Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

  “Mom,” I breathed helplessly.

  Her wings extended like they were literally catching the air and pushed down once.

  The sound they made was like a single heartbeat low in the earth. My hair blew back with the force. She lifted off the ground slowly, impossibly graceful and light, still glowing all over. Then she suddenly shot out over the tree line, tucking her body up and moving fast across the entire length of the valley until she was only a bright speck on the horizon. I was left stunned and alone, the rock ledge empty and silent, darker now that she wasn’t there to light it.

  “Mom!” I called.

  I watched her circle around and glide her way back to me, more slowly this time. She swept right up where the mountain dropped off and hovered, treading the air gently.

  “I think I believe you,” I said.

  Her eyes sparkled.

  For some reason I couldn’t stop crying.

  “Honey,” she said, “it’s going to be all right.”

  “You’re an angel,” I gasped through the tears. “And that means that I—”

  I couldn’t get the words out.

  “That means you’re part angel, too,” she said.

  * * *

  That night I stood in the middle of my bedroom with the door locked and willed my wings to appear. Mom had assured me that I’d be able to summon them, in time, and even use them to fly. I couldn’t imagine. It was too wild. I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my cami and underwear and thought of the Victoria’s Secret models in the Angel commercials, their wings curled sexily around them. No wings appeared. I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole idea. Me, with wings sprouting from my shoulder blades. Me, part angel.

  The thing about my mother being a half angel made total sense — as much as my mother being some kind of supernatural being made sense, anyway. She’d always seemed suspiciously beautiful to me. Unlike me with my brooding stubbornness, my flares of temper, my sarcasm, she was so graceful and even-tempered. Perfect to the point of being irritating. I couldn’t name one flaw.

  Unless you count lying to me for my entire life, I thought, allowing myself a flash of bitterness. Shouldn’t there be some kind of rule, anyway, that angels can’t lie?

  Only she hadn’t actually lied. Not once had she ever said to me, “You know what?

  You’re not different from other people.” She’d always told me exactly the opposite, in fact. She’d always said I was special. I’d just never believed her until now.

  “You’re better at things than most people,” she’d told me as we stood at the top of Buzzards Roost. “Stronger, faster, smarter. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Um, no,” I said quickly.

  But that wasn’t true. I’d always had a sense that I was different from other people.

  Mom has a video of me walking when I was only seven months old. I learned to read by the age of three. I was always the first in my class to master the multiplication tables and memorize the fifty states, that kind of thing. Plus I was good at the physical stuff. I was fast and quick on my feet. I could jump high and throw hard.

  Everybody always wanted me on their team when we played games in PE.

  Still, I wasn’t like a child prodigy or anything. I wasn’t exceptional at any one thing.

  As a toddler I didn’t golf like Tiger Woods, or write my own symphonies by age five, or play competitive chess. Generally, things just came a little easier for me than they did for other kids. I noticed, sure, but I never really gave it much thought. If anything, I’d assumed I was better at stuff because I didn’t spend too much time sitting around watching crap on TV. Or because my mom is one those parents who made me practice, and study, and read books.

  Now I didn’t know what to think. Everything was falling into place. And out of place, at the same time.

  Mom smiled. “So often we only do what we think is expected of us,” she said. “When we are capable of so much more.”

  At that point, I got so dizzy that I had to sit down. And Mom had started talking again, telling me the basics. Wings: check. Stronger, faster, smarter: check. Capable of so much more. Something about languages. And there were a couple rules: Don’t tell Jeffrey — he’s not old enough. Don’t tell humans — they won’t believe you and even if they did, they couldn’t handle it. My neck still tingled when I remembered the way she’d said “humans,” like the word suddenly didn’t apply to us. Then she had spoken about purpose and how, soon enough, I’d receive mine. It was important, she’d said, but it wasn’t something she could easily explain. After that she’d basically shut up and stopped answering my questions. There were some things, she’d told me, that I had to learn over time. By experience. And then there were other things I didn’t need to know quite yet.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” I’d asked her.

  “Because I wanted you to live a normal life for as long as you could,” she’d answered. “I wanted you to be a normal girl.”

  Now I would never be normal again. That much was clear.

  I looked at my reflection in the bedroom mirror. “Okay,” I said. “Show me. the wings!”

  Nothing.

  “Faster than a speeding bullet!” I announced to the reflection, striking my best Superman pose. Then my smile in the mirror faded and the girl on the other side stared back at me skeptically.

  “Come on,” I said, spreading my arms. I rotated my shoulders forward so that my shoulder blades stuck out and squeezed my eyes shut and thought hard about wings. I imagined them erupting out of me, piercing the skin, unfolding themselves behind me the way that Mom’s had on the mountaintop. I opened my eyes.

  Still no wings.

  I sighed and flopped down on my bed. I switched off the lamp. There were glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, which seemed so silly now, so juvenile. I glanced over at my alarm clock. It was after midnight. School tomorrow. I had to make up a spelling test I’d missed in third period, which seemed even more ridiculous.

  “Quartarius,” I said, my mom’s name for a quarter angel.

  Q-U-A-R-T-A-R-I-U-S. Clara is a Quartarius.

  I thought about my mom’s strange language. Angelic, she’d called it. So uncanny and beautiful, like notes of a song.

  “Show me my wings,” I said.

  My voice sounded strange that time, like there were other higher and lower echoes around my words. I gasped.

  I could speak it.

  And then I felt my wings under me, lifting me upward slightly, one folded beneath the other. They stretched nearly to my heels, glowing white even in the darkness.

  “Holy crap!” I exclaimed, then clapped both of my hands over my mouth.

  Very slowly, afraid that I’d make the wings go away again, I got up and turned on the light. Then I stood in front of the bedroom mirror and looked at my wings for the first time. They were real — real wings with real feathers, weighty and tingling and absolute proof that what happened earlier with my mom was no joke. They were so beautiful it made my chest tight to look at them.

  Gently, I touched them. They were warm, alive. I could move them, I found, the same way I could move my arms. Like they were truly a part of me, an extra set of limbs that I’d been oblivious to my whole life up to now. I would have guessed that I had a good ten- to twelve-foot wingspan, but it was hard to be sure. All that wing simply didn’t fit in the mirror.

  Wingspan, I thought, shaking my head. I have a wingspan. This is insane.

  I examined the feathers. Some were very long, smooth and sharp, others softer, more rounded. The shortest feathers, the ones closest to my body where my wings connected at the shoulder, were small and downy, about the size of my thumb. I grabbed one of them and pulled until it came free, which stung so fiercely my eyes teared up. I gazed intently at that feather in my hand, trying to get my head around the fact that it came from me. For a moment it just lay there in my palm, and then, slowly, it started to dissolve, like it was evaporating into the air, until
there was nothing left.

  I had wings. I had feathers. I had angel blood in me.

  What happens now? I wondered. I learn to fly? I dangle from a cloud strumming a harp? I’ll receive messages from God? Dread uncurled itself in my gut. Our family was hardly what you’d call religious, but I’d always believed in God. But I was finding out then that there was a big difference between believing in God and knowing that he exists and apparently has some great master plan for my life. It was pretty freaky, to say the least. My understanding of the universe and my place in it had been turned completely upside down in less than twenty-four hours.

  I didn’t know how to make the wings go away again, so I folded them against my back as tightly as I could and lay down on my bed, angling my arms so I could feel the wings underneath me. The house was quiet. It felt like everyone else on the earth was asleep. Everyone else was the same, and I had changed. All I could do that night was lie there with this knowledge, amazed and frightened, stroking the feathers under me gently, until I fell asleep.

  Chapter 5

  Bozo

  Christian and I only have one class together, so catching his attention is no easy task. Every day I try to pick my seat in British History so there’s a chance that he’ll sit next to me. And so far in the span of two weeks, the stars align exactly three times and he ends up in the desk next to mine. I smile and say hello. He smiles back and says hi. For a moment, an undeniable force seems to draw us together like magnets.

  But then he opens his notebook or checks his cell phone under his desk, signifying that our Nice weather we’re having chitchat is over. It’s like, in those few crucial seconds, one of the magnets gets flipped around and pulls him away from me. He’s not rude or anything; he just isn’t all that interested in getting to know me. And why should he be? He has no idea the future that awaits us.

  So for an hour each day I secretly watch him, trying to memorize everything I can, unsure of what might be useful to me someday. He likes to wear button-down dress shirts with the sleeves rolled casually to his elbow and the same version of Seven jeans in slightly different shades of black or blue. He uses notebooks made from recycled paper and writes with a green ballpoint pen. He almost always knows the right answer when Mr. Erikson calls on him, and if he doesn’t he makes a joke about it, which means that he’s smart plus humble plus funny. He likes Altoids. Every so often he reaches into his back pocket for the little silver tin and pops a mint into his mouth. To me that says he expects to be kissed.

  On that note, Kay meets him right outside class every day. Like she saw the way the new girl looked at her man that first day in the cafeteria, and she never wants him vulnerable to that again. So all I have are the precious pre-class minutes, and so far nothing I’ve done or said has elicited a significant response from Christian. But tomorrow is T-Shirt Day. I need a shirt that will start a conversation.

  “Don’t stress about it,” says Wendy after school as I parade a line of T-shirts in front of her. She’s sitting on the floor of my room by the window, legs curled under her, the very picture of the BFF helping to make a huge fashion decision.

  “Should it be a band?” I ask. I hold out a black tee from a Dixie Chicks tour.

  “Not that one.”

  “Why?”

  “Trust me.”

  I pick up one of my favorites, forest green with a print of Elvis on it that I got on a trip to Graceland a few years before. Young Elvis, dreamy Elvis, bending over his guitar.

  Wendy makes a noncommittal noise.

  I hold up a hot-pink shirt that reads, EVERYONE LOVES A CALIFORNIA GIRL.

  This could be the winner, a chance to play up what Christian and I have in common.

  But it will also clash with my orange hair.

  Wendy scoffs. “I think my brother is planning on wearing a shirt that says, ‘Go back to California.’”

  “Shocker. What’s his deal with Californians, anyway?”

  She shrugs. “It’s a long story. Basically my grandpa owned the Lazy Dog Ranch, and now some rich Californian owns it. My parents only manage it for him, and Tucker has rage issues. Plus, you insulted Bluebell.”

  “Bluebell?”

  “Around these parts, you can’t disrespect a man’s truck without dire consequences.”

  I laugh. “Well, he should get over himself. He tried to get me burned at the stake in Brit History yesterday. Here I am minding my own business, taking notes like a good little girl, and out of the blue Tucker raises his hand and accuses me of being a witch.”

  “Sounds like something Tucker would do,” admits Wendy.

  “Everybody had to vote on it. I barely escaped with my nun’s life. Obviously I’ll have to return the favor.”

  Christian, I remember happily, voted against burning me. Of course his vote doesn’t count much because he’s a serf. But still, he didn’t want to see me dead, even in theory. That has to count for something.

  “You know that’ll just encourage him, right?” Wendy says.

  “Eh, I can handle your brother. Besides, there’s some kind of prize for the students who can last the whole semester. And I’m a survivor.”

  Now it’s Wendy’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, well, so is Tucker.”

  “I can’t believe you shared a womb with him.”

  She smiles. “There are definitely moments I can’t believe it either,” she says. “But he’s a good guy. He just hides it well sometimes.”

  She gazes out the window, her cheeks pink. Have I offended her? For all her playful talk about how much of a pain Tucker is, is she sensitive about him? I guess I can understand why. I can make fun of Jeffrey all I want, but if somebody else messes with my little brother, they better watch out.

  “So, Elvis then? I’m running out of options here.”

  “Sure.” She leans back against the wall and stretches her arms over her head, as if the conversation has exhausted her. “Nobody really cares.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve been here forever,” I remind her. “You’re accepted. I feel like if I make one wrong move, I might get chased off school property by an angry mob.”

  “Oh please. You’ll be accepted. I accepted you, didn’t I?”

  That she had. After two weeks I’m still eating lunch at the Invisibles lunch table.

  So far I’ve identified two basic groups at Jackson Hole High School: the Haves — the pretty people, comprised of the wealthy Jackson Holers, whose parents own restaurants and art galleries and hotels; and the much smaller and less conspicuous Have-Nots — the kids whose parents work for the rich Jackson Holers. To see the great divide between these groups, you only have to look from Kay, in all her coiffed perfection and Frenchtipped manicured fingernails, to Wendy, who, though undeniably pretty, usually wears her sun-streaked hair in a simple braid down her back, and her fingernails are polish free and sports clipped.

  So where do I fit in?

  I’m quickly starting to figure out that our large house with a mountain view means that we have the big bucks, money Mom never mentioned back in California.

  Apparently we’re loaded. Still, Mom raised us without any idea of wealth. She lived through the Great Depression, after all, insists that Jeffrey and I save a portion of our allowance each week, makes us eat every morsel of food on our plates, darns our socks and mends our clothes, and sets the thermostat to low because we can always put on another sweater.

  “Yes, you accepted me, but I’m still trying to figure out why,” I say to Wendy. “I think you must be some kind of a freak. Either that or you’re trying to convert me to your secret horse religion.”

  “Darn, you got me,” she says theatrically. “You thwarted my evil plan.”

  “I knew it!”

  I like Wendy. She’s quirky and kind, and just solidly good people. And she’s saved me from being labeled as a freak or a loner, as well as from the sting of missing my friends back in Cali. When I call them, already it feels like we don’t have much to talk about now that I’m out of the loop
. It’s obvious that they’re moving on with their lives without me.

  But I can’t think about that or whether I’m a Have or Have-Not. My real problem has nothing to do with being rich or poor but instead with the fact that most of the students at Jackson High have known each other since kindergarten. They formed all their cliques years ago. Even though my natural inclination is to stick with the more modest crowd, Christian is one of the pretty people, so that’s where I need to be. But there are obstacles. Huge, glaring obstacles. The first being lunch. The popular crowd usually goes off campus. Of course. If you have money, and a car, would you stay on campus and dine on chicken-fried steak? I think not. I have money, and a car, but the first week of class I did a 180 on the icy roads on the way to school. Jeffrey said it was better than Six Flags, that little spin we took in the middle of the highway. Now we ride the bus, which means I can’t go off campus for lunch unless someone gives me a ride, and people aren’t exactly lining up with offers. Which leads me to obstacle number two: apparently I’m shy, at least around people who don’t pay much attention to me. I never noticed this in California. I never needed to be outgoing at my old school; my friends there kind of naturally gravitated to me. Here it’s a whole different story, though, largely because of obstacle number three: Kay Patterson. It’s hard to make a lot of friends when the most popular girl in school is giving you the stink-eye.