I pulled my knees to my chest, nervously tugged the cloak tighter around my shoulders. I shook my head. Not just yet.
“Are you afraid they won’t like you?” Rowe asked.
“Oh.” My eyes widened. “I hadn’t even thought of that. What if they don’t like me?”
“It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking you,” he said candidly, meeting my eyes. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, what’s r-really bothering you?”
“It’s . . . dangerous for someone like me to be out in the open.”
As if in response, my wings started to flutter beneath their shroud. I gave the cloak a good yank.
“Someone like you? Someone different, you mean?”
I shrugged. “Yes,” I answered quietly, suddenly shy.
“So, is it dangerous for us or for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you the threat, or are we?”
“You are! Well, they are.” I motioned to the cluster of teenagers. Of course it was them.
Rowe peered at me thoughtfully. “Funny. I suspect they might say otherwise.” He stood. “And that might just be the root of the problem: we’re all afraid of each other, wings or no wings.” Rowe smiled that quick smile of his. “Shall we join them?”
He offered his hand and pulled me up easily. I was surprised by how small my own hand looked wrapped in his. I blushed. I adjusted the cloak one last time and let him lead me toward the group, his hand gently pressed against the small of my back.
Cardigan sat on the edge of the reservoir with two boys and a girl. The boys were twins, identical in every way. The girl was small and bone-thin, her wrists like crane legs.
Cardigan stood and, with a flourish toward me, announced, “This is the Living Angel,” resurrecting the name the newspapers had given me on the day I was born. On the day Henry and I were born.
The three stared at me, then the girl said, “Isn’t she supposed to have wings?”
The twins laughed at her. I gaped at Cardigan, shocked that my best friend would give me away just like that. Some friend, I thought, glaring at Cardigan.
“She does!” Cardigan said. “They’re just — hidden.” Her face fell as she sat back down. “It is her, though.”
Rowe moved slightly, shielding me from the group. He frowned at Cardigan. “You can’t be s-serious,” he said to her quietly. “You don’t kn-now how they’re g-going to r-react.”
Still believing it was all a joke, one of the boys said, “I heard her wings are, like, six feet long.”
“Twelve feet, five inches across actually,” I murmured.
“Like an eagle?” he dared.
“Wandering albatross.”
The other twin stood and crossed his arms. “So, if they’re so big, how d’ya hide ’em?”
I sighed and moved out of Rowe’s protective stance. I pulled the green cloak open just far enough to reveal the front straps of my harness.
One of them whistled. “Off the wall. That looks painful.”
“It is,” I admitted.
“Why do it, then?” the girl asked. She had a soft, wispy sort of voice that made me think of dandelion clocks. I shrugged.
“Take that thing off,” the girl said. “We don’t mind.”
“Yeah, do your thing, baby,” said one of the twins.
The other boy grinned. “And don’t feel like you have to stop there either.”
So I took them off. First the heavy cloak, then the harness. My wings popped free and opened, the tips stretching toward the sky. Suddenly everyone around the reservoir grew quiet. Conversations forgotten, they gathered around the mythical creature whose story they’d heard once as children but had mostly forgotten or never really believed.
“Let’s see ya fly,” a boy called out.
“I can’t —” I began. I dropped my wings back to my sides. Flying had never felt like something I could do. But, then again, neither had leaving my house on the hill.
“Yes, she can!” Cardigan’s excited voice echoed across the water.
I stared at her. “No,” I muttered. “No, I can’t.”
“Of course you can!” she insisted, manic elation gleaming in her eyes. “Why would you be given wings if you weren’t meant to fly?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
Cardigan grabbed my wrist in a tight grip. I clawed at her hand, begging her to let me go. I searched the faces around me for the one I could count on: Rowe’s. But I couldn’t find him.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she said, laughing. “This will be fun.”
Followed by a fervent and growing crowd, Cardigan gleefully dragged me to the end of the reservoir, where the ground fell away — a ravine.
I stood alone at the edge of the cliff. The kids crowded around, close enough that I could hear their enthusiastic calls, but distant enough that I couldn’t grab and drag one of them with me if I should plunge to my death.
A body broke through the crowd and walked purposefully toward me. The next moment I was wrapped in Rowe’s arms. I felt his twitching muscles in the quickening of my heart, his anger and indignation through my hands on his chest.
“Rowe!” Cardigan objected.
“Enough.” His tone said it all.
Into my ear he murmured, “You don’t have to do this.” He gently moved his hand down my arm to steer me away. “I can take you home.”
I let my head drop against the itchy wool of his jacket. The fabric felt coarse on my cheek. I found it comforting. Like his arms wrapped around me. And how perfectly I seemed to fit into the spaces of his body.
I breathed him in, wishing that I had my mother’s gift and could smell him — the essence of him — the way that she would be able to. He made me feel safe. Protected.
But I’d been protected my whole life, forced to watch the world through the lonely window of my bedroom while the night called to me, like a siren luring forlorn sailors onto a rocky shoal. I didn’t want to be protected from the world anymore.
I pulled away from Rowe and moved back to the edge of the cliff. I shuffled my feet. Dirt and pebbles gave way and bounced over the jagged rocks lining the side of the cliff.
I smiled back at Rowe, who looked at me quizzically.
“Watch this,” I said.
I turned and spread my wings open, as wide as they would go, feeling the wind comb its cold fingers through my feathers. One feather came loose and danced its way down into the dark ravine below.
In my mind’s eye, I could see myself arching upward. I could see the awe on the kids’ faces. I could feel the ground fall away from me and a heavy ache in my shoulders as my wings lifted me up into the night. For a moment the act of flight seemed possible.
The sky suddenly looked so vast.
And I suddenly felt so small.
My wings opened and closed uselessly once or twice more before I stepped away from the ledge. “I can’t,” I said, my teeth chattering as much from the cold as from the adrenaline rushing through me.
Cardigan smiled. A real smile this time. She stepped toward me and rubbed my arms to warm them. “I know,” she said kindly.
Rowe breathed an exasperated sigh of relief.
A girl in the crowd piped up. “What are they for, then?”
For? I didn’t want to think about what my wings were for, so I showed off my one winged trick instead, knocking down a beer-can pyramid with a flap.
Not long after that, the small crowd dispersed, until it was just me, my wings, Cardigan, and Rowe.
“Wasn’t that fun?” Cardigan exclaimed excitedly. “You should have seen their faces, Ava!” She laughed.
I glared. “How could you do that?”
Cardigan stopped laughing. She twisted her pretty hair around her finger nervously. “Well, I just thought . . .” Cardigan put her hands on her hips. “Look, you wanted to meet people, right? Now everyone knows you! You don’t have to hide anymore.”
“Are you kidding?” I was yelling now. “I’m lucky they didn’t try to burn me at the stake!”
“Okay, I get it. Jeez, will you cool it already?”
“That was possibly the most selfish thing you’ve ever done, sis,” Rowe offered.
“Selfish!” Cardigan spat. “I did it for her!”
“And how is it that you got to be the one to decide what she needed?” Rowe asked.
Cardigan opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Stay out of this, Rowe,” she finally muttered.
I threw up my hands in disgust. “I’m going home,” I said, and stormed off, leaving Rowe and Cardigan to run to catch up to me.
It was quiet on the way home — Rowe walked between me and Cardigan.
When we reached my house, Rowe said to us, “You two need to sort this out.” To me, he said, “Ava, I’m glad you c-came. Truly, it was a spectacular night. T-terrifying, sure. But spectacular.” Then he made a sharp right toward his house.
Cardigan and I watched Rowe walk away before turning to face each other. Cardigan sighed. “Listen, I thought I was doing you a favor, getting your wings out into the open, so to speak. Cross my heart I did. I wanted them to see that you’re nothing to be afraid of.”
I looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. It all seemed so simple, so harmless under the night sky. “I would’ve liked just one night. One night to be . . . normal. To just be a girl.”
“But you’re more than that. When are you gonna realize that that’s pretty swell, too?” She threw her arms around me in a tight hug. “Will you come out with us again? Please say yes.”
I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
Cardigan smiled. “Okay, but you know you don’t have to wear the harness or anything now, right? Unless you want to, that is.”
“I think — I think I do, honestly. Well, at least I want to keep wearing the cloak.”
“But why?”
I shrugged. “I like pretending to be normal.”