“Bill,” Mom says with a warning in her voice, looking at me. Then she shakes it off and smiles at Billy. “We’ve got a million things to talk about, you and I.” And with that, they walk away, leaving us staring after them.

We make our way over to the barbecue. When we get there we can see that it’s being manned by a white-haired guy with a long ponytail wearing a Hawaiian-style flowered shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops. He’s flipping meat on the grill like a professional.

“What’ll it be, young’uns?” he calls back without bothering to turn around. “Cheeseburger or regular?”

“Cheese,” answers Jeffrey, who can always be counted on to think with his stomach. “I’ll take two.”

“Right-o,” says the guy, and then he turns and squints at us. “What about you, Clara?”

It’s Mr. Phibbs. My English teacher. Mr. Phibbs in flip-flops. My head is going to explode.

“A bit of a shock?” he says good-naturedly, taking in our expressions, as if it has only now occurred to him that we might be surprised to see him. “We decided that it was for the best if you didn’t know.”

“Who decided?” I can’t help but ask.

“Your mother, mostly,” he says. “But it was something we all agreed upon.”

“You’ve known about us all this time?” Angela manages.

He snorts, which is the strangest sound ever coming from him. “But of course. That’s why I’m there. You kids need someone to keep an eye on you.”

He turns back to the grill, whistling. He serves us up two hamburgers each, which we balance on paper plates with potato chips and fruit salad like this is a Fourth of July picnic. We wander off dazedly to sit in the grass and eat. I discover that I’m ravenous. And the food is wonderful.

“Oh my God,” Angela says, when she finally stops eating long enough to talk. “This is so cool. I would never have guessed there’s a group. The congregation.” She says the word like she’s trying it out on her tongue, like it’s a word with magic powers. “I want to talk to Billy again. She seemed fabulous. Holy geez,” she exclaims, pointing across the meadow. “That’s Jay Hooper, you know, who manages the rodeo arena in Jackson.”

“Are all these people from Jackson?”

“Don’t think so,” she says. “A few, though. I can’t believe that I’ve lived here for my entire life and I didn’t know about this. I wonder if it’s like this in every city, or if it’s just Jackson. I have that theory that angel-bloods are attracted to the mountains, did I ever tell you? Whoa, that’s Mary Thorton. Wow, I wouldn’t have pinned her as the angelic type.”

I stare at her blankly.

“I guess you never know,” Angela says, still looking around. “Oh, and there’s Walter Prescott. He owns the bank.”

“Walter Prescott?” I whip around to see where she’s looking. “Where?”

“The blond one, in front of that big green tent.”

I locate him, a tall light-haired man building a fire. I wouldn’t have guessed he was Christian’s uncle, looking at him, mostly because his hair is that towheaded blond that almost looks white, nothing resembling Christian’s dark messy waves.

“I wonder if we’ll see Christian,” says Angela.

In that moment I know he’s here. I can feel him.

“There he is.” Angela points to a group of people who are helping to guide a motorboat trailer into the lake. “Christian!” she yells suddenly. She cups her hands around her mouth and belts it out. “Paging Christian Prescott!”

Mortifying, but effective. Christian turns at the sound of his name. Sees us. Then he’s striding toward us through the grass, wearing rolled-up jeans and a T-shirt, no shoes, which seems to be the style here in the meadow. He seems relaxed, hands in his pocket, not in a particular hurry to get to us.

“Christian,” someone yells from by the lake. “I thought we were going to water-ski?”

“Maybe later,” he calls back, waving. He stops in front of us. “Hey, Clara. Angela.” His gaze swings to Angela briefly before coming back to me. “Jeffrey here, too?”

I look around but can’t see Jeffrey.

“Yep, we’re all accounted for,” says Angela. “The Angel Club has arrived. Isn’t this crazy?”

“Right. Crazy. I guess.” He shrugs.

“Don’t tell me, this is old news for you. You knew about all of this before, didn’t you?” Angela asks.

He grabs a potato chip off her plate and tosses it in his mouth, crunching it loudly.

Angela glares at him, then sniffs and stalks off across the grass toward Billy and Mom.

Christian raises an eyebrow at me. “What’d I do?”

“Dude,” I say with a smile. “You are in so much trouble.”

Later, after we watch the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever witnessed that wasn’t in a movie, Christian helps me set up the tent that Angela and I are supposed to share tonight. Angela, predictably, is nowhere to be found. She didn’t even bother to retrieve her pack from the edge of the meadow. Christian and I lug both packs over to the campsite, pick out a space, and start pitching like crazy. We have to hurry because soon it will be too dark to set everything up, but it’s no problem, really. Christian seems to have done this tent thing a hundred times before.

“So,” I ask him as he’s pounding in the tent pegs, the final step in the process. “How long have you known about this place?”

He shifts to work on another peg. “My uncle brought me up here last May. I was pretty surprised by the whole thing, too, believe me. Before that I had no idea.”

“So you really were camping with your uncle,” I muse, finally putting two and two together. “And here I thought . . .” I stop myself.

He stops hammering to look at me. “You thought what?”

“Oh, nothing. I thought it was an excuse so you could skip. Because of—”

“Kay,” he finishes for me. “You thought I skipped school to dodge Kay.”

“I guess so.”

He starts hammering again. “Nope. But it was because of her, in a way. When I broke up with Kay, my uncle saw that as a sign that I was getting serious about my purpose. So he said it was time. He brought me up here, and we spent the week flying, training, meditating, all that, and then on the weekend the congregation showed up.”

What made my mom decide it was time to bring us here? I wonder. “Did you see my mom?” I ask, because even though she hasn’t been up front with the angel info, part of me still can’t believe that she was involved with all of this and never told me.

“No. I heard some people mention a Maggie,” he answers, “but I didn’t know who she was.”

“Oh.” Suddenly I realize that I’ve pretty much been peppering him with questions for the past half hour, and he’s done most of the work putting up the tent.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” he says then.

I look up, startled. There are a lot of words I’d use to describe Christian Prescott: mystery, enigma, conundrum, destiny, terrifying, and, well, just plain hot, if I’m being honest, but the word idiot has never crossed my mind. Except maybe that one time at prom. “Idiot?”

“Because all the signs were there, pointing to you being the girl from my vision, you being an angel-blood, and I never figured it out. If I’d only figured it out sooner, maybe . . . ,” he trails off.

I swallow. “What signs?”

“I always felt like there was something different about you, even the first time I saw you,” he says.

“You mean when I passed out in the hall? I guess I must have seemed different, all right.”

“I hadn’t had my vision yet,” he says. He sits back in the grass. “I thought I did something bad to you, and that’s why you passed out.”

“Something bad to me?”

“With my mind.”

“Like your talking-in-my-head thing.”

He starts picking at the grass, pulling on tufts and smoothing it between his fingers. “I didn’t know how to control it yet,” he says.

“Have you always been able to do that? Talk in people’s heads?”