Angela

I'd met Angela when I was three. She suddenly appeared, an elegant vision in loose sweaters, like an angel with two tortoiseshell halos. We rode the bus together in silence until, annoyed with the preschooler with curious eyes, she poked fun at me. Once I opened my small busy fists her jaw dropped. “You're really smart!” she remarked, eight and the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. Her last name was shiny and red like a Ferrari.

Her mom let her wear make-up already. Her hair was burnished rose gold and her strong nose divided two eyes so blue the sky strove to match. Her smile and laugh were so infectious I cuddled up to them every morning and afternoon, waiting for her to finish pinning up her hair at the sides when she didn't tease it into wings above her perfect ears. Her thick spider eyelashes done, her Maybelline mascara tucked back into her purse, Angela carefully applied pearly lipstick so pale it was like pink ice. Once she asked if I'd like to wear some to school. I wanted it more than I didn't want the cold sores Mom warned me against. Her eyelids were lovingly pigmented. Then it was my turn: we talked and talked.

Angela was bored. I was a great conversationalist but I was three. She sparkled when she asked, “Do you know 'fuck'?” I sure didn't. It was the middle finger showing the world it was a happy loner. “Fuck you” was approximately the same, only it made sure everyone else knew to stay away. Asshole was usually two As butt-slapping twice and then opening into a final clap. Sometimes it could be an F with its hole rimmed by my other index finger. It was for someone I hated. Bitch was the I-love-you sign turned inward with the thumb folded over the middle fingers, horns mocking someone I really thought was awful. Shit, my right thumb extended from its fist, was expelled from the tight snail of my left fingers. Preschool was boring; Angela was a more fun teacher.

Once, my ass freezing on the cold grey-beige linoleum between the gym and front doors, I sat and conferred with my friends, switching between gossipy, chatty circles. As I shivered in my sweatshirt, the cold seeping into my pelvic bone, I espied a ring with paste jewels on Jenny's finger. “Let me see! I wanna try it on!” I exclaimed. I wasn't old enough for jewelry and the sparkling stones entranced me. How fancy, how expensive! A golden band and faceted stones like Grandma's and Aunt Annette's!? I needed it badly. What did a ring feel like on a finger? I was six and in the first winter of kindergarten.

Denied, I fired back, “Fuck you!” Now I knew what it meant. I wielded it beautifully. It glowed with the fire glinting off the ruby facets despite the dim fluorescence overhead. Angela, sitting Indian style in the pretzel-legged group of older kids I knew, next to Alex with his chipped front teeth, had prepared me well. “Fuck you” was very useful in cases of extreme disappointment and anger. Suddenly, an aide swooped down on me, curly brown mullet and gold hoops quavering with her voice as she signed, “Did you just say something?” I blinked back, bewildered. “What? No. Me?” I understood then just what it meant to swear. “I saw you say something. What was it you said?” I stared innocently into the earnest, pudgy face looking down at me, its attached hand clutching my blue sleeve. “I said, 'I like your ring! I wanna try it on this finger,' and I stuck my ring finger out, see, like this. I had to show Jenny my finger so she could slip the ring onto it because she wouldn't let me.”

That was how I ended up in the principal's office in preschool. I squirmed in the vinyl-covered seat as the secretary bustled with errands and the fax machine in between her tan telephone and the vice principal's office. Whipping around, I settled onto my knees, my sad nose pressed against the chicken wire-spined glass, the children huddled together, the aides standing in a cluster of laughter, their backs toward me. “Fuck you,” I pressed against the glass, more astute than ever. “Fuck you.” The school was still dark.

Over the next year or two Angela and I played together a lot. She lived half a mile away one block behind a hair salon with a black sign in its window advertising a white pair of scissors. Her house was bigger than ours with an upstairs and dirty carpeting. Her family was warm, friendly and seedy. We preferred my house with the dress-up clothes in the basement and were captured in black and white wearing head scarves, heels and my tutu, purses cleaving our arms. Angela always clutched at me, terrified, as we slipped down the stairs. She froze on the stairs; she never let me turn on the light until we were all the way down, the murky black yielding to gray at our feet. The huge steel rotary saw was always whirring, she insisted, the blade hissing underneath its mint-green head, unattended in the dark. It waited for us, I assured her each time, to slice us into murder victims. This was Angela's concoction and I wasn't allowed to dispel the myth. We quickly snuck around the bottom stair and opened the box of clothes out of sight of the cruel saw. Upstairs in our elegant attire we had lemonade, Hi-C or Hawaiian Punch and our beaming faces negated onto rolls of film.

Several times we had a substitute bus driver Angela despised. She told me stories about a horror movie in which the Rat King slew humans by the dozens and was worshipped by bloodthirsty rats. Our sub, thin with a pointed nose, a weak chin and light eyes that seemed as kind as his smile when I clambered up the steps, was the Rat King, she confirmed, her eyes suddenly harsh and cold. Her mouth tightened into a suspicious moue. The only Rat King I remembered was the one from The Nutcracker but, no, this was a more sinister one, she assured me.

One day the Rat King, whose job didn't pay very well so his navy blue jacket was grubby as it hung off the back of his seat, presented me with a mini Reese's peanut butter cup! I marveled at the kindness but Angela knew better. Shrewdly, she called me over, sharp and protective. Her blue eyes widened and razored as she looked over the wrapper on our candies. “Aha!” she pointed, triumphant. “See this?” I peered at the gold foil and, sure enough, there was a tiny sepia center with a thick aura of oily bronze. “Maybe it's old,” I ventured.

“People poison candy from the bottom, see,” Angela settled into her first cautionary tale. “This happens all the time. Kids die from it every Halloween. There are razor blades in apples and pins in harder candies.” She glared balefully at the Rat King, who smiled back hopefully, his fine brunette curls softening the evil within. “He probably has a whole pocketful ready to poison a whole bunch of us. That fucking asshole, he stealthily kills kids and switches school districts! What they do is they get poison or cleaning spray and suck it into a syringe like this, filling the chamber by pulling out the stopper, and then they stick the needle into the bottom of a soft candy, like these peanut butter cups, and inject the poison into the center. He wants to kill us.”

She stuck her head back up and glittered judgment at the Rat King, who had both paws on the large black steering wheel with ridges all around its bottom. He had sad eyes when he wasn't trying to make us like him. Ducking back down, her knees lodging into their usual position on the pebbled green vinyl before us, she giggled, “Boy, is he ever gonna be surprised when we come out of our houses tomorrow! Gimme your candy again,” and dutifully I dropped my two-cent chocolate into her hand. “Follow me; we're gonna get rid of this real discreetly,” and I slipped across the aisle as she swung into it.

We crept row by row toward the back of the long empty bus. Sometimes we had retarded kids with us but only when their regular bus couldn't take them. The bad kids also only got to ride with us sometimes and Angela protected me from teen penises I didn't understand yet. The old black woman with milky blue eyes that always scanned the sky for God in two different directions wasn't in the front seat that day. The Rat King watched us in the rearview mirror serenely.

Angela stuck her strong fingers into the white plastic wells and squeezed her arms together, the small window so dense it tried to plop down onto its lower half but gingerly, gently lowered so noiselessly our hearing aids picked up nothing but the hum and jumble of asphalt and debris. “Watch: we do this while he can't see us. He's gotta watch the road, and we slip—whoosh!--each candy out good and sneaky. The wind steals them good and fast and he'll never know we didn't eat them. Thank him for the candy and always, always turn it over to me. He'll keep trying to kill us and we'll thwart him at every turn. We're gonna be alive when he finally leaves and he's gonna be really pissed!”

The Rat King smiled at me after school and gave me soiled Tootsie Rolls and peanut butter cups. My young stomach felt as greasy as the poisoned wrappers. I felt bad for such a desperate killer. He looked so much like Willy Wonka I wanted to be friends back. He was so sad I wanted to love him forever and ever and eat his friendship in equal measure. He was the Rat King so I had to let Angela help me outwit him. She had such blue eyes and was in fifth grade so she knew these things.