Read Halo for Free Online

and I saw she had a broad smile and white teeth. She wore a lot of mascara but her skin had a natural glow. “Bethany, that’s a pretty name,” she went on. “Kinda old-fashioned though. But hey, I got stuck with Molly, like some character in a picture book.”
    I smiled awkwardly at her, not entirely sure how to answer someone so confident and forthright.
    “I guess we’re stuck with the names our parents chose for us,” I said, knowing it was a lame attempt at making conversation. I figured I really shouldn’t have been talking at all, seeing as we were in class and poor Mr. Velt needed all the help he could get. It also made me feel like a fraud, as angels didn’t have parents. For a moment I felt like Molly would see right through my lie. But she didn’t.
    “So where are you from?” Molly wanted to know, blowing on the nails of one hand and shaking a bottle of fluorescent pink polish.
    “We’ve been living overseas,” I told her, wondering what her reaction might be if I told her I was from the Kingdom of Heaven. “Our parents are still there.”
    “Really?” Molly seemed impressed. “Whereabouts?”
    I hesitated. “Different places. They move around a lot.”
    Molly seemed to accept this as if it were fairly commonplace.
    “What do they do?” she asked.
    I fumbled for the answer in my head. I knew we’d discussed this but my mind went blank. It would be just like me to make a critical mistake within my first hour of being a student. Then I remembered.
    “They’re diplomats,” I said. “We came with our older brother. He just started as a teacher here. Our parents will join us when they can.” I tried to cram in as much information as I could to satisfy her curiosity and stem further questions. By nature, angels were bad liars. I hoped Molly hadn’t seen through my story. Technically speaking, none of it was a lie.
    “Cool,” was all she said. “I’ve never been overseas but I’ve been to the city a few times. You’d better be prepared for a change of lifestyle at Venus Cove. It’s usually pretty chill around here except things have been a bit weird lately.”
    “How do you mean?” I asked.
    “Well, I’ve lived here my whole life; my grandparents even lived here and ran a local business. And in all that time, nothing really bad has ever happened; there’s been the occasional factory fire and some boating accidents—but now . . .” Molly lowered her voice. “There’s been robberies and freak accidents all over the place—there was a flu epidemic last year and six kids died from it.”
    “That’s devastating,” I said weakly, feeling a hollowness in the pit of my stomach. I was starting to get a sense of the extent of the damage done by the Agents of Darkness, and it wasn’t looking good. “Is that all?”
    “There was one other thing,” Molly said. “But you’d want to be careful bringing it up at school—a lot of kids are still pretty torn up over it.”
    “Don’t worry, I’ll watch my mouth,” I assured her.
    “Well about six months ago, one of the senior boys, Henry Taylor, climbed up on the school roof to get a basketball that had landed up there. He wasn’t screwing around or anything, he was just trying to get it down. No one saw how it happened, but he slipped and fell. He came down right in the middle of the courts—his friends saw the whole thing. They were never able to completely get rid of the bloodstain, so no one plays there anymore.”
    Before I could respond, Mr. Velt cleared his throat and looked daggers in our direction.
    “Miss Harrison, I assume you are explaining to our new student the concept of covalent bonding.”
    “Um, not exactly, Mr. Velt,” Molly replied. “I don’t want to bore her to death on her first day.”
    I saw a vein throb on Mr. Velt’s forehead and realized I should probably intervene. I channeled a calming energy toward him and watched with satisfaction as he started looking less harangued. His shoulders seem to