Hey all! This is my first story, co-written with my best friend. This is the story of two teenage girls', who find themselves with wings, fake parents and a motley crew of mutants. It is based only on Maximum Ride, but there are some deviations, too. Enjoy!

Disclaimer- JP owns MR

Chapter 1- Karlie

Bip...bip...bip...bip..bip.. .bipbipbipbipbiiiiiiiiiip!

"Unghh..."I groaned. As I rolled over to murder my alarm clock, my greyish-blue sleep-sticky eyes reluctantly opened. It was Monday. Again. I slowly slid my tan legs out of my beautiful, warm bed into the freezing winter air in my room. Yanking the rest of my body out of bed, I scudded over to my wardrobe to do a random pick of my clothes for the day. I stuck my hand in a drawer and pulled out a navy blue shirt, while thrusting my other into the next drawer to retrieve a pair of jeans.

I hastily changed into my clothes, not wanting to be exposed to winter's icy grasp any more than I needed to. My mother insisted that I'd cope without a heater, even though she had one, the hypocrite. I dragged a brush down the tangly ravines of my hair, wincing at points, and tied it out of my eyes and into a loose ponytail.

I shrugged on a thick, light brown coat as I slunk down the stairs and into my least favourite room- the kitchen. This was the place where I had blown up some toast, massacred some noodles and made a bowl of cereal combust into flames (I still have no idea how I did that). All in all, cooking was my weakest point. For breakfast, I kept it safe and just ate fruit, because you don't have to mix one thing with another to make something that could burn your face off.

Still munching on an apple, I ran out the front door and all the way to school, which was only about four blocks away. On my way, I saw several late kids rushing to class like me, but I wasn't late. Everyone else was early, even if there was a set time for school to start.

As I slipped into class, Mrs Martha was calling roll.

"John Dumbbell?" I snickered immaturely.

"Here!"

"Tess Emmerson?"

"Present!"

"Karlie Goltz?"

"Here!" I answered.

"Jason Letterman?"

"Here"

I quickly tuned out the roll calling and looked down at my work for the day, already set out on my desk by our OC teacher. Bleugh. Science on a Monday morning is exactly the opposite of my cup of tea. I twiddled with my compass, doodling perfect circles all over my work pages.

"And Alex Zhou?"

"Present"

Mrs Martha then stood up and instructed the class on what to do for the first session. "9M, this morning we will be focussing on DNA. The students who have handed in their Workplace Health and Safety forms will be testing their DNA by pricking fingers and putting blood samples under the microscopes on the back desk." Everyone turned around in their seats to peer at the shiny, new microscopes. "9M! Your attention is over here! So, as I was saying, the other students without returned forms will be completing DNA booklets at their own desk. I will be at the microscope table, making sure no-one damages the scopes or themselves. Remember what happened last time I wasn't watching. Now let's go."

I smiled remembering how Joey had licked 'contaminated lemon,' which resulted in a trip to the hospital to reduce an inflated tongue-it looked like a pink cucumber!

For the rest of the session, I dutifully completed my booklet, as my mother (cue eye roll) decided that I wasn't allowed to prick my finger, and had thrown my note away.

I hurried straight from my science class to art class with Mr Beecher. This was one of the best classes for the week, and I was actually good at it. We were always loud and had a consistent stream of jokes running around the room. Mr Beecher was really fun, and was never strict. He simply told us an activity to do for the session, then went back to his desk to work on his own art. It's amazing. It always looks so real. He definitely has a very good hand for painting, but never boasts about it.

"Alright class, we'll be drawing the base picture for our assessments today. Pick a picture using the internet, something that you think that you can draw, and print it out, and copy that picture in HB pencil, to your sheet of paper. You can use A5 paper, A4, A3, hell, you can even use A2! But I need that base picture done by today, and by Friday, we'll be finished our assessments, and the due-date is Monday, just in case you need extra time to spend on details. Kay?"

Muttered "yep"s and "okay"s came from around the class, then everyone started moving around to an easel or a computer at the back of the classroom. I moved to an easel, which I shared with my bestie, Sophie. A smile lit up on her face when she saw me, making her brown eyes shine.

"Hey, Karlie! Do you reckon my picture's okay for the assignment?" She shoved a paper picture in my face. Once I had gotten the picture out of my eyes and focussed on it, I realised that it was of a pair of wings. Huh. I was sure I had seen that somewhere else. I creased my brow for a second, thinking. Aha!

"Hey Soph, you do realise that I'm doing the same picture as you?"

"What? Oh! Ah well, my wings are gonna be a different colour from yours." She shrugged and started on her base drawing, picking an A4 sheet of paper.

"Yeah, you're right. Anyway, yours will turn out way better than mine." Sophie seemed not to hear me, and continued drawing.

I sighed and leant back to get a closer look at my drawing-now-painting. Sophie and I were both quick workers, and we finished our base drawings halfway through the session. We were now onto painting over our drawing, but now we were each doing different colours on our wings. Mine were honey-coloured in the primaries, broan in the secondaries and the rest was white. Sophie's were totally different from mine, completely pitch black with white tips on her end feathers.

Anyway, I was really impressed with my work, but more impressed with Sophie's. It was amazing. She had a real talent for art. I wondered what we would look like with wings. Sophie with her black ones and me with my honey-brown-and-white ones. That would be so amazi-

"9M! That's it for today, you can go to lunch now! Don't worry, I'll collect your work." We all filed out of the room, taking about our works of art and about where we'd sit to eat and so on and so forth.

Sophie and I sat (or should I say perched) in our usual spot, up in the enormous maple tree on the edge of the eating court, and watched students mill around. For the whole lunch, we talked about random school related things, and the upcoming school event- the Halloween Dance.

Sophie and I trudged into our next class, stage band with Mr. Gray. We retrieved our instruments from the store-room, each with our tenor saxophones. The small band of about 20 filed into the prac room to unpack and get started with some scales.

As we laboriously unpacked our big instruments, Mr Gray whipped his gold, trumpet from its case, put the mouthpiece on, and promptly started improvising in D# minor... Show off.

"Rightio! Today we're gonna get a jump on some new charts. This'll be sight reading but it's not hard. The songs we're gonna get today are Thriller and Frankenstein." Mr. Gray shouted around the room.

Elated shouts from the band echoed around the room as we sat down and passed along the new music. "Okay!" Mr. Gray announced. "We're gonna start with Frankenstein. A one, two, a one two three four!"

After band, when everyone was shuffling around the halls to get to their next class, I remembered something. "Hey, Soph," she turned to look at me in answer, "would you like to come with me and my family to climb Mt. Rushmore tomorrow? We'll start at about 12 in the morning so we can get up there to see the sunrise."

"Oh cool! I'd love to!" Sophie was really excited. "But… what about school?" I sighed. Soph loved school. I have no clue why. It was as fun as watching paint dry (yellow, oil based paint, so that's really saying something). "We'll just skip school for the day, and say we we're sick, or going on a family day, which we are, really. It's easy enough! Deal?"

"Deal."