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The angel came into the kitchen the next morning and watched me eat burnt toast. I didn't mind. Neither I nor my ex had been morning people, and—since I hated the taste of coffee—I didn't usually wake up properly to have a sensible conversation until around nine. Still, it was nice to have something—someone around, if only to give me something new to stare dazedly at while my brain got up to speed with the world. “You want anything to eat?” I belatedly offered, after about ten minutes of watching him stand awkwardly around and stare at my toast.
The angel started a little. I think he'd been expecting me to ignore him totally after taking him in. (I wasn't quite sure what to do with him, myself, but I did have some manners.)
“Er. No. Thank you, but I don't require...”
I raised an eyebrow. “You don't eat?”
He reddened a little. His skin was fair enough that he couldn't hide it. “No. Not really.”
“So what do you do? Absorb sunlight like a solar panel?”
He folded his hands behind his back and answered primly, “I have other means of energy sources.”
I had to be drunk to discuss the metaphysical eating habits of an incorporeal being made substantial, and it wasn't even noon yet. I consequently let the subject drop.

And, well, it worked. Kind of. My grades did improve, marginally, mostly because if I didn't study I got subjected to long 'talks' (read: periods of nagging) and I was leaning towards introversion, if not becoming an outright recluse. I didn't like to be touched anymore. I'd been a very tactile person most of my life—if I saw someone looking down, I ran up and hugged them. It made lives interesting. I've always felt that everybody needed a little surrealism in their daily existence.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't becoming one of those kids who's all 'oh, woe is me. No one understands. Etc., etc.' I was still pretty good at faking normal.
Sometimes you can be too good at acting.

I turned the corpse over with the wrought-iron poker, disdaining to even touch such vermin with my bare skin. He smelled like gin and cheap perfume, the sort often worn by whores in the Mews, who could afford no better. I remembered that I, too, had once worn such perfume, and my nose wrinkled at the memory. An old scar puckered his left cheek, and tattooed ward-sigils crawled up his right forearm. He would be all too easily identified.
I left him face-up on the floor, not caring whether his death-stare followed me or not. I was accustomed to dealing with much more unsettling situations. But I'd have to get rid of him before morning, as I wasn't entirely certain that Lord Remus--my first client of the day--would appreciate yet another corpse in my bedroom. (Although, to be fair, this may simply be a result of his lineage. The Crowell family, I have found, tends to lack imagination, vigor and enthusiasm.)
My landlord was one of the bourgeois. I had told him that I dealt in antiques—a plausible enough story, especially upon realizing my somewhat lavish tastes in furnishings. He would have expected a woman of my 'upbringing' and 'pedigree' (purchased from a dealer in the Hockhall district when I was nineteen) to have gone into hysterics by now.
I didn't care to disappoint him.