When Angela was twelve, she did a terrible thing. She sneaked aboard a bus for a museum, none less than the Metropolitan Museum of the Arts.

She had recently seen the movie, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwieler. Like most kids, she wanted to run away also.

She had stared at pictures of the Metropolitan Museum in her textbooks, picturing her old friend, Indigo. She pictured Indigo in velvet slippers, leading tours through those spacious, blazing exhibits. He was a New Yorker and his daddy was a museum guide. Who said Indigo’s Daddy didn’t work at the Metropolitan Museum?

“You heard from Indigo? Got a letter?” she asked Blue and Violet, in Sixth Grade.

Gawky and lip-chewing, she waited for them in the locker-room, curling her foot around her leg to hide the tears in her socks.

 “Naw. Why you asking? Little weirdo left town six years ago. Indigo is gone,” they said.

Blue and Violet were grownup girls now. They talked of movie stars, dancing, lipstick, other girls they hated, and boys. Boys and boys and more boys. Except Indigo.

“Why discuss a boy we haven’t seen since kindergarten? Now, these high school boys give us shivers.”

“Indigo is my best friend. I haven’t heard from him. My heart is breaking,” Angela said.

“Look at bleach-tips skateboard Dustin. Talk about heartbreak,” they said. Giggled.

Indigo, forgive me. I know I’m a stowaway. I just HAD to visit you. It’s been six years! Well, I could’ve hitchhiked…there isn’t much tying me to sanity. Nothing ties me to growing up.

“I’m going to a sleepover, and you can’t stop me,” Angela told her Momma, later.

“Blue’s house, or Violet’s house?” said Momma, lazily.

“Don’t ask.”

She packed her suitcase carefully. Camouflage clothes. Soft shoes. Droopy hats, Toothbrush and toothpaste and clean underwear. When she raced with jingling pockets down to the bus station, she sneaked under the billowing tent-cape of an absent-minded old lady and pretended she was this stranger’s granddaughter.

The bus rumbled. The stranger rustled, startled, and laid eyes on a frightened, shivering Angela.

“Who are you, child, pray tell?”

“Nobody, ma’am.” Try to sound unconcerned.

“Well, I’ll have to put up with you for God-knows how many hours.”

“Have you ever been to the Metropolitan Museum? Do you know anybody who works there?”

“Heavens to Betsy, no. Why the Metropolitan Museum?”

“I was just wondering if you’d heard of a boy in New York named Indigo.”

“Child, there are hundreds of thousands walking the streets of New York every second.”

“He’s my friend. Haven’t seen him since kindergarten. We write letters…used to. He’s a velvet-slippered museum boy and a prodigy, an artist, a real gentleman. He’s the cutest boy that ever lived. Indigo! His Daddy named him after a Van Gogh painting. I think he’s a direct descendant of Van Gogh.”

Angela and Indigo had filled in the missing colors in their coloring books. Painting peace. Painting hope. They had shared everything together in their confidential letters for six years. Now…the letters had simply stopped. RETURN TO SENDER. No more secrets.

I’m not the first twelve-year-old kid to run away to the Metropolitan Museum. Indigo is never scared. I need not quiver like an undercooked chicken, she thought.

She must’ve said that aloud. The elderly stranger shot her a menacing look between her thin, blue-lipsticked teeth. Frustrated, Angela concentrated on concealing her luggage inside her shirt, shoes, and pants, so that the security guards wouldn’t find it.

The stranger said, “How did you know a little prodigy boy from New York? Girl, you look like a hoodlum.”

“Don’t call me a hoodlum, or I’ll slug you,” said Angela. Her fists were as hard as marbles.

Angela stuffed her dreams inside a fading memory of her kindergarten friend, Indigo. She lived in a crumbling house in Cranberry Bucket, New York. He lived at the Metropolitan Museum. She wore castoffs and cutoffs and hand-me-downs—he wore midnight-black velvet. She got free lunches at school that were bologna sandwiches and foiled-sealed juice boxes. She got turkey meatballs from the church food pantry, she got bruises from her Daddy’s temper, she got the pain of growing up too fast without the benefit of love or freedom. Indigo’s life was perfect, and he knew none of this. That’s what she told herself. She was gonna live with Indigo and his Daddy at the Metropolitan Museum.

A grinning Egyptian hippopotamus named William waited outside the Museum.

Stendhl syndrome—definition—a psychomatic condition in which individuals visiting vast spaces of great beauty experience hallucinations, rapid heartbeat, foaming at the mouth, fainting, etc.

That was how Angela felt.

An Egyptian sarcophagus is the worst place to sleep at night. So is the Metropolitan Museum with nothing around you but blackness, history, and the retreating steps of security guards.

She clasped her overnight bag, feeling cold in spite of the July heat. Not that she cared about running away from her parents—not at all. A museum at night was such a horrible thing, huge and full of plastery footsteps, security flashlights. Danger.

“You’ll never be safe in this world,” Angela’s mother had said.

Will I be safe on Neptune? I wish I were on Neptune.

Lights began to dim.

Just find some safe exhibit to hide behind.

Every step that Angela took sounded like a thunderclap to her. A beam from a security flashlight revealing her shadow would give away in an instant. Soon they’d have a newspaper article saying GHOST GIRL INVADES EXHIBITION, TERROR SEIZES NEW YORK.

A life-sized model of Henry III had made Angela break out screaming. He stood there, obese and plaster, cold royal eyes, a placard below telling the fate of his six women. She swore she felt a blade on her neck. Sweat broke along her temples. Her screams sent Security running.

Angela ran smack into a brass goddess taming a snake. Stars danced before her eyes—she stumbled but kept running. The Metropolitan Museum has two million works and exhibits. Hard to keep from smashing into them. The museum was an obstacle course of hideous statues she had to navigate. Viking horns stabbed her. Tahitian cannibals aimed spears at her. Indians aimed arrows. Brutus aimed a dagger…on and on and on.

“The screams went this way!” said a security guard, huffing and puffing.

“My bones are turning to water,” croaked an elderly guard.

“Should we call the police? I think we should call the police,” said another.

“We’re the law here; we’ve got guns,” said the first guard, gruffly.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, idiot, moron, hopeless, feeble-minded, cowardly guards. Go to Hades. Get away from me. This museum isn’t yours. It is mine now. I am the Metropolitan Museum’s Personal Ghost. You drooling slobs won’t chase me away.

Angela leaped into a bed which Catherine the Great of Russia had died in. The bed was four hundred years old, and the sheets were crumbling to dust. She drew the dusty curtains. Was that sound the security coming to shoot her, or was it Catherine’s ghost? Or was it her heart?

Bang! Shots rang out.

“Bobu, you shot the head off the goddess Athena!” cried an Italian security guard.

“Can’t you tell a museum robber from a statue? Look at this wreck! We will clearly be fired, and have to pay fines up to the Devil…no!”

“Just wait till the newspapers get hold of this…”

“How do we cover up the damages?”

“Where will we ever find respectable work again?”

“Let the damned ghost pay, Leonard!”

Two guards got into a swearing match over the statue while two others got into a swearing match about the ghost.

“Where should we search now?”

“How about Catherine the Great’s bed? I swore I saw a shadow move back there.”

Run. Run to the Dutch Renaissance Room on God-knows-what-floor. Indigo’s Daddy work there, I am sure.

Angela felt like tar-black lightning. She did an imitation of Edvard Much’s famous painting, The Scream.

When the security guards’ footsteps retreated, she left Catherine’s bed with relief. Padded softly downstairs. Found a fountain.

Softly glowing, coin-filled, the fountain looked cool and peaceful. Angela stripped off everything but her underwear, climbed inside, and did the Dead Man’s Float. Her splashes were silent. The backstroke. The butterfly. Floating in a marble museum at midnight was pleasant, but her heart ached. Indigo, her only true friend, was gone from her. She just knew it now.

            Her mind filled with thoughts of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, De Vinci, Picasso, Van Gogh. She let their colors and statues take her imagination for a ride. If she closed her eyes and tried with all her might not to think about being stranded in New York—well, she could think up a way to get home.

            “I don’t wanna go home. I wanna search every street in New York for Indigo. I can’t let him down.”

            The Metropolitan Museum has two million works and exhibits. Hard to believe you can’t find your deepest heart while standing among them.

            Crowds of kids would take field trips here, and leave in their gigantic orange buses. Angela would stay stuck here like a rat, scanning their faces, looking for Indigo.

            What did she have left to do here…? Nothing! She could hitchhike home! Adventure awaited her. Here it was! Resolve filled her. She scooped up piles of wet coins from the fountain and grinned.

            “Angela, how dare you run away like that?”

            The first car Angela picked up on her way back home was her own god-forsaken Momma, rolling around in a 1975 Plymouth Cuda. Looking for her.

            Momma chewed a breath mint and glared at Angela. “You’d better hope God will have mercy on you—I won’t. I picked you up, didn’t I?”

            Angela squirmed in her museum-robber clothes, her face down, so she didn’t have to look Momma in the eye and see that Momma really had worried about her.

Six years raced by.

 More and more changes.

Angela’s letters to Indigo continued to come back marked RETURN TO SENDER, since he had moved deeper and deeper into New York City. His Daddy’s voice echoed on the phone’s answering machine.

She put her Metropolitan Museum epscade far behind her, lost in the toil and tribulation of high school.

When she got her high school diploma and her childhood ended, Angela took a train to New York City, an easel tucked under her arm. She had learned about Expressionism and Realists, lights and shadows, abstract and surreal, Escapism and Surrealism, Van Gogh and Picasso. She was finally going to art school, a white-brick place called Wilson’s School of the Arts.

You’d better hold onto your ears, Angela. An artist is never in any danger of sanity. Watch your steps.

Oh, the sights she’d see…Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Broadway, the Bronx, Flushing Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum. Then why did her heart thud so? Why did she nervously scan the faces around her? Why did she still feel like a museum-robber?

Whom in New York City was she was hoping to find?

The memory of mussed-up sheets in Catherine the Great’s bed, the goddess Athena’s head blown off, an opened sarcophagus, coins dredged from a fountain, and a thousand other illicit deeds filled her mind. I would rather be anywhere than the city I ruined, New York City!

Angela’s New York City was full of confusion and delight and artwork, but the strangest thing was running into a person she knew.

She ran into him in the burn ward of the hospital.

Two weeks into moving into her dorm, she had trapped herself in the bathroom. She slipped and fallen under the blazing shower-water after turning the stiff knob far too high. That stiff knob again! “HelPPP,” she gasped. Her roommate used a hacksaw to beat down the door and drag her out, saving her life.

Agonized, she sank into the whiteness of the drips and tubes and machines. They flickered on and off, on and off, like her consciousness. She was too drugged to notice anything but the fuzzy faces of doctors and nurses bringing her water.

“Why am I here?” she croaked to her fellow patient.

A young man got up and swung open the curtain. He stared long and curiously at her underneath his dark and bushy lashes.

“I know you,” Angela said.

“I think I know you, too.”

He looked just like her kid friend Indigo might’ve looked, grown up. Same smile. Same dimple. Still, why would Indigo turn out a thug? This young man was slumped, had a nose-ring, had an obscene tattoo on his right arm.

“They’ve brought me here before, after an overdose,” said the young man.

Angela nodded, dazed.

“They tried to send me to rehab. But man, I wouldn’t go. I have too much fun. I smuggled some of the snowman right into Room 366. Want a couple a’ grams, boss?”

Angela shook her head.

“You won’t end up in prison, I promise. They can’t send you to rehab. Hell, I endured three weeks of rehab before giving up. Now, baby, I’m as free as a breeze. Got plenty of time to think while I’m cooped up here. You see, I dropped my lighter when I was smoking weed in my apartment, and busted up my backside with burns. It ain’t bad in the hospital—they loaded me up with painkillers. That can’t be bad.”

“Where are your folks?”

“Hah! My folks don’t want me. They’re drug-dealers as well, but me, I got too strung-out even for them to handle. Kept borrowing the old man’s money. I do fine. Fine, baby, fine!”

“What is your name?”

“Indigo. What’s yours?”

“Angela.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

So there they were—Angela and Indigo. Together again. The years were too thick to shake off a glance. Two kids who climbed on the monkey-bars in kindergarten, who suddenly reunited at a New York City hospital, had no clear words for the shock. They had written letters…but not for six years.

“I ran off to live in the Metropolitan Museum to find you,” Angela cried.

Indigo laughed, a short bark.

“You said your Daddy worked at the art museum.”

“He did. Sure as Hell. When we moved to New York, he struggled and bullied his way into being a security guard at the Met. He loved to carry a gun and walk after dark. Then, one night, he heard a scream in the Met. Old man was so frightened, he pulled out his gun, shot the head off a statue.”

Angela buried her head.

“What happened to your Daddy then, Indigo?”

“He started doing cocaine. Got Mother and I into the habit. This is the family business now.”

“You had stopped writing letters to me. Long before that.”

“I’m sorry. It was Daddy’s fault.”

“Why?”

“Daddy was a surly, mean sort. Never let me visit the Met. Told me, ‘Keep your heart in the gutter. Don’t look at artwork. That’s for sissies and cowards.’”

“Some father,” said Angela.

            “All my life, I’ve stood outside, looking into what I wanna be. What I can’t be.”

            “I know the feeling.”

            “Why are you in New York City, Angela?”

            “Going to Wilson’s School of the Arts.”

            “Not me! I’ve lived in NY since age six, and I’ll die here. Soon. The drugs are like ropes, pulling me down. They say I can’t take another overdose, but I disagree. Don’t I look like a forty-year-old bum at only eighteen? They say I’m a bum.”

            “Who is ‘they?’”

            Indigo waved his bruisy hand.

            Angela was so starved for company that she and Indigo talked for hours. Nothing surprised them. Nothing bothered them. Nothing touched them. Not their burns or their bum lives or their backstories. Nothing.

            “What’ll you do when you leave the…um…hospital?”

            “Back to my apartment. Back to my drugs.”

            “Do you know the way? Do you have a route?”

            “I’m unsteady on my feet. Couldja lead me home? I mean, when they let you outa here?”

            She pictured kid Indigo on his roller-skates, crashing to the pavement, busting his knees open.

            “Gonna go to sleep…can’t talk no more. Feel better soon.”

            “It is good to see you, Angela. Good night.”

Meeting Indigo in New York was Surprise Number One. Falling desperately and crazily in love with him was Surprise Number Two.

Like a wind through a wide-open door, Angela and Indigo swept into each other’s lives.

She had visited his dark and festering apartment, deep in the ghetto. The floor was littered with pill-bottles and disgusting old needles. Far from Wilson’s School of the Arts, she took a subway into the seedy part of Manhattan to visit Indigo.

“Throw these bottles all away, or I’ll take them,” Angela said.

Indigo gazed at her, his face like the raw skin under an unpeeling Band-Aid.

Since he’d met Angela, Indigo had vowed, “I wanna rid myself of them drugs and be a diamond-crusted sculptor boy. Gotta find my way back into the Met where Daddy wouldn’t let me go. I wanna be an artist like you…wanna be a sculptor.”

This was a crazy idea. Druggy Indigo’s shaking hands could not hold a fork steady. How could he have patience to chip at plaster for hours? Where would he get chisels and tools when he was literally starving?

“If you wanna be a sculptor, Indigo, you’ve gotta be the sculpture,” said Angela.

“What does that mean?”

“Life will pound you and press you out of shape, but you won’t give up. You will let your life loose its plaster chips, and become a beautiful part of Creation.”

Indigo groaned, slowly dropped his pill-bottles out the window. The creaky window closed. His face twitched. He was starting to come unstuck.

Well, Angela tried to tell herself, Indigo was a good boy. A kind boy. He had a mangy cat whom he called Van Gogh, because its ear was chewed off, an animal he carefully fed from the little food in his refrigerator. Van Gogh purred around his ankles.

He had a box of trash-picked costume jewelry and feather headdresses. He’d rig himself like a freak, dance in the streets, and gather pennies from strangers. This was how Indigo made a living.

He flung open a drawer and showed Angela a green, glowing stack of money. His ribs bounced up and down with his excitement.

“This is the money I’ma save to buy plaster, chisels, and molds. I made this money dealing cocaine, like Daddy’s good boy. I’ma work day and night to make it specialer than special. I dunno what. Daddy will never know. You’ll never know!”

Angela looked dubious. She stuck her glossy, black ponytail behind her ears, flipped her frilly scarf. Her paint-stained hands curled into fists.

“You said you’d paint a picture o’ me, didn’t you?”

“Yes…”

“Well, keep on painting.”

“I never stop painting.”

“Move over, Michelangelo,” muttered Indigo. His dark and fluttery lashes drooped, dreamily.

Black nights.

Angela comforted Indigo out of his craziness all the time. She would hold his head on her knee for hours, until he stopped kicking and drooling and groaning. When he fell asleep on her lap, Angela gazed into his face and sighed.

My baby boy, Indigo.

I will never leave him.

She laid the tattered blanket across him, and left Indigo’s apartment, looking warily for thugs. She kept her fists tight, moved swiftly. Nobody saw her come or go. Her visits to Indigo were an absolute secret.

Indigo’s Daddy knew, and Angela knew that Indigo’s Daddy knew her secret—he knew that Angela’s escape six years ago had cost him his job at the Metropolitan Museum. If he ever saw Angela again, he would put that revolver to good use.

Right away.

Bam.

Autumn melted into winter into spring, and time ran like a fuse. Burning.

This was the Summer of Wonders. Angela and Indigo shared a coconut cake, turned up his boom box and danced on the apartment roof. They shared foaming glasses of Coke, popped popcorn, shot illegal fireworks. They talked and talked. Couldn’t find enough to yammer about. Delighted, they gazed at each other like paintings in the Metropolitan. Like they’d been reborn.

“Party on Brooklyn Bridge tonight!” Angela declared, between her Dr. Pepper and fifth slice of pizza. “Come with me to Brooklyn Bridge!”

Like two sleepy eagles come to land, they gazed over the river. One glowing ball of light. Fireworks traced the sky like a third-grader’s cursive. Trains and jets sang a symphony. Angela’s hand burned for a paintbrush. Moonlight! Dancing! Freedom!

She turned and gazed into the easel of Indigo’s face. That face, she’d tear the world apart to find. Now that they were here together…

“Nobody I’ve ever known, on earth or Neptune, has made me come unstuck. You helped me. Now I know I have a real friend,” said Indigo.

 While they shared a kiss on Brooklyn Bridge, a freight boat’s shadow passed over the water. Its low-mournful horn rang out.

Angela pulled away. Why did that freight-horn make her remember? She thought of her mother’s scowl and the cold bathroom tiles and a locked door. She thought of a locked museum.

Oh, God, let me forget that.

Indigo was saying, “Please, please, please come to my nineteenth birthday party.”

“I’ll bring layer cake. Pineapple upside-down cake. Cherry pie. Everything. Presents up to the sky.”

“Thank you, dear Angela.” He grinned like a foolish child. He bounced shakily on one foot.

“Angela…I have a surprise for you. All the nights you didn’t come to visit me, I worked on my surprise. I can’t wait to see your face.”

Often, when Angela stood outside in the ghetto, she heard hammers. Indigo had pounded plaster like a madman. It had sounded like walls splitting open. Why was that?

Why did Indigo still look afraid? Factory smoke drifted across the sky in a smoggy, putrid wave.

He hugged her like she was a falling star and said, “You cannot ever leave me. You cannot leave New York City.”

“No, Indigo, I’d never leave you.”

“Don’t even let the idea cross your mind.”

“Wherever we go, touring the art galleries of Europe and China, we go together. That’s a promise.”

“Swear it. Say it.”

“I love you.”

“I love you truly.”

When Angela got home to her dorm and flopped on the narrow bed, her easel toppled, and she cried. She did not know why…but she cried herself to sleep.

“Indigo!” she cried. “INDIGO!”

Today was the Day of Days—Indigo’s nineteenth birthday party. Angela carried a sack of chocolate cake. Ice cream. Presents. Streamers. A piñata, to whack open with his hammers and chisels.

“Indigo! INDIGO!” she screamed, with rising panic, searching. He was nowhere to be found. “INDIGO!”

That’s when she spotted feet. Sneakered feet, holes in the bottoms. They stuck halfway out the apartment door, like fish spilling from an overfull net.

Confused, she thought, Those are Indigo’s shoes. He trashpicked those Nikes, painted them light blue. This unconscious lump of humanity isn’t Indigo.

She knelt and felt the person’s pulse. Nothing.

Those long dark lashes didn’t move. That New York Yankees cap had slid to the floor. As she mashed the phone buttons, knowing the police call was useless, she spotted the bottle on the floor, sprawled empty and loosed from its childproof cap. That bottle was plain old Tylenol.

Why?

Police cars filled up the block, like hornets attracted to a carcass. Light-headed, Angela gazed at the wreck and ruin of Indigo’s nineteenth birthday. She saw how dirty his apartment walls were, how they looked ready to cave.

“You must tell us everything,” the police said, eyebrows buzzing, clipboards out. “Tell us every single thing about this day—everything you know.”

“You said the young man was a drug addict?”

“Did you have any clues that he was…suicidal?

Not a single clue.

Nothing but this crumpled note on the floor. It read:

 Dear Angela, I am sorry to leave you. But I should have done this long ago. My Daddy visited me the other night and told me all he knew about who you are. He said you ruined his life, and he would ruin both our lives if he caught us together. God knows, I’m done with the old man. Sure wish things could’ve turned out better. But I’m too tired to deal with my family anymore. Don’t cry for me. Nineteen ain’t a bad age to die. I love you and always will. Yours, Indigo.

Why?

It was so sudden, so sudden. Angela felt like Indigo’s apartment walls. Ready to cave in. She was no longer hiding in the shadows.

She was just like that ruined statue in the Metropolitan Museum.

“Stay out of that apartment, girl. It’s a police zone. See the police tape? Don’t cross.”

“Please put down that hammer!”

“We order you to leave.”

Angela disregarded the cops, New York, the whole world. Her crazy grief knew no bounds.

“Where are you going with that chisel?”

Slam! Angela hit the caving walls with a hammer and chisel. Slam, slam, slam. Wallpaper and insulation junk spilled to the floor. Slam!

Those cracks weren’t water-damage—they were a hinge to a hidden cabinet. Her face fell apart. Even the cops stared.

Now the wall gaped open. What did he weary eyes and tired arms find? A marble-painted, plaster, polished carving, flawless, two feet high. A cool and mysterious Cupid figure, modeled after a Michelangelo picture. Indigo had only glimpsed this picture in the Queens Public Library once.

 Indigo had carved this all himself.

Angela, thought, He had a heart, and a lot of courage. Why, then? Why did he leave this behind the walls?

Cupid gazed at her with ancient-looking eyes. A quiver was poised in his plaster hands. Angela tried to drag off Indigo’s Cupid. She lugged him outside the apartment door and down the stairs. He was heavy, so heavy.

Bright black water swirled in the Metropolitan Museum at night. Bright black water glistened beneath Brooklyn Bridge. Bright black waves crashed on Coney Island. Angela thought, Like a river into its home in the sea—I’m moving on. I’m running back to the little Angela I left behind.

She stomped out of Wilson’s School of the Arts with her canvas, for the last time.

“Why would you waste all that money and quit art school?” people asked. Their brows wrinkled.

“Don’t ask. I’m just…done.”

“Fool girl!”

When autumn leaves come rolling by, Angela gave up art school. Gave up prestige and ambition and money. Who cared? She’d be a street-painting bum. For she was going on twenty—an adult, a free and new bird.

Strung-out young men, single moms, skinny Puerto Rican children, and flower-sellers passed on the street, day after day. They were like the ocean. Angela picked out random souls, sketched their faces, and filled in the colors.

She made the streets of New York her studio and the people her landscape.

“Why are you staring at me?” cried a shoeless woman, who lugged bulging garbage bags behind the grocery store at dawn.

“Why you painting on that easel?” cried the Italian fishermen on the riverfront.

“You should be off the street, unemployed artist, big nosy-face,” said a squeaky little hunchback in boxer shorts.

Still, Angela drew and colored faces whom she didn’t know the names of. She was determined to help strangers see behind the walls of themselves. Just like Indigo had a statue in his bashed-up walls, these people had cool marble greatness inside them. They were only waiting for a moment to arise.

“How do you see all that beauty in me? No one ever saw me like that,” they often said.

Names and faces, names and faces. Angela sketched and colored, sketched and colored. Hers was a clear, bright watercolor world.

Above the watery horizon, while rainclouds fled away, the rainbow was like a clear glass pouring down on them.