I have an allusion somewhere towards the end of this section to an old comic I used to read. Old as in 1960's old. You may know it though, but for those of you who don't know it, I swear I didn't make it up.

I was fooling around with a radio that must have been sitting in the basement longer than Tut was in his freaking tomb. My mom said I could take it apart, since it didn't work anyway, and I was about halfway through setting it to catch army radio waves – hey, you never know when you might want to know top-secret government whatnot – when the front door opened and my dad walked in.

"I'm home!" he shouted.

I left the radio and walked into the living room. "Hi," I said, leaning against the wall. "How was work?" I asked, making it pretty clear that work didn't exist.

"Oh, same as usual," he said.

"I don't know what usual is. How was it?" Hopefully, I could get him to admit it himself.

He sighed, and sat on the couch, rustling the cushions. "Paperwork…filing…it's not interesting at all."

I sat down on the couch next to him. "Where do you work?" I asked.

"Is your mother around?" he asked. Way to change the subject.

"She's down the block talking to one of the neighbors. She'll be back to make dinner in a minute. What kind of company do you work at?"

He sighed sadly.

"Look," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. Boy, he had a bad habit of doing that. I moved my wing. "I…a few days before you came back, my boss…well…" He groaned. "How do I put this?"

"How about 'my boss fired me and I'm out of a job'?" I suggested helpfully.

He stopped. "How'd…you find out?"

I shrugged and turned my head to the ground. "I overheard you and Mom the other day talking about it."

He sighed sadly. "I'm sorry, James," he said. "I wish there was some way we could get more money but…we can't. Not right now."

I nodded understandingly. This was generally a really bad thing. Really bad. A spark of curiosity arose in me.

"What did you used to do, anyway?" I asked.

"I used to work with machines. Put 'em together, and stuff. Take apart broken ones for the parts."

I remembered something. "Which reminds me, I have to clean the radio off the kitchen table," I said.

"What?" he asked confusedly.

"Yeah, I was taking apart an old radio. I'll move it upstairs so we can eat dinner."

"You were taking apart…a radio?" he asked incredulously.

"Yeah. Broken thing. I was fixing it," I said. He just stood there for a minute not saying anything, and his perplexity embarrassed me. "I'm just gonna…go clean that up," I mumbled, quickly going to the kitchen.

I cleaned up the table and an hour later we were eating dinner, like a normal family. My dad told my mom about how he hadn't gotten any of the jobs he'd interviewed for, but there was one more he was going for tomorrow, so he might get that one. My mom announced that my room was almost done, and that my dad just needed to get the bed, which was now in the garage collecting dust, for me to finally move in.

There was one more announcement my mom made that nearly made me choke on my food.

"James," she said, "I'm going to the school first thing tomorrow to enroll you."

I spewed my drink halfway across the table.

"James!" my mom shouted.

"School??" I asked incredulously. Get a hold of yourself, Iggy, I warned myself. You don't want to freak out like you did in front of that neighbor girl. I pulled myself together and took a long deep breath.

"Of course," she replied. "What, did you think you'd get out of that?"

"I kind of hoped I would," I grumbled into my cup.

Ugh. School. Why was that word constantly hanging over my head?

-

Later that day, after my dad had put my bed upstairs, I walked into the living room to hear random blurbs coming from the TV.

"Temperature of," – Bzzt – "You'll never know," – Bzzt – "Again, one eight hundred," – Bzzt – "You'll get a wonderful shine," – Bzzt –

"What are you doing?" I asked whoever was flipping through the TV channels.

"Watching television," my dad answered. I went over and sat down next to him.

After a minute more of random blurbs and bzzts, I asked, "Are you going to stop at a station?"

"There's nothing on," he answered. Finally there were no more bzzts and he stopped at a station.

Some sort of action music was playing and it sounded kind of like a fight scene.

"What's this?" I asked.

"An old show I used to watch," he said. "Spider-man."

I thought I'd heard of that before, but I wasn't sure. "Spider-man?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "You mean you've never heard of him? James, there's a lot I have to show you."

Um, okay…

"Spider-man was this cool comic superhero with spider powers. Marvel created him. He wasn't my favorite superhero that they made though," he rambled. "The X-Men were. They were the best ones. The old group though, not the new one."

What was he talking about?

"Uh…" I said, "What the heck is an X-Men?"

"The X-Men," he began, "were a group of teenage mutant superheroes."

Wait – mutant?

"…Mutant?" I asked slowly.

"Yeah," he said. "There was Cyclops – he had laser vision." Laser vision? I think I might've remembered one of the poor doomed subjects at the School having laser vision. "And Jean was my favorite." Jean…gene…genetic…God, why am I so warped? Oh I know why. I'm a genetic freak. "She could move things with her mind." I definitely remembered there being at least one like that.

"What else?" I asked, completely engrossed. Mutants. Where did these ideas come from? And this was all fake, right?

"There was Beast. He wasn't very interesting. Just really agile." Agile. Well, technically that was a genetically enhanced feature, since they did that to us. "And Ice Man. Pretty simply. He could create and manipulate ice and snow." Okay, definitely did not remember any experiment like that. "And of course, the most important was Professor X." That sounded like the kind of name that Gazzy would invent. "He could read and control people's minds."

I froze. Angel, I thought. God, that is exactly like Angel. Angel reads people's minds, Angel controls people's minds –

"And probably one of the cooler powers was Angel."

Oh, yeah, that wasn't a coincidence at all.

"He had huge white wings."

My heart skipped three beats. He did not just say what I though he said.

"W – wing?" I stuttered, disbelievingly. Why, oh, why must it be wings?

Calm yourself, I told myself, it's just an imaginary comic.

Wait – maybe the whitecoats got their original ideas from this comic. I wondered…

"Yeah," he said. "Big wings, that could take him higher than planes could go. I always thought that it would be amazing to do that. Wouldn't that be really incredible?"

"Yeah," I breathed. "Just…incredible."

"I can only imagine what that would be like." He stopped for a second and then went on quickly, "It's all fake, though. Stop looking like it's so weird."

I nodded slowly and tensely. "All…fake…"

I couldn't put it off any longer. This whole conversation had reminded me that one of these days I was going to have to show them my wings. I had to show them. Better sooner than later. They had to know.

"Dad, there's something I have to tell you and Mom," I announced, standing up.

"What is it?" he asked casually.

"Mom needs to be here."

"Rita!" he shouted loudly, startling me. In a few seconds, Mom came down the hallway from the stairs.

"Yes?" she said.

I stood in front of the TV and sought the top of it for the power button. I found it and turned it off.

"There's something really important I have to tell – show – you," I said, shrugging off my jacket. "It has to do with where I've been."

I completely had their attention now.

"I just want you to be prepared," I warned them, "for anything. Let nothing surprise you. Everything is weird."

"What?" Dad asked, completely lost.

I sighed. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, so I'll show you."

Slowly, I unfolded my wings, pushing them through the slits in my shirt and extending the feathered things wide and completely out to their fullest length. My right wing brushed the wall, my left touching a flowerpot.

In complete shock, they said nothing.

"What…buh…wings…" my mother stuttered. I felt myself growing hot. I wished they would say something real soon. This was getting awkward.

Then again, I guess there was no way it couldn't have been awkward. How many people have you come across that just have wings? 'Yeah, I'm your missing son and by the way, I have wings and can fly.' There we go. That wouldn't scare anybody off at all.

One of them got off the couch – Mom – and slowly brushed my wings with her hand.

"Are these real?" she breathed.

"Um…yeah," I answered, flustered. Max had told someone before, someone named Dr. Martinez, but it had been because she needed to, because otherwise her wing may have healed completely wrong. Which would be bad. She hadn't told us much about it until we all seemed okay with letting people know about us. Which was around right after we went to that diner with the evil manager. But she said that it was a really awkward moment. Maybe she'd felt something like I did now.

"And you can…fly with them?" she asked.

"Yeah," I answered.

"Just like Angel," my dad said.

I fiddled with a loose piece of string on my shirt. "Are you gonna hate me now, cause I'm a freak?" I asked quietly. Say no, please say no.

"Of course not," my mom said. "They're…beautiful."

Really?

I folded my wings back in so they wouldn't get tired from being held out so long.

"How'd you get them?" my dad asked.

I smiled weakly. "That's a very long story." Should I tell them? I guessed they had a right to know. Yeah. They did. What secrets am I hiding? "So let's all sit down, cause this may take a while."