For Keeps

47. A new page for Angel Domingo.

{Angel}

Angel's phone buzzed with texts on the bathroom sink, as she was bent upside down blasting the hair dryer at her freshly showered, navy-blue sheet of hair. When she flipped her mane back from her face, she dragged a finger down the phone screen, her mouth quirking.

Bri's texts were filled with their usual bubbly energy:

<mom found the most amazing place yesterday *galloping rainbow unicorn gif*>

<can't wait to show you!!>

These were interspersed with Patrick's matter-of-fact:

<what time is service?>

<you staying for soup lunch?>

<it's Tiff hi Angel xx>

Angel rapidly texted back, a grinning emoji vomiting rainbows for Bri, plus <thank youuuuu u r the best!!!> and <service starts at 10:30! yes to soup!> for Pat and his fiancé Tiffany. Probably he was driving and she was texting.

She liberally shook her magic hair dust into the roots of her mane and scrunched it up high and proud, looking a little bit like a rainbow unicorn herself. The sides were freshly buzzed around her dainty brown ears, and she ran her fingers down the tiny gold piercings that highlighted her favourite feature, smiling at herself. If all went as planned, next month she would have a roommate to try out Canadian-Filipino fusion meals and share studying angst.

Twenty-fourteen was going to be a new year and a new page for Angel Domingo. Maybe it was time for a bright new hair colour.

She flicked a lock of hair over her eyes, giving herself finger guns and a sneer in the mirror, imitating Lilo imitating Elvis Presley. She'd spent the evening at her work house re-watching Lilo and Stitch with Grace for the hundredth time. They could practically recite the entire movie together--Angel doing Lilo and Grace doing Stitch in her throaty voice. Thank God Disney started caring about BIPoC representation. When Angel was a child all she had was lily-white princesses to admire.

She'd made it to St Aidan's for every Advent service her work schedule permitted. The formality of the service style, the old hymns and spoken prayers, were unfamiliar to Angel, whose father pastored a small, charismatic congregation out east. That unfamiliarity felt safe; she was increasingly sure no one was going to spontaneously stand up and declare a 'word' against some aspect of the culture around them that was deemed sinful. The old hymns they sang couldn't have cared less about the gender or sexual identity of individual humans, and stanzas steeped in a worldview of a wrathful God and miserable, creeping humans were noticeably absent from St Aidan's hymnody.

In the midst of the strange pageantry and symbolism, Angel was beginning to recognize the kind, generous Jesus she knew personally, especially at the communion table and the weekly potluck lunches.

As she waited for Pat and Tiff in the back of the nave of St. Aidans, Angel used her phone to snap a photo of the stained glass window towering above her head, a glowing Mary holding a chubby infant on her lap, a feathered gender-neutral young person kneeling at her knees. She played with the filters on her phone to saturate the image with color, and posted it with the hashtags: #angel #worshiptheKing #namesake #sundaymorning. Her younger siblings and cousins still followed her photo stream; her older brother would probably say the image looked unforgivably Catholic. If they were on speaking terms.

The pews were three-quarters full, and Angel noticed Kurt Visser's tall, colourful figure in one of them, with Jon leaning into him, saying something--his grin flashed as Kurt laughed. A smile flitted over Angel's face as she looked away. She'd thought her boss was a very serious, non-humorous person until she started coming here and got to know the person Jon was when he was with his brother Cary, and Kurt...whatever they were to each other.