Excerpt from Absolute Angels (2025)

Absolute Angels is a coming of age novella set in post-war New England. Thesis project developed in fulfillment of the requirements of SAIC’s Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Writing.

George’s first thought was that maybe James had a homely cousin that no one ever mentioned. Her face was round and pockmarked, her eyes were small, and dark, set deep into their sockets. She blinked slowly and infrequently, reptilian and inhuman. George found her unnerving. No one else seemed to notice. They just kept talking, like they always did when girls were about. The girls they hung around with always tried to muscle into the conversation, to prove that they were quick and bright and chic. She just sat there and watched with her strange little eyes. Too much time had passed to ask for her name, but he’d missed it, and now he had no idea who she was. He had shown up to the bar late, on the tails of a going away dinner with his parents, and by the time he arrived James had already settled into their booth, his arm slung around the interloper. George felt as though he recognized her from somewhere, but was confident that they had never met. Like maybe they had sat next to each other on a train once, or she had appeared in the background of a dream of his. 

James was stroking the top of her arm in a way that seemed distinctly uncousinly, and George tried for as long as he could to live in the world in which James’ family was handsy and overfamiliar, to escape the world that he was increasingly confident was his own, the one in which this strange and ugly girl was James’ date. If she was James’ date, which he suspected she may be, George feared that everything he knew to be true suddenly wasn’t. 

His strange new life looked mostly the same as his old one. He was at the Four Swans, sitting at the booth he and his friends had sat in every night of winter break. His friends were the same, James and Salty and Bink. The conversation had carried over from the night before, gossip about a girl they had known as children who had been married suddenly earlier that week. Across the room a banner, now drooping, announced the beginning of 1947. Underneath it sat a couple of guys who had been a few years ahead of them in school, their military haircuts slightly grown out as they huddled in a tight group, talking seriously and lowly. Sometimes they would all get a drink together, George’s friends and the old-timers, and reminisce about some school legend or another who they all remembered from their overlapping year. 

That night, however, was meant to be just for the four of them. It was the last night of winter break, and tradition dictated that they would get blisteringly drunk before going their separate ways in the morning. George and James would be on the train back up to Andover at noon, and Salty and Bink were both driving up to Groton and St. Paul’s, respectively. Not only was it tradition, it was their last year. They would all be graduating in the spring, and while they would have the four years of college to hang out and drink, George was aware of the ways in which boyhood bonds change in the first years of adulthood. It was all the adults in their lives could talk about, and sitting in their booth at the Four Swans, looking at James’ date, George wondered if he was the only one who had been listening. 

It would have been a betrayal to bring any kind of date, he thought, much less one that was eerie and quiet and non-beautiful. Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, he remembered where he knew her from. It was a flash of an image, of her encircled in a pair of hairy, masculine arms. Of her looking up, charmed and shy, into the face of Shields, their headmaster. She went to Abbot. Not only that, she had opened the Fall Dance.  

Lionel Shields was young and handsome, and the girls would giggle into their hands whenever he opened a dance, but the boys knew what it meant. Shields had gotten it into his head that it was a show of inter-school unity, picking some particularly lame duck out of the crowd of Abbot girls to show the boys that it was gentlemanly, and polite, to ask them to dance. If he had spent much time speaking to the boys of Andover, he would know that it had the opposite effect, but Shields had always been more interested in shows of force than the interior lives of his students. The boys would ask the girls to dance, eventually, but it was, for the most part, out of obligation. Nothing Shields could do would convince them of anything other than the truth, which was that the girls of Abbot were awkward and dorkish, and were to be largely ignored, and occasionally mocked outright. No one more so than whichever poor soul Shields had chosen to dance with, who would be the subject of days of pantomimed swooning and eye-batting. She never knew, of course, safe as she was in the confines of Abbot’s campus down the hill. But George knew, and he felt a pang of embarrassment for everyone involved. For her, for sitting at this table, blind to reality. For James, for being seen with her. For himself, for being implicated in the charade. The only innocents were Bink and Salty, who didn’t know who she was, and who in fact hadn’t seemed to register her presence at all. 

Later, they all pushed out into the cold January air and said their goodbyes. As was custom, George and James split a cab back up to the Upper East Side, but this time the girl sat in the middle, crushed between them. They got to James’ first, and he quickly hopped out, leaning over the open window of the cab to say goodbye. 

“I’ll see you at the station, right?” He said to George, who nodded, bewildered into silence by the course of his night. James then turned to the girl, smiling his crooked president’s smile. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” she said. 

It was the first word George could remember her speaking, and her voice was higher and more girlish than he had been expecting. Then, in a particularly humiliating gesture, James leaned through the window and kissed her. George looked quickly down at his lap, as though if by not looking, he could erase the kiss entirely.  Later, he would remember this moment as the end of something, though he was never quite sure of what. He kept his eyes on his lap for the rest of the cab ride. 

They soon pulled up in front of her building, dangerously close to his own, and she awkwardly climbed out of the car. 

“It was nice to meet you,” she said. “I’ll see you at school.” 

She might as well have threatened his life, and all he could do was nod stiffly, his eyes trained on the twill of his pants. Only when he could feel the cab pull away did he look up, catching sight of her in the rearview mirror. She stood a few steps off the curb, watching as they drove away. He could barely make out her expression in the streetlight, but he could swear she was smiling.