Of all the characters in Crawdad, there's nobody quite as damaged as Angel, but she's probably one of the toughest too. She's made some bad choices in her short life. Choices that have left her with nothing. She ran away from home on a whim, misled by someone she thought she could trust. Can she ever go back?
~Meet Angel~
Mikey glared at me like he might hit me
again, his eyes so dilated they were like huge black holes in his head. I got
up and went to the kitchen before he could do it again. There was nothing
inside him. He’d burned it out a long time ago and now he wanted to burn out my
soul too.
I
hovered in the kitchen by the sink overflowing with smelly, putrid dishes
because no one ever washed them. I stared out the back window at the yard
filled with weeds as high as your waist and remembered the smell of fresh cut
grass when my dad mowed the lawn back home. The buyer came banging on the front
door. When Mikey opened the door, I slipped out the back unnoticed. I sprinted
across the overgrown lawn, glad I’d put my flip flops on this morning. They
weren’t great for running, but at least the rocks didn’t hurt as much as
barefoot. Once I hit the alley, I was out from under the shady trees in the
shabby yards.
The sunlight blinded me at first until my
eyes adjusted. It had been awhile since I’d been outside much. I could feel the
sun burning my pale skin, but it felt good to me, like it was burning away the
crust of filth that had grown over me like moss on a sick tree. For the first
time in a long time, I felt alive, maybe even happy. Maybe I could go home? I
could finish school. I was still young enough to go. They had to let me in,
right?
Mikey’s voice nagged my brain. You can’t do that. You’re too stupid. They
don’t want you. It had become. a constant in my life. Sometimes I believed
it, but I never wanted to think those things about myself. I knew I wasn’t
stupid. It’s just I wasn’t sure about the other two.
I shoved Mikey’s voice out of my mind and
tried to put some distance between me and his house. All I had in my pockets
was a dead cell phone somebody left at the house after a night of partying and
a watermelon Jolly Rancher. My tummy grumbled so I unwrapped the candy, stuck
it in my mouth, and kept walking.
I got a few blocks before I saw a cop car,
its lights flashing, stopped in the middle of the street. It wasn’t a busy
neighborhood so it wasn’t blocking a whole bunch of traffic, but there were a
few gawkers across the street. Part of me knew I should turn the corner and
avoid the mess, but curiosity got the better of me, so I kept walking the way I
was going. Pretty soon I could see two officers hassling this big black kid.
Some cops think they gotta interrogate every person they talk to, but I
couldn’t see how the kid was doing anything wrong. I supposed he could a robbed
a gas station, but he didn’t act guilty. Suddenly, one of the cops went for his
Taser gun.
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