Angelaboutme [portable] -

Lena turned her head toward the window. Outside, the November rain was falling in thin, relentless sheets. “My father used to say things like that. Right before he left.”

Margo shrugged, crunching another cheese puff. “Just Margo. I’m your angel.” angelaboutme

She was seven years old, sitting on the cold linoleum floor of a county hospital hallway, watching a social worker’s lips move without hearing a single word. Her father had left three months earlier—just walked out of their cramped apartment with a duffel bag and a promise to “get some milk.” The milk never came. The angels her grandmother used to sing about, the ones who “watched over little girls with golden hair,” never came either. By the time Lena turned eight, she had decided that angels were just a bedtime story for children too fragile to face the truth: you are alone, and no one is coming to save you. Lena turned her head toward the window

Margo grinned. “No. Most of them are really into kale. Very sanctimonious about it, too. I’m kind of the black sheep of the guardian angel world.” Right before he left

Lena remembered. She remembered the fire escape—the rusted metal, the way the city lights blurred through her tears. She remembered standing at the window at three in the morning, one hand on the lock, thinking about how easy it would be to just disappear.

She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Margo visited every day, always bringing snacks—cheese puffs, mostly, but also an alarming number of those little peanut butter cracker packets. She told ridiculous stories about other people she’d guarded over the centuries (a Viking who kept trying to fight trees, a Victorian lady who secretly wrote terrible poetry, a nineteenth-century baker whose bread was so bad it once started a small riot). She made Lena laugh, which hurt her ribs, which made her laugh harder.

“Technically,” Margo said, picking a fleck of orange dust off her jeans, “I’m a guardian angel. Third class. Very low on the celestial totem pole. But I passed my human-interaction exam on the third try, which is actually pretty good, considering.”