The first thing I learned about being fully human was that it hurts to fall off a bicycle.
It was late August. Kade had found an old blue bike in the back of the garage, his from when he was twelve, and spent a whole Sunday fixing it up: new tires, new chain, a bell he'd bought at the hardware store and installed on the handlebars with great ceremony. "For Eva Bell," he'd said, ringing it twice. "It's practically the law."
I lasted eleven seconds in the gravel lot before I went over the handlebars and landed on both knees.
I sat there in the dust with Lug Nut licking my face and Kade running toward me, and I looked down at my knees. They were scraped raw, both of them, little beads of blood welling up through the dirt. They stung. They stung so much.
I waited for them to heal.
They didn't.
They just sat there, scraped and bleeding and ordinary, the way anyone's knees would.
Kade dropped down next to me in the gravel. "Are you okay? Eva? Are you hurt? Talk to me—"
I started to laugh.
I couldn't stop. I sat there in the dirt with my bleeding knees and my bicycle on its side and the dog trying to climb into my lap, and I laughed until tears ran down my face. Kade stared at me like I'd hit my head.
"Look," I gasped, and pointed. "Look, Kade. They're not healing."
He looked. He looked back up at me. Slowly, his face changed, and the corner of his mouth tilted up.
"You're a mess," he said.
"I'm a mess," I said.
"You're gonna have scabs," Kade said.
"I'm gonna have scabs!" I said.
He laughed then too, and pulled me into his arms right there in the gravel, and we sat in the dirt and laughed like idiots while Lug Nut barked and the bike's back wheel ticked around and around in the August sun.
He cleaned my knees afterward, in his little kitchen above the garage, with peroxide and cotton balls from a first-aid kit that had been his dad's. It stung so badly I yelled. He put two cartoon bandages on each knee, dinosaurs, because they were all he had.
I've kept the scars. Small ones, faint and white. They're the first scars I ever got the regular way.
I love them.
* * *
There were a lot of firsts that summer.
My first sunburn, at the lake in July, which turned my shoulders the color of a fire truck and made Sari laugh so hard she nearly drowned. My first cold, which I was sure was going to kill me, and which Clay treated with chicken soup and a hot toddy and the words "Honey, it's a sniffle, you'll live." My first gray morning when I woke up tired, and stayed tired, and understood for the first time why humans drink so much coffee.
My first birthday. We didn't know when it was, so Sari picked one: the day Clay found me in the alley. She threw a party at the Broken Antler with balloons and a cake shaped like a cloud and a banner that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Manny sang. Badly. In Spanish. Tyler and Dana came, the paramedics, and Dana shook my hand for a long time and looked at me with those sharp gray eyes and said only, "Glad you're here, kid." Mrs. Kowalski came, without her cane. Lily Haugen came with her mom and gave me a drawing of a girl with yellow hair and enormous wings, and I had to go into the kitchen for a few minutes and stand by the walk-in cooler until I could breathe again.
It took most of the summer, and a lot of help from people who didn't ask questions, to turn Eva Bell from a name on a whiteboard into a real person with real papers. Sari's mom helped. A lawyer who ate breakfast at the Antler every Thursday helped. I don't understand half of what they did, and I've decided not to ask. Clay says some things are better left in the kitchen.
But in September, I got a library card with my name on it, and I cried in the middle of the library.
* * *
Clay framed Hollis's last crossword.
The one we'd finished together, the three of us, on that gold morning in his bedroom. Clay had taken it home in his shirt pocket and kept it, and one day in August I came down for my shift and there it was, hanging on the wall above the last stool at the counter, in a plain black frame. Hollis's careful pencil letters. Clay's terrible ones. Mine.
Nobody sits on that stool anymore. Nobody had to be told. People just don't.
Every morning at seven o'clock, I pour a cup of black coffee and set it on the counter there, and I let it go cold. Clay pretends not to notice. Sari says it's morbid. I don't care. Some things you do because they're sensible, and some things you do because you loved somebody, and those are different kinds of things.
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Under the frame, Clay put a little brass plate. It says: HOLLIS GRANT. COFFEE BLACK. TWO EGGS OVER EASY. RYE TOAST. HE ALWAYS FINISHED.
* * *
I start nursing school in January.
It was Sari's mom's idea, in the end. She came into the diner one afternoon in her scrubs after a twelve-hour shift, looking gray and tired and wonderful, and sat at the counter and watched me work for a while. Watched me notice when a little boy in a booth had a cough I didn't like, and tell his mother to have it checked. Watched me sit with an old man whose hands were shaking too badly to hold his fork, and help him without making him feel helped. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
"You ever think about nursing?" she asked me, when I brought her pie.
I looked at her.
"You've got the instincts," she said. "I can always tell. Most people look at somebody hurting and look away. You look closer." She took a bite of pie. "Prerequisites at the community college. Two years after that. It's hard. You'll hate it sometimes. You'll be exhausted and broke and you'll cry in the parking lot after clinicals. But you'd be good at it, Eva. I can see it."
So I'm doing it. I signed up for anatomy and chemistry and something called microbiology, which Sari says is "just germs, but fancy." I bought the textbooks. They're heavy and expensive and full of words I have to look up, and some nights I sit at Kade's kitchen table with a highlighter in one hand and a cold cup of coffee in the other, and I want to throw them both at the wall.
And then I read something about how the heart works, the valves and the chambers and the electrical signal that keeps it all in rhythm, and I remember feeling it. Gary's narrowed heart. Kade's, racing and failing on the pavement. Hollis's, slowing gently down. I remember the shapes of them, the way pain has a shape. And I think: I'm learning the words for things I used to only feel.
It's slower this way. So much slower. I'll need years to learn what I used to know in a breath. And even then, I'll only be able to help some people. I won't be able to fix everything. I won't save everyone.
But I couldn't do that before, either. Not really. Not even with wings.
Hollis was right. The trick is learning which ones are yours.
* * *
Aurelle came on the first cold night in October.
I felt her before I saw her, the way I always had. A brightness at the edge of things. A candle lit in the next room. Only this time it was fainter, because I'm only human now, and humans can barely see angels even when they're standing right in front of them.
I climbed out onto the fire escape. Kade was asleep inside, sprawled across most of my narrow bed with Lug Nut on his feet. The town was quiet. The first snow of the year was dusting the mountains, white against the stars.
She was sitting on the roof across the alley with her knees pulled up and her wings folded neat behind her, exactly the way she'd sat the very first time.
"Hi, Eva," she said.
"Hi," I said.
She came across the gap and settled down beside me on the cold metal landing. Her glow was soft and steady. She looked at me for a long time.
"You look different," she said.
"I'm older," I said.
She frowned. "By five months?"
"It counts now," I said. "Every day counts now."
She thought about that. Aurelle always took things seriously, especially things she didn't understand.
"Are you happy?" she asked finally.
I thought about it. I thought about my scabbed knees, and my sunburn, and my cold. My textbooks. Hollis's crossword on the wall. Sari's terrible birthday banner. Clay's coffee. Kade, asleep in my bed, snoring very slightly, with his arm thrown over the place where I'd been.
"Yes," I said. "So happy it hurts sometimes."
"That doesn't make any sense," Aurelle said.
"I know." I smiled at her. "That's the best part."
I'd brought a mug out with me. I held it out to her.
"What is it?" Aurelle asked.
"Hot chocolate," I said.
She stared at it. Angels don't eat. Angels don't drink. She knew that, and I knew that.
She took it anyway. She held it carefully in both hands, the way I had the first morning in the little room upstairs, and she looked at the steam rising off it, curling up into the cold night air.
Then she took a sip.
She made a noise. A loud one.
I laughed so hard I had to hold on to the railing.
"Eva," she whispered, staring down into the mug like it had told her a secret. "Eva. What is this?"
"I told you. Hot chocolate."
"Is it all like this? Down here? Is everything—"
"Not everything," I said. "But a lot of it. More than you'd think."
She was quiet for a long time after that. She sat there on the fire escape beside me with her wings tucked in and the mug cupped in her hands, and she looked out over the sleeping town. The old brick roofs. The blinking yellow traffic lights. The dark shapes of the mountains, and the new snow, and the stars.
She looked at it the way I used to look through the Veil.
She looked at it a little too long.
When she finally stood up to go, she handed me back the mug, empty. She'd finished every drop. She hugged me tight, and kissed my forehead the way she always had, and spread her wings, white and gold against the stars.
"I'll come back," she said.
"I know you will," I said.
She hesitated at the edge of the roof. She looked back at me, and at the town, and at the light glowing in the window of the Broken Antler where Clay had left it on, the way he always did now, in case anyone needed it.
"Eva," she said. "When you jumped. Did it hurt?"
"Yes," I said. "So much."
She nodded slowly.
"Was it worth it?" Aurelle asked.
I looked at the lit window. At my bandaged knees. At the man asleep in my bed.
"Every single second," I said.
Aurelle looked at me for a long, long moment. Something moved behind her eyes. Something I recognized, because I'd felt it myself, a long time ago, standing at the Veil and looking down at a world I wasn't allowed to touch.
Then she was gone, a streak of gold up into the dark.
I sat on the fire escape a while longer with the empty mug in my hands, watching the place where she'd disappeared. The night was cold. My breath smoked in the air. My fingers were starting to go numb.
Then I went back inside, and I closed the window, and I climbed into bed next to Kade.
He woke up just enough to pull me against him, warm and solid, his arm sliding around my waist.
"You're freezing," he mumbled into my hair.
"I know," I said.
"Where'd you go?" Kade asked.
"Just saying goodbye to a friend," I said.
"Mm." He was already falling back asleep. His breath was slow and warm against my neck. "She coming back?"
I thought about Aurelle's face. About the way she'd looked at the town. About the empty mug.
I smiled in the dark.
"Yeah," I said softly. "I think she might."
And then I closed my eyes, and I let myself get warm.