A/N: FFN helped me to get through the tough years known as the "perpetually awkward years of middle school." It is now about ten years later, and the tough times have begun again - tough for different reasons, though. What follows is a celebration and reconciliation of all the pains and blisses that we each go through as human beings, interpreted through the life of Nudge post-Maximum Ride. The story uses the original as a jumping-off point, but it will diverge significantly. Yet, I still hope that this story will help you as writing it has helped me.

I found out there was a sister website called FictionPress for original work, and as this manuscript was originally an original work, I will be migrating it to that site starting tomorrow.

To understand how Nudge came to be, one need only know the Greek ABCs.

Alpha: A group of melomaniac whitecoat scientists desired above all else to be the alphas of the whole world.

Beta: By experimenting on children, they created a Flock with wings. Just before beta-testing taking over the world, however,

Gamma: Children who had minds of their own escaped, preferring to tough it out on the streets rather than suffering more gamma rays.

Growing up amidst turmoil and uncertainty, the only thing that was certain to Nudge was that, like all of her ancestors since mitochondrial Eve, she would survive innumerable catastrophes—whether natural or imagined, man-made or psychological, or a combination of these—with small joys sandwiched in between.

The world ticked on despite the Y2K bug that had crept in at the end of her birth year.

Then, an oversized disco ball dropped, smashing the bug, the previous year, the previous decade, the previous century, and the previous millennium. The Queen unveiled Voss, a catwalk dominated by madness incarcerated inside a glass box.

The Twins fell when the calendar dialed the emergency number. Anthrax was delivered through snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night.

SARS launched an attack against humanity with metaphorical micro-missiles. Fathers resigned when secrets with their sons came under the spotlight.

A vessel intended to sail to the New New World exploded instead.

It was confirmed that the state had no weapons of mass destruction.

Birds launched an attack against humanity with metaphorical micro-missiles. Katrina wept.

Stem cell research was stemmed.

The unveiling of the iPhone ushered in the era of the smartphone to thunderous applause. Biofuel development was fueled.

Big Auto received a big check. Vampires and other supernatural beings became the most sought-after boyfriends in young adult fiction. The Queen's disciple ruled the runway—absolutely FIERCE.

Pigs launched an attack against humanity with metaphorical micro-missiles. Madoff made off with billions, got giddy for a while, and then pled guilty. The King sang no more. The Queen created Plato's Atlantis, an otherworldly fantasia under the sea.

The Queen ended the show of life. Oil floated in the Gulf. Tesla set up shop on Wall Street for seventeen dollars a share.

Multiple shades of gray replaced the solid neutrals characteristic of print. Fukushima threw a tantrum on an island. A modern-day Cinderella married her Prince. Floods swept through Main Streets in river valleys. People occupied Wall Street.

A star was drowned. Elementary schoolchildren were attacked by a actual micro-missiles.

Runners geared up to go twenty-six point two, and they would have made it, too, but an explosive cocktail ended the race instead.

Camels launched an attack against humanity with metaphorical micro-missiles. Militants absconded with a harem of schoolgirls.

Actual micro-missiles unjustifiably rained down on humanity. Ugly s-s-sneakers became a coveted item of impractical beauty.

Mosquitos launched an attack against humanity with metaphorical micro-missiles, now equipped with a technological advance that could shrink the heads of babies. The former Prince went the way of The King. The motherland of Shakespeare demanded a divorce. It became known that Flint and Steel should have been called Flint and Lead.

And finally, the Sun decided it no longer wanted to watch the greatest show on Earth, and it hid its face behind a total solar eclipse.

August 21, 2017

Dear Miss Catherine,

It was a shame, really, that I had to miss the solar eclipse today. I would've been able to see it, camped out on my front porch, but we were driving cross-country instead. So, so many miles. My organs feel like they've been scrambled.

My arms, too. We had to carry all my stuff from the car up two flights of stairs into the hotel room as a precaution against car-jacking thieves. I really wish this place had an elevator. Thank God my fingers still work so that I can write. Only after cramming all my boxes and bags into Max's tiny sedan did I realize how many unnecessary things are indispensable for modern life. It must be nice to be a turtle, carrying your entire house on your back. Pick up and move whenever you feel like it, none of this whole production. Shrink into your impregnable fortress if some hungry bird decides to pick you out at the buffet.

But this is what I had always wanted, right? To escape to some place as far away as possible while remaining inside the country. That's what you had wanted, too. You stay in a city that's officially been home to the world's largest fountain drink cup since yesterday, where everyone knows each other and can draw your family tree to your second cousin twice removed, where the cow to human ratio is higher than the student to faculty ratio at school, where the highlight of the year is the annual county fair when they bring in the cotton candy machine, and where the de facto Michelin-starred restaurant is Andy's Café where they chuck at you what are supposed to be the best dinner rolls in the world but I was never much good at catching them and had to settle for chicken and dumplings instead.

You stay in a place like this for too long, and the claustrophobia gets real. Even three and a half years was too long for me. I was the mutant outsider who had moved in. You were the outré insider they had kept out.

You had wanted to escape to art school, but then life happened. The "snowstorm" that year made your grandmother reluctant to drive the two and a half hours north to your first interview, and then the interviewer at your second ticked you off with some pig-headed remarks, so you ended up at the school next door instead.

I had wanted to go to Tannenbaum or Kingsbeard, but "the admissions committee hopes you will find a better fit at another institution of higher education and wishes you the best of luck in your future endeavors," and here we are, on the way to Excelsior. Fit. Fit my goosebottoms. They don't give a drip about those national exams I studied my tush off for to show admissions that I am academically prepared to hit the Leagues. They don't care because it's the hardest to be stuck in the middle if your daddy's pockets aren't deep enough to pump liquid gold into the endowment fund—much less take you off of need-based financial aid—and old Pop's pants also ain't got enough holes in them to get you put on Questbridge.

Applying to colleges is like playing darts in the dark, dead drunk. Rip your identity into chunks of carefully worded 250- to 500-word essays intended to demonstrate your maturity, throw the clippings at a line of Latin-inscribed canvases à la Pollock, and hope something sticks.

Oh well, maybe I shouldn't complain. I could still make my mark and change the world in four years. And it's still one of the nation's "best" universities, however you define best. First-world problems. The yuppie flu. But I'm not urban yet, and not a professional at anything yet besides being a student. I'm young though, there's that.

It's getting late. There's still several hundred miles to go tomorrow, and then all the unpacking. Good heavens, really not looking forward to the unpacking.

And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

Itinerantly,
Nudge

At 2:14 pm, Nudge arrived on the grounds of Excelsior. Rumpled and slightly hazy from the car ride, she got in line to check in and borrow a moving cart. Halfway across campus, another student who had already completed the ordeal of move-in was laying, stretched out on a picnic blanket on the university's central lawn, directing a drone by pushing and swiveling buttons with his thumbs. As seen by the drone, the fields teemed with freshmen and their parents the size of ants. A central artery marched from the candy-cane striped tents to the cluster of dormitories rising like stony-faced hills from the surrounding grass and pavement. Each worker in this conduit pushed along a large, unwieldy box on wheels. Other workers scurried back and forth between the dormitories and vehicles parked nearby, filling their boxes with stuff, disappearing inside the maws of the buildings with the stuff, and then crawling back out to indefatigably repeat the procedure.

Into this organic clockwork, Nudge, Max, and Fang entered. They marched into the swarming hills. After some time, they entered the only elevator in the complex with Nudge's large box of unnecessary but indispensable modern life survival gear and pressed the button "4." Creaky mechanical gears slowly helped them win the war against gravity, complaining with a rust-laden voice all the way. Upon egress from the carping service box, they were stymied at the foot of a half-flight of stairs.

These stairs were small, but mighty. A team of young brawny workers strained to push an overflowing box up the stairs, their foreheads beaded with sweat and muscles bulging through T-shirts. Unfazed, Nudge began lifting items out of the box and carried them trip-by-trip up the stairs, down the hall, and to her room.

Nudge and her stand-in parents surveyed the one hundred square feet that would be her designated sleeping area for the next nine months. A narrow bed on worn wooden legs was pushed up against one wall, raised above a matching set of worn wooden drawers. A single metal bar bridging two protrusions suggested a closet. Three whitewashed shelves hung over a small desk. The chair concomitant with this desk balanced on lurching rocking legs. A narrow window opened onto the backyard of the ancient stony hills. It was then noted with alarm that no lights were installed, although a light switch had been screwed into the wall by the door, along with a small, thoughtfully placed sink.

A hallmate popped her head in the open doorway to say hello. She introduced herself as Tina The hallmate popped back out to pop into other open doorways and say hello.

Light being necessary for the photosynthesis of plants and metaphorically so for the mind, it was determined that they would need to buy a lamp.

At 4:12 pm, Nudge and her stand-in parents revisited her one hundred square feet of designated living space with a five-headed lamp and many other unplanned purchases which had been deemed to be unnecessary but indispensable under the alluring glow of box store lights. Among the litany of diverse miscellany were a pack of Atlantis black ballpoint pens, a minifridge, a purple beanbag chair, a shower tension rod and bedroom curtains, a set of wire organizing shelves that could be disassembled and rearranged, an Instant Pot, a box of Ritz crackers, and two bags of pinto beans.

Then, there was the exchange of goodbye, goodbye, and Nudge began to unpack. Halfway through, an outsider looking in through the open doorway might have assumed that a localized tornado had just ravaged her room. Gradually, bit by bit, the chaos sorted itself out. The beans were poured into Rubbermaid containers and sealed, knick-knacks were arranged, boxes were flattened, multiple trips to the recycling and trash chutes were made, lightbulbs were screwed into the lamp, and the lamp was lighted.

As the finishing touch, Nudge draped the bedroom curtains over the bathroom tension rod, climbed onto the wooden demi-rocking chair, balancing precipitously so it wouldn't keel over backwards, and forcibly jammed the ends of the rod against the two sides of the wall next to the window. Magically, by the power of static friction, the rod stayed up. She then climbed down, dusted her hands, took out an origami rose from a faded paper box, and set it on a shelf facing the window in front of a framed five-by-seven-inch pencil sketch of a scorpion dancing with a ballerina.