Free Unearthly by Cynthia Hand Page A

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.
    â€œYou’re better at things,” she’d told me as we stood at the top of Buzzards Roost. “Stronger, faster, smarter. Haven’t you noticed?”
    â€œUm, 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.
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me all this before?” I’d asked her.
    â€œBecause 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.
    â€œFaster 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.
    â€œCome 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.