Wings

by E. D. Baker

“What is it?” Tam asked, reaching behind her to scratch.

  The nurse pushed her hand away. “Don’t touch it,” she said. “You might make it spread.”

  “It really itches!”

  “I’m sure it does. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She grimaced and scribbled something on a notepad.

  The nurse made Tamisin wait until the bell rang before she could go to her locker. The halls were crowded then with students grabbing their things from their lockers and running to catch their buses. Members of the student council were taping fliers to the wall announcing their newest fund-raiser, a Halloween bake sale, to take place the following week. Jak was leaning against a locker looking bored while Jeremy talked to Heather. When Jak saw Tamisin, he stood, smiling, and followed her down the corridor.

  The skin on Tamisin’s back had gone from itching to burning, so she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She ran to her locker, threw it open, and dragged out her backpack. Half its contents fell out onto the floor. When she bent down to pick up everything, her hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t seem to get a grip on anything.

  “Let me help,” said Jak, crouching down beside her.

  “Thanks, but you don’t need to …”

  “It’s my pleasure,” he said, handing her some papers. He was smiling when he looked into her eyes, but his smile quickly melted away. “Is everything all right?” he asked, reaching out his hand to help her to her feet.

  “I’m fine,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “I can manage on my own.”

  His expression changed from concern to something more distant. “Sure,” he said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  Tamisin ran the entire way home. Before she’d even opened the front door, she was ripping off her jacket and flinging it aside. Her feet thudded on the stairs as she raced to the bathroom and tore off her blouse. Turning around in front of the mirror, she saw right away what Tiffany and Kendra had meant. The skin between her shoulder blades looked red and raw. It was cracking in places, leaving a web of angry red lines. Reaching around behind her, she tried to scratch her back, but it hurt instead of making it feel better.

  “I’ve got to do something,” she said, hopping from one foot to the other in an agony of itchiness. “Maybe a shower would help.”

  Pulling off her clothes, she turned on the shower and climbed in. Hot water made her back hurt more, but cold water eased the itchiness a little, so she turned it to the coldest temperature she could stand. Her teeth were chattering and her nose had begun to run when she finally turned off the water. Wrapping a towel around herself, she threw open the door and dashed to her room to put on an old black T-shirt and jeans. Once she was dressed, she hurried to the kitchen, where she took all the ice from the freezer, filled every plastic bag she could find, and carried them upstairs. She had just reached her room when she heard Kyle come home, so she locked her door before setting the bags on her bed. She tried lying on the bags, but it was too uncomfortable. Desperate, she lay on her stomach and used one hand to place as many bags as she could on her back.

  Within minutes she was sound asleep and didn’t wake until someone pounded on the bedroom door. She sat up with a start, groaning at the pain in her back. “Hey, Tam,” Kyle shouted. “Dinner’s on the table.”

  “Go away,” she said, lying down again. “I’m not hungry.”

  Her mother was at the door a few minutes later. “Tamisin, are you in there?”

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “Do you need anything? If you’re really sick, maybe I should call the doctor.”

  “I don’t want to see the doctor. I just want to sleep,” Tamisin said, replacing a melted bag of ice with one that still held a few solid pieces.

  The next time she woke, it was dark and the house was quiet. Groaning, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. A plastic bag slid off the bed, sloshing. There was a foul smell in the air that made her crinkle her nose. Although her back no longer hurt, she felt like she was a hundred years old and nearly fell when she set her feet on the floor. Taking one slow step at a time, she shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, glad that everyone else was in bed.

  Tamisin flicked on the light, tugged her T-shirt over her head, and turned her back to the mirror. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Two parallel lines about five inches long ran vertically between her shoulder blades. She prodded one with her finger and a clear fluid dribbled out. A wet, blue mass oozed from the gash and hung from her back. Tamisin poked it. Whatever it was, the thing felt as warm and sticky as blood.

  The other line hadn’t opened as much, but she could see blue inside it as well. Since the side where the lump had already come out felt better, Tamisin decided that this one had to come out, too. She twisted and turned, working her shoulder muscles, but nothing happened. Finally she reached down to touch her toes like she did in gym class, and felt a pressure in her back suddenly give way as another smooth, wet clump slurped out to hang down like the first.

  Tamisin wiggled her shoulders again and the clumps began to unfurl, growing stiffer as they dried. Although they had been dragging on the muscles of her back, they began to grow lighter and stretch out until she could see what they were. Smooth and supple, they were sapphire blue veined with violet and shimmered in the light. When fully dry, they were longer than her arm span and reached from behind her head to her thighs.

  Tamisin laughed in spite of herself. “Spreckles and pointy ears were nothing compared with this,” she said. “Tamisin Warner, the strangest girl in school, has wings!”

  The wings were warm when she touched them and as sensitive as her hands. They weren’t lifeless like fingernails or hair, but another living part of her.

  For the next hour or so, Tamisin experimented, moving her shoulder blades, bending and stretching, and eventually controlling her wings by flexing the muscles in her back. At first her wings were weak, and she could only flap them feebly, but she kept at it until the muscles ached and she could move them enough to fan the air.

  After putting on a halter top that left her back bare, Tamisin was ready to run to her parents’ room to show off her glorious new wings when she began to wonder how they might react. They were normal people, whereas Tamisin … She wasn’t sure what she was, but she certainly wasn’t normal. Although she’d been excited at first, the longer she looked at her wings the more she realized just what they meant. She’d always known she was different, but she’d never realized that she was that different. Kyle might be weird, but he wasn’t any weirder than any other boy his age, and Petey and her parents were about as normal as they could be. So how could such a perfectly normal family have someone like her in it?

  Tamisin hesitated, her hand on the doorknob of her parents’ room. What if her parents knew something that they’d never told her? What if having wings ran in the family, skipping a generation or two? Or maybe it was all her parents’ fault—maybe they’d done something that made Tamisin have wings. But how could that be? She’d never heard of a real person with actual wings.

  Knocking softly on their door, Tamisin opened it and went in.

  “What is it?” asked her mother’s sleepy voice. “Pumpkin, is that you?”

  “I need to talk to you,” said Tamisin.

  “Right now?” her father mumbled. “Can’t this wait until morning?”

  “No, it can’t,” Tamisin said, and she flipped the light switch on the wall.

  “Why did you do that?” asked her mother, rubbing her eyes at the bright light. “What is that you’re wearing? Are you going to be in a school play?”

  “It’s not a costume,” Tamisin said. “These are real, which is why we have to talk. I need to know how this could have happened. Tell me the truth. When you were in college, did either of you do some kind of drug or participate in some weird science experiment?”

  “I don’t understand, sweetie,” said her mother. “What are you talking about?” She patted the mattres
s beside her. “Your father and I were on the swim team. We told you that’s how we met. The only science experiments I did were for a basic biology course. Are you having problems in science class? Do you need a tutor?”

  “You aren’t listening!” Exasperated, Tamisin sighed and plopped down on the bed. “Here,” she said, turning her back to her parents. “Touch my wings. Don’t worry, they won’t come off.”

  Tamisin felt her mother pat one of the wings, then tug it ever so gently. When she tugged again, harder this time, Tamisin gasped. “Hey! I told you it was attached!”

  Suddenly her mother no longer sounded sleepy. She sat up, pulling the covers up with her. “Michael, look at them. I think these things are real!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” said Tamisin’s father. He grunted when he sat up in bed and reached toward her wing. “Let me just …” Tears came to Tamisin’s eyes when he yanked so hard that it felt as if needles were shooting into the muscles of her back.

  “Ow!” she shouted, jumping to her feet. Whirling around to face her parents, she glared at them and reached behind her to rub the base of her wing. “You don’t have to try to rip it off me!”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” her father asked.

  If Tamisin hadn’t been so upset, she might have laughed at the expressions on her parents’ faces: her mother looked like a guppy with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open, and her father looked half asleep and completely befuddled.

  “So how did this happen?” Tamisin demanded. “It was radiation, wasn’t it? You went to a protest with Dad at some army-testing site while you were pregnant and you got a good dose of radiation. Then you had me and that’s why I’m so weird! I’m a mutant, aren’t I? Come on, you can tell me the truth. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  Tamisin’s mother stared down at her hands. “I suppose we should have told you before. It’s just that the time never seemed quite right.”

  “Tell me what? You mean I really am a mutant?” Tamisin abruptly sat on the blanket chest at the foot of the bed, shaking. She was no longer sure she was ready for the truth.

  Her mother shook her head. “It’s nothing like that.” She glanced up at Tamisin, her eyes pleading with her to understand. “For years I’ve wondered how we were going to say this, and I had all sorts of speeches planned, but I’m just going to come out with it. Tamisin, you’re my darling daughter and I love you. I’ve always loved you and I always will. However, I didn’t give birth to you. Your father and I adopted you when you were just a few days old. After we had Kyle, I had three miscarriages. We wanted a little girl so much …”

  Tamisin felt like someone had punched her in the stomach. She almost forgot how to breathe. It was the worst, most hopeless feeling in the world—everything she knew and trusted and believed in had been a lie.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before this?” she said when she could talk again.

  Her father cleared his throat. “Your mother told you that we were waiting for the right time to—”

  “And when was that going to be—my wedding day or maybe when I graduated from college? ‘Congratulations, dear, we’re very proud of you and just wanted to tell you that you’re adopted’?”

  “Please don’t be angry,” said her mother. “I only wanted you to be happy.”

  “I would have been a lot happier if you hadn’t lied to me!” No longer able to sit still, Tamisin hopped to her feet and began to pace the length of the room, unaware that while she gestured with her hands her wings were waving behind her. “And what about my wings? Are you telling me that my real parents have wings, too? Then maybe they’re some kinds of mutants! Or aliens! Did you ever think of that?”

  “Certainly not mutants, or aliens, for that matter, but there were times we did wonder …,” said her father. “Things happened to you that were a little unusual, sweetheart. Remember the fireflies when we went camping and how you got your spreckles? And the way you dance whenever there’s a full moon?”

  They both looked so worried that Tamisin felt the urge to comfort them—until she remembered that they had lied to her. “To think that my parents … But you’re not, are you? Do you realize that I don’t even know what to call you now? I can’t call you Mom and Dad anymore. I know it always bugs you when kids call their parents by their first names, but I guess I’m going to have to call you Janice and Mike. Or should it be Mr. and Mrs. Warner?”

  Her mother, or the woman she’d thought of as her mother, looked like Tamisin had slapped her. Her father frowned and shook his head. “There’s no need to talk to us that way. We’re still your parents. We raised you and we’re still your family.”

  But Tamisin wasn’t listening. Stopping in the middle of the room, she stared at the wall without seeing it. “I wonder what my real parents are like. Why do you think they gave me up for adoption? Do you think they might be dead?”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” said her father.

  Her mother was looking at her wings with a most peculiar expression on her face. “They’re very beautiful. Do they work? What I mean is—can you fly?”

  Tamisin frowned. It was an obvious question, and she didn’t know why she hadn’t considered it. “I don’t know.” She moved her wings, fanning the air slowly at first, then faster and faster, but all it did was flip the pages of the book on the nightstand and flutter the curtains on the windows. “I guess not.” She didn’t know who was more disappointed, her mother or herself.

  “We’ve talked about what we would do if you wanted to try to find your birth parents,” said her father. “You can if you want—it’s your decision. And you know we’d help you any way we can. We love you, pumpkin, and we want whatever’s best for you.”

  “What can you tell me about them?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid,” said her mother. “The only thing the lawyer who handled it told us was that your birth mother had already named you Tamisin. But we don’t think your life was very good before you came to us. A doctor told us that the mark on your wrist was from a rat bite.”

  “What about the lawyer? Could I go talk to him?”

  Her father shook his head. “We can give you all the information we have about him, but I doubt it will do you any good. He was a strange little man. He disappeared years ago. We tried to contact him when you were a few years old, but no one knew what had become of him.”

  “Are you going to tell Kyle about your wings?” asked her mother.

  Tamisin glanced over her shoulder and watched the color on her wings ripple when she fanned them. “No, and I don’t want you to either. Kyle has never been able to keep a secret. If he hears about them, it will be all over town by noon tomorrow.”

  “We won’t tell him, but do you really think you’ll be able to keep it a secret?”

  “I’m sure I can,” Tamisin replied. After all, the last thing she wanted to do was let all the people who already thought she was weird know that she was even odder than any of them could imagine.

  Chapter 6

  Tamisin slept in the next morning until everyone else had left the house and then stayed home from school. Having thought about her wings and the news of her adoption all night, she decided that she really wasn’t surprised to learn that she was adopted. After all, even before her wings appeared she’d known that she wasn’t anything like the rest of her family. She loved them, but there’d been too many times that she’d felt as if she didn’t belong.

  When Tamisin didn’t get out of bed right away, her cat, Skipper, began to scratch at the door. Yawning, Tamisin sat up to stretch and was surprised when her wings twitched, trapped by the blankets. She’d forgotten about them for the moment, but as her memory of the previous night returned, her emotions were mixed. Having wings was very exciting and they were quite beautiful, but although it had been easy to say that she wanted to keep them a secret, she didn’t know how that would be possible. They were so big and obvious.

  Standing in the middle of her room, Tamisin experimented wit
h her wings, trying over and over again to fold them close to her body so they lay flat and weren’t too uncomfortable. It took some time, but when she finally had them pressed against her back so closely that she could wear clothes over them without any bumps or wrinkles, she began to feel much better about them. If she could find a way to drop out of swim class, she should be able to get by without anyone noticing anything.

  Skipper meowed again on the other side of the door and Tamisin opened it to let her in. While the cat hopped onto the bed, Tamisin spread her wings wide, sighing with relief as the cramped feeling faded away. Since no one else was home, she kept them unfurled as she headed for the basement, the only room that was big enough for what she had in mind.

  The room was long; it ran the length of the basement and was half as wide. For all the years Tamisin had been dancing in it, the room had seemed to be big enough for just about anything. It wasn’t until she’d put on the music from her dance solo and was trying out some new steps incorporating her wings that she noticed how low the ceiling was. She’d found that beating her wings while she leaped gave her added distance, but it wasn’t easy to coordinate the two kinds of movement. Although it was tiring, she did it over and over again, getting better with each try until, suddenly, she was airborne. It lasted only a second longer than her usual leap, but it was enough to make her hit her head on the ceiling and keep her feet off the ground farther than she’d ever done before. Wanting to prove that she hadn’t imagined it, Tamisin stood up and tried again. This time she actually felt suspended in the air before she went too high and hit her head.

  With a whoop of excitement, Tamisin tore up the basement steps to the two-floor entryway at the front of the house. She’d have gone outside, but someone was bound to see her. Although the entryway wasn’t very big from front to back, it was the tallest area in the house and the only one where she wasn’t likely to hit her already sore head. For the rest of the afternoon Tamisin practiced beating her wings, thrilled that she was able to go higher. It was true that she could fly, but it was her secret and hers alone. She wouldn’t tell anyone about it, not her parents, not Heather, and certainly not big-mouthed Kyle. For the first time in her life, Tamisin was convinced that being different could be a truly wonderful thing, and she didn’t want anything to spoil it.