Love in the Time of Global Warming

Part 2

Chapter 3: Angels of the Apocalypse

Noey had a joke that we were going to start a band called Angels of the Apocalypse. I thought it was kind of stupid because only Noey could play anything—drums. Moira loved to sing and looked great doing it but she wasn’t very good. It was a terrible band name anyway. Plus there were only three of us and as far as I knew there were four apocalyptic angels. But Noey had T-shirts printed with a photo of wings on the back and the name of the “band” on the front.

She and Moira wore them to the Santa Monica Mall. I felt too embarrassed so I didn’t wear mine.

While Moira tried on dresses I leaned over the railing and looked down at the people and stores below, imagining what it would be like to fall to one’s death here. The mall, with its greasy smells and labyrinth of silver escalators leading nowhere, always made me hungry and tired like I needed something I could never have. I would rather have been home reading about the melting clocks of French surrealism or the dark, haggard faces of German expressionism.

This kid, Corey something, from our school was hanging out in the food court and he asked if we wanted to get high with him. I didn’t, not because of the weed, which I actually liked the few times I’d tried it, but because I wanted to be with my friends, without the interruption. Corey was blond-banged and athletic-looking. Moira stroked her hair, coiling and uncoiling it around her fingers, while Corey sipped her soda and asked her to sing for him since she was in a band, after all, right? I almost cried and then pretended I had something in my eye, trying to concentrate on not letting my eyeliner run. We went to Corey’s house and smoked in his living room until his mom came home and we escaped out the window.

“Such a hottie,” Moira said later.

I looked at her lying on my bed with those freckles, that rose-colored hair, eyes of fractured jade, and something clenched in my stomach I didn’t fully understand yet. I just knew I didn’t want her to talk about this Corey person at all.

Noey sat cross-legged on the floor with her camera around her neck. She and Moira both liked being at my house more than their own (Moira’s parents were always busy working; Noey’s mom drank and yelled) so most nights my mom invited them for dinner. We helped her in the kitchen, making complicated paella, bouillabaisse, or lasagna with fresh herbs, meats, and produce from the Sunday Farmers’ Market. Venice complained about too many girls being over but he looked at them with a kind of wide-eyed, starry-lashed wonder and they asked him about his latest obsession—baseball cards or video games or football season. My mother painted me and my friends as the three Botticelli Graces, dancing in a circle holding hands, almost exactly like the original, except for our blue jeans and cotton tank tops. Only Moira liked to pose but Noey and I did it anyway to please my mom. Besides, her paintings were amazing—as dreamy as they were lifelike—and we wondered if someday the painting of the three of us would be in a museum, keeping us together forever.

I knew eventually we’d be apart. I’d applied to study art history at NYU, Moira was going for fashion design at FIDM, and Noey had a scholarship in photography at Purdue.

Sometimes we had slumber parties in my room and I’d make up stories to help them sleep—tales based on the myths I’d read or the paintings I’d seen. Tales of the great heroes of the past, who sailed the seas, fought monsters, and rescued their friends and lovers. I made up words, too, which drove my friends crazy. (“Faunishness,” Penelope? Really?) Sometimes I made Odysseus, Aeneas, and Achilles into heroines instead. My friends liked that twist, although it wasn’t always easy for me to do since the original stories were so male-oriented, the women in them often so passive or cruel.