Flight Read Free

not-quite-boyfriend, Joe
Fflowers. Joe didn’t want to fly because he wanted to keep playing
hockey. At least, that’s what Joe said, and said, and said, but
Prissi was sure that a big part of his refusal was just teener
defiance because Joe Fflowers was the grandson of Joshua Fflowers,
the man who had invented fledging.
    Prissi herself, who only had had her wings
for ten months, still was obsessed with what those wings could do.
When Prissi fledged, just before her fifteenth birthday, she was
1.6 meters tall and weighed 46 kilograms. As a result of her small
size and proportionate weight, she was qualified to choose from a
wide choice of wing shapes. With fledging, the general rule was
that the larger the subject, the fewer the choices. After
discussions with her father, which, if she were truthful, were more
arguments than discussions, Prissi wheedled LT wings with a red and
silver rippled feather pattern. Least Tern wings, with their delta
shape and small surface area, had been designed for quick turns and
great speed; however, there were trade-offs. LT’s were much less
effective for soaring or long flights. Although they took extra
energy to fly and were ineffective for long distances, Prissi loved
her LTs because they let her do acrobatics and stunt flying most
other wingers couldn’t come close to duplicating. Another benefit
of the stubby delta design was that they took so much energy they
pretty much self-regulated body weight. Prissi thought that an LT
teener winger would have to be pretty lovelorn, heartbroken or
acnefied to get too fat to fly.
    Prissi Langue loved flying. For her, it was
the ultimate freedom. When she was in the air, two hundred page
rulebooks, intractable math problems, the slights and slurs of
classmates and the sadness that clung like cobwebs from her
mother’s death in Africa three years before stayed on the ground.
Many of Prissi’s friends were ambivalent about flying. They liked
their wings because people like them, privileged people, were
supposed to like their wings. They liked the freedom flying
brought, but they feared the danger. More than eighty thousand
Noramican teenerz died each year from crashes. But, for Prissi,
being in the air brought nothing other than a great sense of
well-being. From growing up in Africa, where two and four-legged
dangers existed everywhere, the girl had a well-developed sense of
what was safe. Her mother’s death only had confirmed what she
already knew—the earth was a dangerous place to be alive and an
easy place to die. Yet, when Prissi first began to fly, even while
she wobbled her wings and bobbled her landings, one of the biggest
and most unexpected benefits of being in the air was how safe she
felt. The higher she went, the safer she felt. At two hundred
meters, looking at the insignificant details far below, Prissi felt
as secure as when she and her mother had snuggled in a string
hammock on those sloggy, slow, Bujumburan mornings. Mornings where
sunlight and mist coming off Lake Tanganyika swirled around one
another in a slow dance. Misty mornings. Missed mornings.
    Prissi shoved her face closer to the mirror
to shove away her thoughts. What a minefield. She loved science,
idolized scientists, but how was it be that they could grow wings
on kids and regenerate organs, but couldn’t do a freeieekin thing
about pimples. Science—key to the mysteries of the universe. No,
not, quite yet.
    Prissi tipped her head to keep her hair,
which tended to fall around her face like a tattered flag, out of
the way before she put the tip of an index finger on either side of
an excrescence centered over her left eyebrow. She pushed down and
away. The growth, like a miniature nebula, exploded onto the
mirror.
    “She shoots, she scores!”
    Prissi stared at her contribution to the
communal killing field until a panicky flutter told her to look at
her mypod.
    She swore.
    If she didn’t flame, she was going to be late
for Fi-Sci. Dr. Smarkzy, even though he