1 - max

I'm sure you've heard all about it from Max, but we bird-kids spent our first days at The School. Our world consisted entirely of labs, people in long white coats, dog cages, experiments, needles, medicines, you name it. The stuff still makes our skin crawl.

But I met Max there.

It was worth it.

The first person I met, though, was Iggy. We were freaking toddlers. Just little two-year-old bird-kids in freaking dog cages. That's basically how the Flock met each other. "Oh, hey, your cage is next to mine! Let's be buddies!"

Not really. But kind of. Minus the whole exclamation-part.

I was in my cage, flapping my wings like a stupid toddler. I guess I was trying to stretch them—wings can be really uncomfortable when they get cramped too long… especially since I never tucked them in properly when I was little. And I was probably trying to fly, stupid little toddler me. Every time I flapped really hard, I'd hit my head really hard on the top of my cage. Which of course, got me nowhere.

It was pretty stupid. You'd think I'd know better, being a genetically enhanced human-avian hybrid, but no. Appearently everyone is that stupid when they're toddlers.

So I was flapping my wings and bonking my head when in the middle of this, I heard a thunk behind me. I turned around to see a pale-bird-kid with icy-blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. A bird-kid.

I blinked. Whoa. More bird kids existed? I had no idea. Then again, what had I really seen of the world?

We stared at each other for a while. Then he pointed to himself and said "Iggy." Guess that's what Jeb called him.

I nodded, and said "Fang," because Jeb always called me that. And I liked that name, too—Faaaaang.

(Yes. Bear with me—or my two-year-old me here.)

"What are you doing?" Iggy asked.

I glanced at my wings. "Flying. But I don't ever go anywhere…"

He lit up. "Cool! Let me try!"

So we were both flapping around and bonking our heads like two-year-old bird-kid idiots when I heard another thunk.

Iggy and I quit flapping for about two seconds and looked.

It was another cage.

With another bird-kid.

A girl. With the prettiest face I'd ever seen. Her brown eyes were dark and soft and her golden hair caught the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs and glowed. I couldn't stop staring at her, while Iggy got tired of her after a few seconds and began bonking his head again. She was just beautiful. Like… the sun. But much better looking because you could look at it.

I reached out through the bars to maybe touch her hair—it was that pretty, like gold. I was that sad.

She just let out a cry and jerked herself away to the far end of her cage. She glared at me with her pretty brown eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep, probably. I wondered what kinds of experiments the whitecoats had put her through. Any less worse than mine, maybe? She seemed more closed off than Iggy had. But somehow…

I wanted to earn her trust. I wanted her to trust me, and I wanted to trust her as much as she did for me. A very ambitious idea for a two-year-old, but I wasn't that stupid. She was beautiful and I wanted her.

That stayed in my head until I fell asleep.

She stayed like that for a really long time. Distant. Aloof. Whatever. But she never talked to me. And whenever I talked to her, she just glared at me. I know. Wonderful. Such a great beginning to a beautiful friendship.

Or not.

She didn't look at me as coldly as she did that first day. She didn't glare at me like she did with the whitecoats. Not with the same intense hatred, but more of a distrust.

But it wasn't enough. Whenever I tried to talk to her, she just glared at me. And it's not like I talked to her that often anyway, because I mostly messed around with Iggy. And talked to him. Although I don't remember what we talked about. What would we talk about anyway? Our hair? How the whitecoats sucked bull? Honestly, what would two-year-old bird-kids talk about anyway? I can't even remember. Most of the time now Iggy and I talk about stuff like how Megan Fox was hot. And how Lil' Wayne sucks. And how In-N-Out Burgers from our stint in California was da bomb.

But we didn't have In-N-Out Burgers when we were two years old. It's not like the School ordered fast food for us whenever we felt like it (which probably would've been ALL THE TIME).

What we did eat was crap food. Really crappy food. Stale bread, meat that was practically green, water that smelled like rotten eggs, eggs that were actually rotten eggs—or they looked like it anyway. It was disgusting, and they never fed us enough of it. (Remember, Max said we bird kids eat a lot. And it's true. It takes a lot of energy to fly and eat and talk and think at the same time. I mea n, I don't eat and talk and fly all at the same time, but you get the idea.) It wasn't the best stuff in the world—far from it, but you know, we all need food and sometimes you gotta eat what you have to. I mean, I've eaten worse. (Smoky hot jus au rat, anyone?)

That's kind of what they served us one time. (No, not the rat.) Hard bread. Cold hot dogs stuffed with some kind of mystery meat that I never bothered to (and didn't want to) try and name. You rich upstart kids wouldn't've have want to go near it—it was seriously nasty stuff.

But us little bird-toddlers fell on it like Erasers. I think we once timed ourselves eating—Iggy got this world record of 4 seconds. Not even Nudge or the Gasman has even beat that. Seriously, he inhaled it, it was so fast I couldn't see. One second it was there, another it was just gone.

So anyway, we all pigged out on the prison grub. But I didn't pig out, actually. I waited for a second, and watched that girl…

I'd always noticed that every time she finished her meal, she'd always half-frown and touch her stomach, like she wanted more. I couldn't blame her. The whitecoats were jerks. None of us got enough food. Ever.

So my sentimental, two-year-old self took my mystery meat hot dog, ripped off a piece, and extended a part of it through the bars of the cage. I wasn't sure why I did it… but she looked so miserable and hungry and desperate that something in my nonexistent heart twinged. And so I held my hand out to her. She looked up under that tangled curtain of blond hair with her brown eyes, blinking incredulously. "For me?" she whispered hoarsely.

I nodded, and held out the piece of hot dog again, silently urging her to take it.

Slowly and hesitantly, her fingers reached out to take the hot dog. I gulped, and involuntarily half-smiled. "Fang," I said. "I'm Fang."

Her brown eyes smiled.

"I'm Max."