Page 13 of New Angels

Luke leaves the following night.

He leaves under the cover of midnight with fierce kisses to ease my mournful lips and a gold key pressed into my palm. He wears dark jeans and an old hooded top, a pair of black canvas shoes on his feet. This is his undercover style: casual, common. He still looks like a fucking supermodel.

MacKechnie stands a small distance away, waiting respectfully by the lion and unicorn statue for his charge to say his goodbyes. We’re hugging, all of us, a needy, greedy collision of love and affection, of tightly linked hands and murmuredI love yous. Kisses are pressed to lips and shared between us in abundance. We don’t care who sees. This is grief on top of more grief, and as Luke holds me tenderly, I feel my shoulders shake with the birth of a sob.

Luke cradles my face between his fingers and plants a painfully soft kiss on my forehead. He kisses my eyelids gently. And then, taking me by surprise, he brushes his hands down my blazer, dusting me off the same way he did all those many months ago, when I’d first met him in politics class and tripped by his feet.

“No more falls, yes?” he asks with the ghost of a smile, straightening my lapels and smiling down at my gold crown badge. I gaze up at him, lost and on the verge of tears. “It’s only the getting back up that matters now.” I try to cleanse my sorrow, pressing my eyes into his shoulder. He holds me in place with a steady palm, his other hand trailing down Rory’s arm.

“I will miss you, my brothers,” he acknowledges, and behind me I hear the soft noise of palms kissing, of tight lingering handshakes and soothing back-pats. “We’ll be together again. We’ll fight this.”

A letter has been left for Baxter to wake up to, outlining Luke’s absence.

A letter has also been left for Baxter, detailing MacKechnie’s sudden leave of absence.

If she links the two, then so be it. There’s limited chance either will ever be back here again.

Luke turns around in the entrance hall, gazing up at the rafters in the ceiling lit by endless levels of flickering lantern light. “Lochkelvin has been my home for a great many years, a haven from palaces and grandeur. In many respects, it has been more of a palace for the soul than any of our other estates. It is sad, then, that it has come to this.” I note that in moments of deep emotion and vulnerability, he falls back into his old melodic speech patterns. It makes me smile slightly. He gives MacKechnie a wary glance. “Shall we?”

MacKechnie inclines his head.

We watch at the doorway as Luke, our fellow chief and lover, and the establishment’s political enemy, leaves us. He leaves in an anonymous black car, the castle lights from the outdoors trailing over its glossy exterior. He doesn’t wave us goodbye, and neither do we. This feels too sad, too big, for such a gesture. Instead, we keep our eyes on him, and vice-versa, imprinting him in our minds forever, until it’s no longer possible to do so, until Luke’s car fades into the horizon, consumed by the great mountains surrounding us. It feels like the same odd absence as Benji’s departure, and the four of us are, I’d imagine, feeling a kinship in emptiness.

The loss of Luke hits like a truck. Arms tangle with arms, knitting each of us together, though right now all I want is to be, like Luke, alone. Everything’s changing, and I don’t like it. I don’t do well with change, with people being in my life and then being ripped away. It makes me feel inadequate, broken, abandoned. At least Luke had no other option. At least Luke is doing it for his survival and hadn’t wanted to be away from us at all.

“He’ll be okay,” Rory murmurs, brushing a kiss to my temple. Maybe he sees how distraught I am. He holds me close and I lean into him, Danny and Finlay surrounding me. Rory’s words… they sound like they’re trying to convince himself. “He’ll be okay.”

Without Luke, days slide into weeks. The hollow feeling in my chest never wanes — as though, for safekeeping, Luke had robbed me of my heart the moment he’d left.

Deep-diving into my studies is a much-needed diversion. The good thing about all of us being separated is that there’s nothing to doexceptstudy. The sensation of phantom pain, that something important is missing, never once eases. So I distract myself by becoming fluent in the language of politics. I begin to read political essays for fun, poring over academic language and using it to inspire my contributions in class. Dr. Moncrieff returns, and though he’s still a strange, morally gray character to me, he remains a fair teacher, and I receiveAafterAwith every new assignment.

I exist in the library, the dining hall, classrooms, and my bedroom, all forcibly far from the other chiefs. These are the only places I can travel freely without pestering a teacher for a pass. No more late-night wanderings allowed for me.

Rory and Finlay, confined to new separate single bedrooms, also find it a struggle to adapt.

“She’s got spies, I swear tae ye,” Finlay mutters to me in passing between bookshelves in the library one day, glancing suspiciously at some little first year who stares back at him with a Baxter-esque glare of disapproval. “I’m bein’ followed. Every move. I cannae get close tae anyone at a’.”

Not long after my talk with Baxter, leaflets are pushed through my bedroom door. I flick through them in quiet horror and learn everything I’ve ever wanted about contraception from the public health board. Baxter seems to favor pure no-nonsense, scientific fact, managing to make sex sound as unsexy and therefore as unappealing as possible. In the diminishing number of blessings I try to count, at least I don’t also have to contend with being up-sold abstinence and purity rings. I get the feeling that kind of thing would be laughed out the door here.

November ends in a riot of blue and white saltires to represent St. Andrew’s Day. November 30th is a national holiday in Scotland, represented by the patron saint St. Andrew, and Finlay seems to be the only one interested enough to decorate the castle. He does it for extra-curricular points as well as national pride, ostensibly to wheedle into Baxter’s good books, but really it’s the only time he has the liberty to wander the castle, pinning blue and white paper chains to the walls and banisters, and to meet in secret with Rory.

I hear through Danny en route to breakfast, via Finlay, who heard it via Rory, to save a date in December for us to get together on the island. Some days, it’s the only thing that keeps me going.

Saltires are removed and soon replaced by Christmas decorations. A plump, towering tree is erected in the foyer, brightly dusted with fake snow. The gremlins resume their usual festive tradition of stealing all the baubles and smashing them onto the heads of people they dislike. A respectful bubble exists around me, and I watch Arabella become the main target this year. One particularly sharp icicle is enough to draw blood from Arabella’s cheek. The next day, all baubles appear to be super-glued to their branches, and the gremlins resort to snapping off the branches instead and wielding them like swords.

The talent show is canceled, citing sparse attendance numbers. Seems events at Lochkelvin are only worth holding whenallimportant industry figurehead parents can turn up, and last year’s lax security is enough to put them off making the journey. Li shoots daggers at me, as though this is all my fault and not Antiro’s for storming in last year and shooting up the place. Briefly, I wonder if she’d have performed another Mariah Carey song to show off her vocals and bag herself a top London-based talent agent.

All the money in the world, courtesy of her dad, and still a burning need for validation.

I still have the key to Luke’s new bedroom, but like Finlay, I too feel the eyes of Baxter’s spies. I note, however, that at some point in December, they begin to look the other way — to Rory, usually, and I wonder if, somehow, he’s been able to sway them to our side with pastries and candy. Whatever it is, I feel his magic working in the background, weaving loyalties where beforehand there’d been none.

I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could touch him again.

We glance at each other across rooms. All of us do.

It’s never enough but it’s something.

6

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