Metamorphosis

Here's the thing about wings that none of the comic books tell you:

They hurt. They hurt like nothing you've ever felt before in your life, and there's a whole hell of an ugly duckling stage before you wind up turning into a beautiful swan. If you ever do.

They just show you those shiny pictures of beautiful people standing proudly with their giant angel wings spread out behind them, smiling beatifically as if to say, 'You little people may gaze upon my sparkling magnificence for 3.4 seconds before I dramatically leap away to something far more important than you.'

(If I ever smile like that, I hope someone puts a bullet between my smug, melodramatic eyes.)

The comic books don't tell you what happens between your guidance counselor handing you a copy of Professor Charles Xavier's annotated and updated version of 'Our Changing Bodies' and your swearing-in ceremony to the Secret Order of Super-People (which, for the record, is probably neither secret nor super). But I will.

Most of the people who get infected with the Phage wind up more or less useless, to tell the truth. Oh, the media love to trot out that story about the Olympic runner from Kenya who wound up hybridized with a cheetah (and didn't that throw a monkey wrench into all of their rules) and a couple others like him, but for every one like that there are a hundred crazy cat ladies who wind up with what amounts to a serious body hair problem and maybe, if they're lucky, slightly better night vision. And even so, they're still worlds better off than the ones who wind up, say, with chitinous bug plates keeping their spines from ever bending properly again.

Not me, though. My doctor says I'm on my way to becoming "fully flighted and functional." Maybe 2% of the human population of the world has been infected by Bacteriophage Plasmavirus chimeriae; of them, about 10% become avian hybrids, and of them less than 10% wind up able to do anything with their wings other than create a decent breeze on a hot day. Making me.... well, making me someone who maybe should have paid better attention in math class, but no matter what the exact odds were against this, I'm Highly Unusual. My doctors say I'm lucky. I think I'd give anything to have it go away.

Do you want to know what it's like to grow wings? Imagine the worst growing pains you ever had when you were a kid, and then multiply it by a hundred. I've grown six inches in the past two months, as my bones hollow out and stretch to accomodate my new mode of transit. It was bad enough being taller than all the boys when I was in eighth grade, but I have no idea of how I'm going to find a prom date now - none of the guys in school are tall enough to do anything much other than stare me in the sternum.

Not that there's anything to stare at. That was the second change; my boobs have vanished completely. Fuel for the growing wings, my doctor said. They may redevelop once my metabolism equilibrates, he said. That's just what every sixteen-year-old girl wants to hear.

And the wings, at least, are growing at a scary rate. I tried to hide them at first, but carrying a backpack over the ridges started to hurt like acid and fire, and before long even t-shirts got too painful. The skin hasn't split quite yet, but it's likely to any day now, and in the meantime I've got what looks like twin mountain ranges about to burst out either side of my spine.

And if anyone ever tells you that they eat like a bird? Punch them in the face for me. Nothing makes a girl stand out in a high school lunchroom like eating your own weight in reduced-cost student lunches. The number of simpering cheerleaders who hover around me as I chow down on sloppy joes and jello cups, cooing about how they just *wish* they could eat like that, but, like, one french fry makes them *soooo fat* has grown exponentially over the past two weeks.

This is my life now. Braces to support my shins as they stretch and thin at alarming rates. Caftans so my shoulderblades don't break through the skin and expose my wings early. Calcium supplements and protein shakes and muscle spasms that snap my arms back like clothespins. Like it or not, everyone knows who I am now. I stand out like a character on an After School Special - our town's very own Phage case. And last week, in the middle of this, my guidance counselor decided that the best way to cheer me up was to let me know that Victoria's Secret has decided to publicize their Angels line with Real Winged Girls, and they're soliciting Phage survivors for their runway shows.

I wanted to be a librarian. I wanted to spend my life safely in the shadows and the back rows, and she thinks that telling me I have a chance to prance around on television in my underwear is going to make me happy?

And yet.

I look at the comic books now, and they seem a little different. And I watch the red-tailed hawks that nest near the library's chimney, and wonder if it's their fault, and what it feels like when they launch so effortlessly into the air and what the wind feels like beneath and around them. And the sky is so vast and wide, and the clouds can hide anything....

I could lose myself up there, I think.

(Confused? Part one is here)