Keeping it Real (2 page)

Unfortunately, my soul-mate and I got a tiny bit too wrapped up in our party plans, so much that we totally forgot the joint assignment we were supposed to be writing on the Hell dimensions!

We’d already blagged two extensions and Mr Allbright was running out of patience. By a cruel incidence, the Friday I’d unthinkingly picked
for my birthday was also the absolute final deadline for our assignment, a fact I totally failed to remember until my alarm went off on Friday morning.

As you’ve probably realised, angelic education is radically different to the human kind. For one thing, angel high school kids aren’t known as ‘pupils’ we’re called ‘trainees’, and I don’t think a day goes by without our teacher banging on about how “you must remember you are being groomed to be the angel agents of the future!”

This is a fact we’re not really likely to forget, since every heavenly high school kid over the age of twelve is expected to do hands-on work experience for a cosmic outfit we just call the Agency, a super-massive organisation dedicated to protecting Earth from the Powers of Darkness.

Obviously in an ideal Universe, they wouldn’t send inexperienced angel kids on dangerous time-travel missions. But as the Agency doesn’t have anything like enough trained agents to meet human demand, they end up using us to fill the gaps.

Given we’re under so much pressure, wouldn’t you think our teachers would be a teensy bit more understanding?

Yeah, right. You could have been on Planet Earth for weeks, wearing the same skanky combats, with nothing but angel trail mix between you and near-starvation, but the instant you get back, you’d better get that essay finished or you’re in DEEP poo, let me tell you!

Anyway, when Friday morning arrived I woke up and blinked sleepily at the pretty patterns the heavenly sunlight was making on the ceiling, with a vague feeling there was something I should be doing.

Then I’m like, oh, duh! It’s my birthday. “Happy birthday, angel girl,” I told myself happily. Then I let out a shriek.

I ran to Lola’s room and hammered on her door.

My friend finally came to the door, with such a bad case of bed-hair you couldn’t actually see her face.

“You did remember, didn’t you?” I pleaded. “You hate handing in work late, I know you do. I bet you sat up all night.”

“I fell asleep in the bath,” she said shamefaced.

”
Lollie
! I was relying on you!” I tried to think. “OK, Mr Albright’s class isn’t ‘til eleven. If we sprint to the school library now we should just have time to dash off an outline. He’ll have to see we’re showing willing, right?”

“I thought Mr Allbright said all the serious Hell materials are in the town library?” Lola objected.

“OK, so we’ll have to sprint faster. Grab your clothes, babe, and let’s go, go, go!”

When we told the librarian what we wanted, she immediately asked to see our IDs then looked outraged. “I can’t help you,” she said stiffly. “The books on your list are extremely dark Hell texts which have to be kept in the vaults.”

“Can’t we read them down there?” Lola pleaded.

“Only senior trainees have pass keys,” sniffed the librarian.

“Couldn’t you make an exception?” Lola wheedled. “We won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” the librarian said frostily, and she flounced off pushing a trolley loaded with returned books.

“Psst!”

We both jumped as Lola’s boyfriend appeared grinning like the Cheshire cat through a gap in the bookshelves.

Having got our attention, he mooched over to meet us, wearing his usual uniform of ripped jeans and a scuzzy Astral Garbage T-shirt.

Don’t tell Lola, but I still find it really hard to think of Brice as an angel. This is a true story, yeah? So I have to tell you that when I found out about his budding romance with my soul-mate, I was not a happy seraph. OK, so I’ve fancied a bad boy or two in my time, but I never went for an actual evil assassin!

At first we couldn’t figure out why Brice kept popping up on our Time missions like a bad smell. Lola says it was destiny. I think it was more like desperation.

Brice was v. v. screwed up when he dropped out of angel school. I’m guessing that by the time we met him, he had become totally sickened at the work he was doing for the Dark Agencies, and was secretly deeply homesick for Heaven. I think harassing angels was the closest he could get.

It can’t have been easy, but somehow Michael our headmaster staunchly went on believing in Brice whatever, and to the shock of our entire school, eventually persuaded the School Council to take him back on probation.

As a born cosmic outlaw, Brice found his probationary period incredibly humiliating. He stuck it out though, passed his retakes, and recently moved up to the upper school where he’s doing really well, Lola says.

All the same, you never quite know where that boy is coming from and Lola was visibly astonished, not to say extremely suspicious, to see him in the library. Her eyes narrowed. “Weren’t you due at the Agency like an hour ago?”

“Nah, still got five minutes,” he said carelessly. “Had to check something out in the Hell-dimensions vault before I take off. Thought you might like to borrow this?” Brice fished around in his pocket, quickly made sure the librarian wasn’t looking and surreptitiously flashed a glimmery blue card.

“You
stole
a celestial pass key!” I breathed.

“Do you want to say that a bit louder, sweetheart! For your information, I am now legally entitled to a pass key to any library in the Heavenly City.”

“Sorry,” I said humbly, “I keep forgetting you’re a senior now.”

He slid the pass key into a little gizmo on the wall and we saw a blue flash. Interesting clanking sounds came up the shaft.

Brice grabbed Lola’s wrist to check her watch. “OK, seriously gotta go,” he said in a rush. “The hell materials are in the lower basement. Save me some birthday cake, girls, yeah?”

We watched him disappear through the swing doors.

“We should really buy that boy a new T-shirt,” I told Lola.

”
Carita
, let me tell you, Brice has a whole drawer full of Astral Garbage T-shirts. All exactly the same!”

“His hair looks
so
much better though,” I said approvingly.

Instead of the scary bleached mullet he had before, Brice now wore his naturally-dark hair in gelled spikes, with occasional blond flashes.

“Where’s your bad boy going anyway?” I asked Lola.

“Not sure,” she said vaguely. “Some mission to do with a disturbed kid, I think he said.”

“Bit sudden,” I objected. “He was coming to my party last I heard.”

She shrugged. “Yeah well, the Agency moves in mysterious ways and whatever.”

A bell pinged and the lift doors slid open. I glanced round guiltily to make sure the librarian wasn’t watching.

“It’s OK, she’s gone for her break,” Lola hissed.

We hopped in the lift and went humming down for miles.

When the doors opened again, we both breathed, “Wow!”

From floor to ceiling, the library vaults were totally bathed in intense azure light. We tiptoed around in the eerie blue silence, trying to find the right section. The hard-core Hell materials turned out to be kept in special cases. You had to switch on a teeny-tiny light and read them through the glass.

Hell dimensions are more complicated than I’d realised; they have this whole evil ecosystem going on. I’m not sure how many hell species there are in total, but it’s a
lot
!

Lola gave me a sly nudge. “Ooh, Mel, check out the cute hell doggie!”

I shuddered in revulsion. “Euw Lollie, it’s
bald
!!”

We’d covered hellhounds in Dark Studies but it was the first time I’d seen a picture. Struggling not to laugh, Lola read out the old-fashioned angelic script under the engraving.

”
These vile dogges do ofttymes attempte to walke on their hynde legges, which maketh them unpleasantly to resemble a drooling human
.’ Oh, yuck - listen. It says,
‘The hell dogges turdes smell vile and after sunset beginne to glowe a pallid green like to a subterranean fungus
.’”

I firmly snapped off Lola’s little light. “We are never going to the Hell dimensions, Lollie, so we will never have to smell a hell dogge’s pallid green poo. Now focus!”

We eventually succeeded in cobbling an outline together for Mr Allbright. As we panted in through the shimmery gates of the Angel Academy, I was ecstatic. My birthday could go ahead as planned!

“Babe, do you mind handing this into Mr Allbright?” Lola said unexpectedly. “I’ll see you tonight at Rainbow Cove, OK?”

She raced off, dark curls flying.

“OK,” I said to empty space.

Lola and I generally help each other get glammed up, but I just assumed she was organising a super-special birthday surprise.

When I got back from school I did all the things you do. I showered, washed and dried my hair, and put it up, leaving just a few cute little loose curls dangling down. I did my make-up, splashed on my fave perfume, and slipped into my shimmery lilac dress.

I was bubbling with excitement all the way to Rainbow Cove. I made my way down the winding cliff path, worn smooth and shiny from centuries of angels’ feet, and OK, I did notice it was strangely quiet - also strangely dark.

I just thought they were hiding. I genuinely thought that when I reached the final bend, all my mates would leap out of the shadows, screaming
Surprise!”

But when I came round the bend, there
were
no shadows. The beach was flooded with moonlight -and it was totally deserted

No fairy lights, no music, no delicious buffet. Nothing.

Absolutely nobody had turned up.

Chapter Three

I
sat down on the damp sand in my new dress and sobbed my heart out. I was totally destroyed. Didn’t my friends know how much this meant? Didn’t they care?

Then all at once, as I wept and blubbered into my hands, I felt this… beautiful vibe.

I looked up, snivelling and bewildered. But it wasn’t my friends I saw standing in front of me, but a group of shimmering light beings. I’d seen these luminous beings once before shortly after I arrived in Heaven. You could say they were my first glimpse of what it means to be a real angel, made of nothing but love and light. And now my cosmic angels had come back.

I scrambled to my feet, respectfully tugging down my dress as they silently gathered round me, and I heard their strangely impersonal voices inside my head. “
So today’s your birthday
?”

“Oh, about that,” I gulped. “You see—”

The night was suddenly full of whizzy little rainbows:
zoom, zoom
,
zoom
. Too late I realised they were zooming towards me! As each miniature rainbow hit my energy field, it exploded into all its separate colours: scarlet and bright pumpkin orange, sunflower yellow and vivid emerald green, sky blue, midnight blue and violet. Then all these colours started to swirl into awesome cosmic-type patterns.

More awesome still, my energy field had started flashing the exact same swirly patterns in the exact same rhythms. I’d like to tell you how long it went on, but I truly have no idea. Finally it was over.

“Happy birthday, angel girl!” the voices sang.

And they’d gone.

An instant later, twinkly fairy lights sprang on around the beach. A heavenly hip-hop beat started up.

“SURPRISE!”

My friends surrounded me, laughing and pelting me with sparkly confetti.

Lola flung her arms round me. “Happy birthday,
carita
! Did you enjoy your upgrade?”

“Is
that
what that was!” I whispered.

There’s me thinking I’m such a rebel, giving myself a DIY birthday, when it really
was
my birthday - my first true birthday as an angel! Angelic birthdays aren’t about getting one year older (we’re immortals, duh!). They’re about getting more, you know…
angelly
!

“Open my pressie,” Lola begged. She handed me a large box tied with about a zillion glittery ribbons, hovering anxiously while I carefully untied every one.

Inside was a lamp constructed out of tiny jewel-coloured fairy lights, and cunningly strung together in the shape of a v. cute, v. girly handbag.

I just stood there going, “Omigosh, Omigosh.”

Lola’s face crumpled. “Didn’t I get the right one? Oh, Mel, I was so sure I’d got the right one.”

“No, it is,” I breathed. “It’s exactly the same.”

“I can change it. It’s just you’re always talking about that cool handbag lamp your mates got you for your thirteenth—”

I could still hear Lola anxiously burbling on, just as I could still see the fairy lights and Mo busily setting out my birthday buffet, but a part of me was back in Pizza Hut with my human mates…

We’d eaten as much as we could physically stuff in, and were chatting happily over pizza remains and slightly melted ice cream.

Suddenly Sky jumped up and rapped her glass. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking—“she started in a posh voice.