Characters
Three Angels, one teacher, and the people around them.
Angelina
The oldest of the three
Fierce, focused and relentlessly loyal. Angelina has curly hair, a skateboard, and the quiet confidence of someone who has already worked out things most adults have not.
She is the boldest of the three: first to speak, first to laugh, and sometimes first to get all of them into trouble. When it matters, she is also first to step up.
She processes the world through music and motion, and her journal reads like an argument she is having with herself.
Angelika
The middle one
She wears her hair in a puff and keeps her feelings tucked behind a smile. She has big, warm eyes and a kind of patience that seems almost impossible for a teenager.
She believes, with complete sincerity, that most people are basically good, and somehow that makes people want to prove her right. She notices small things and writes them down: the way the pigeons on the church roof all face the same direction in the wind, the way the bodega owner’s wife always slips an extra banana into the bag for the little kids.
“Please, oh please, Miss Robinson!”
Angelika
Angelala
The youngest. La-La to her friends.
Braids, sometimes with beads. Headphones around her neck like a necklace, even when nothing is playing. A varsity jacket, and an opinion about absolutely everything.
She is the one who says the thing nobody else will say, and usually she is right. Learning came harder to her when she was small, and she has spent years proving that harder is not the same as impossible. Her memory for melodies is extraordinary.
Her notebook is full of stars, music notes and little cartoon versions of the three of them.
“We’ve gotten straight A’s for a whole year now.”
Angelala
Miss Robinson
Their music teacher
Young enough to remember what it felt like to have a dream. Old enough to know what it costs to protect one.
She is tall and stylish without trying too hard, and she has the kind of smile that makes you feel you have already done something right just by showing up. She wears her hair in a long braid over one shoulder, a coat the color of warm caramel, and two silver chains. One with a small music note charm. The other, a crystal heart.
She conducts with her whole body. She hands out notebooks. She checks homework before she checks harmonies, and the girls trust her completely.
“Everything these girls know, they learned somewhere good.”
Miss Robinson
Also in the story
Eddie Ex
A record producer from the neighborhood who runs his label out of an office on 125th Street. Talented, charming, and just a little too interested in shortcuts. He was the kind of person your grandmother would say had “good teeth and bad intentions.”
Marcus
The engineer who records the girls in a small studio near the church. Patient, soft-spoken, always in the same faded denim cap, and reliably the first person to laugh at Angelina’s jokes.
Every character on this page is fictional.