Angel (Maximum Ride 7)

57

I LOST EVERY bit of cool I had and turned angrily to Maya. “You stay out of this!” I snapped.

She leaped to her feet, knees flexed, hands like knife blades, karate-style.

“Who’s gonna make me? You’re just mad that Fang doesn’t need you anymore!” Maya said, and I felt my blood boil.

“Yeah?” I snarled. “Is that why he replaced me with me?”

Her eyes flashed as she took a step toward me. To tell you the truth, pounding the heck out of someone right then would have been a relief. I was full of feelings that had nowhere to go, so knocking Maya’s lights out would have felt pretty good.

Suddenly there was a little whoosh, and I got knocked back a couple feet. The same invisible force threw Maya back, and we stood there blinking, wondering what had just happened. Then that girl Star appeared again, sitting down in her chair.

“You guys stop it,” she said, as her hair settled into place. “I know twin sisters always fight, but you shouldn’t. I would love to have a sister.”

“We’re not tw—” Maya and I both said, then stopped and looked at each other, frowning. We probably weren’t twin sisters, but we didn’t really know for sure. We might be. Or maybe she was just my clone. Actually, what’s the difference? I needed to do a little research.

“I can tell all of you are mad at each other,” Angel said, stepping to the middle of the aisle. “But I don’t know why.” She looked at all of us. “Is this what you want to do right now? I mean, Max and Fang each have their own flocks. Fang, you chose to leave, so you can’t really argue with anything Max is doing now. If you wanted to have an opinion about it, you should have said something before you left.”

I was surprised to hear Angel say that, and Fang looked stunned.

“She doesn’t have to—” Fang started, but Angel held up her hand, with a stern, no-nonsense look that only a seven-year-old could pull off.

“Max can do what she wants,” Angel said. “You can either stay and weigh in, or you can leave and have no say. That’s how it works.”

Fang opened his mouth, then closed it, looking like he rued the day Angel learned to speak. He threw himself down in a chair, not looking at her, waves of heated anger almost visible.

I was in shock too. Angel had said things that I had felt but had been unable to put into words. She was summing up everything that was making me mad and expressing it so much better than I could have. I hadn’t gotten much further than “Me mad.”

“And Max,” Angel said, turning to me, “you’re the flock leader. Frankly, you need to do better than this.”

I blinked.

“You’re the flock leader when Fang is there, and you’re the flock leader when Fang is gone. I know you’ll always love Fang, but you shouldn’t let him—or Maya—get to you like this. And you shouldn’t let Dylan’s feelings toss you around like a little boat without a sail. You’re a big boat, Max. You have to act like it.”

“I’m a… big boat?” I asked. She’d lost me back at “Maya.”

“Yes,” she said patiently. “You are. You’re the leader, but you’re acting like everyone else’s feelings are more important than your own. Your feelings should be the most important feelings to you.”

“I have to think about what other people feel,” I protested. Especially since I’d been criticized in the past for not caring about other people’s feelings!

“Yes,” Angel agreed. “When it’s a group decision or something that affects all of us. But you don’t when it’s something that’s just about you. You decide how you feel about Fang. You decide how you feel about Dylan. Quit letting everything else get in the way.”

I started to wonder if Angel had been injected with some fancy experimental DNA-type thing that made her sound forty years older than she actually was. And honestly, her face seemed to have lost some of its baby roundness, I noticed, as if in a dream. Her words swirled all around me, like little rays of light clearing paths through my brain.

“Be with one or the other or neither of them,” Angel concluded. “But just do it and quit whining about it.”

I almost said something, then changed my mind. I am not a whiner. I have taken quite a lot without whining. But maybe Angel had a point.

Maybe she had a lot of points.

“The Japanese have an idiom for whining that is translated as ‘vomiting up weakness,’ ” Total said helpfully.

I sat quietly for several moments, thinking, letting my mind sift through the confusion in my brain. When I finally spoke, I felt rock solid for the first time in weeks.

“We all need to fight the Doomsday Group,” I said. “So we need to coordinate our efforts. But, for the most part, it seems to be bad news when Fang and I get together. So the groups should split up, each doing our own thing. But first we’ll make a joint plan. Then we’ll carry out our separate parts.” I looked around. Nudge was nodding, Total was trying to give me a high four, and Fang gave a subtle nod: he agreed.

Dang, growing up was tough.