were crammed on Jordan’s bed, whispering ratings for all the boys there in between fits of giggles, when Luce decided that she’d had a little too much mystery punch. She left the party and slipped down the stairs, seeking quiet air.

The night was cool and dry, nothing like Texas. This breeze refreshed her skin. There were a few stars out and a few kids in the courtyard, but no one Luce knew, so she felt free to sit down on one of the stone benches between two stout peony bushes. They were her favorite flowers.

She’d taken it as a good omen when the grounds around her dorm were blooming with them, even at the end of August. She fingered the deeply lobed petals of one of the full white blossoms and leaned forward to breathe in its soft nectar.

“Hello.”

She jumped. With her nose buried in a flower, she hadn’t seen him approach. Now a pair of ragged Con-verse sneakers was standing right in front of her. Her eyes traveled up: faded jeans, a black T-shirt, a thin red scarf tied loosely around his neck. Her heart picked up and she didn’t know why; she hadn’t even seen his face—short golden hair . . . obscenely soft-looking lips . . . eyes so gorgeous that Luce sucked in her breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” What color were his eyes?

“That’s not why I gasped. I mean . . .” The flower fell from her hand, three petals landing on the boy’s shoes.

Say something.

He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me.

Not that!

It was physically impossible to say anything. Not only was this guy the most incredible thing Luce had ever seen in all her life, he’d walked up to her and introduced himself. The way he was looking at her made Luce feel as if she were the only other person in the courtyard.

As if she were the only other person on Earth. And she was blowing it.

Instinctively, she reached up to touch her necklace—and found her neck was bare. That was strange. She always wore the silver locket her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday. It was a family heirloom, containing an old picture of her grandmother, looking very much like Luce, taken right around the time she’d met the man who would become her grandfather. Had she forgotten to put it on that morning?

The boy tilted his head in a kind of smile.

Oh no. She’d been staring at him this whole time. He raised his hand as if to give a little wave. But he didn’t wave. His fingers hovered in the air. And her heart started pounding, because all of a sudden, she had no idea what this stranger would do. He could do anything.

A friendly gesture was just one possibility. He could flip her off. She probably deserved to be flipped off for staring at him like a crazy stalker. That was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.

He waved, as if to say, Hello in there. “I’m Daniel.” When he smiled, she saw that his eyes were beautifully gray with just a hint of—was that violet? Oh God, she was going to fall in love with a guy with purple eyes.

What would Nora say?

“Luce,” she finally managed. “Lucinda.”

“Cool.” He smiled again. “Like Lucinda Williams.

The singer.”

“How did you know that?” No one ever guessed Lucinda Williams. “My parents met at a Lucinda Williams concert in Austin. Texas,” she added. “Where I’m from.”

“Essence is my favorite of her albums. I listened to it for half the drive out here from California. Texas, eh?

Big adjustment coming to Emerald?”

“Total culture shock.” It felt like the most honest thing she’d said all week.

“You get used to it. I did after two years, anyway.” He reached out and touched her shoulder when he noticed her panicked expression. “I’m kidding. You look much more adaptable than I am. I’ll see you next week and you’ll be completely settled in, wearing a sweatshirt with a big ‘E’ on it.”

She was looking at his hand on her arm. But more than that, she was experiencing a thousand tiny explosions inside her, like the finale of a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. He laughed and then she laughed and she didn’t know why.

“Do you”—she couldn’t believe she was about to say this to a model-gorgeous upperclassman from California—“want to sit down?”

“Yeah,” he said instantly, then glanced up at the window where the lights were on and the party was happening. “You wouldn’t happen to know about a soccer party going on somewhere in there?”

Luce pointed, slightly crestfallen. “I was just there.

It’s right up the stairs.”

“No fun?”

“It was fun,” she said. “I just—”

“Thought you’d catch your breath?”

She nodded.

“I was supposed to meet a friend.” Daniel shrugged, looking up at the window, where Nora was flirting with someone they couldn’t see. “But maybe I already have.” He squinted at her and she wondered, horrified, if she’d been talking to him with flower pollen dusting her nose. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Are you taking cell biology this quarter?” he asked.

“No way. I barely got out of there alive in high school.” She looked at him, at his eyes, which were most definitely a shade of violet. They glowed when she said,

“Why do you ask?”

Daniel shook his head, as if he’d been thinking something that he didn’t want to say aloud. “You just—you look so familiar. I could have sworn we’d met somewhere before.”

EPILOGUE

THE STARS IN THEIR EYES

“I love this part!” Arriane squealed.

Three angels and two Nephilim were sitting on the forward edge of a low gray cloud above a U-shaped dormitory in central Connecticut.

Roland grinned at her. “Don’t tell me you’ve seen this one before?”

His marbled gold wings were extended and folded flat so that Miles and Shelby could sit on them and stay aloft, like a picnic blanket at a drive-through in the sky.

The Nephilim had not seen the angels in more than a dozen years. Though Roland, Arriane, and Annabelle bore no physical signs of this passage of time, the Nephilim had aged. They wore matching wedding bands, and the sides of their eyes were creased with the laugh lines made by years of happy marriage. Under his very faded blue baseball cap, Miles’s hair was slightly gray around the temples. His hand rested on Shelby’s belly, which protruded with a baby due the following month.

She rubbed her head like she’d narrowly escaped a concussion. “But Luce doesn’t eat pepperoni. She’s a vege-tarian!”

“That’s what you took away from this scene?” Annabelle rolled her eyes. “Luce is different now. She’s the same girl with different details. She doesn’t see Announcers, and she hasn’t been to every shrink on the eastern seaboard. She’s much more ‘normal,’ which bores her to tears, but”—Annabelle grinned—“I think, in the long run, she’s going to be really happy.”

“Does this popcorn taste burnt to you?” Miles asked, chewing loudly.

“Don’t eat that,” Roland said, plucking the popcorn from Miles’s palm. “Arriane got it out of the trash after Luce set the dorm room kitchen on fire.” Miles began spitting frantically, leaning over the edge of Roland’s wings.

“It was my way of connecting with Luce.” Arriane shrugged. “But here, if you must, have some Milk Duds.”

“Is it weird that we’re watching the two of them like a movie?” Shelby asked. “We should imagine them like a novel, or a poem, or a song. Sometimes I feel oppressed by how reductive the filmic medium is.”

“Hey. Roland didn’t have to fly you out here, Nephilim. So don’t act smart, just watch. Look.” Arriane clapped. “He’s totally staring at her hair. I bet he goes home and sketches it tonight. How cuuute!”

“Arriane, you got way too good at being a teenager,” Roland said. “How long are we going to watch for? I mean, don’t you think they’ve earned a little privacy?”