Max (Maximum Ride 5)

"That's the point!" Nudge said. "They don't need to! They're not on their own—people take care of them."

"I've always taken care of you and the others as best I could," I said, stung.

Nudge's eyes softened. "But you're just a kid yourself." She brushed her fluffy hair behind one ear. "Max, I want to stay."

Time to get firm.

"We can't stay," I said briskly, standing up. "You know that. We have to go. This has been, well, not fun exactly but better than a punch in the gut. But it's over now, and we have to get back to reality, however much that might suck."

"I'm staying."

Had I heard her right? Nudge was always on my team. She was the agreeable one. Sure, she talked a whole lot and had a weird interest in clothes and fashion, but she was my… Nudge. Almost never in a bad mood. Never fought with the others.

"What?" I said, my mind reeling.

"I want to be normal. I want to be like other kids. I'm tired of being a freak and having to run all the time and never being able to settle down. I want a home. And I know how to get one."

My chest felt tight, but I forced myself to say

, "How?"

Nudge mumbled something, her hair covering her face as she looked down.

"What?" I asked again.

"If I don't have wings."

This time I'd heard it, though it was barely a mumbled whisper.

"Nudge, you come with wings," I said, not even understanding what she meant. "You're the winged version. There's no optional Nudge with no wings."

She mumbled something again, which sounded bizarrely like, "Take them off." Then she was crying, and I sat back down and held her. Her tears got my shirt wet and her hair kept tickling my nose so I had to keep blowing little puffs of air to keep it away from my face. I was so horrified by what she'd said that it took a couple minutes to come up with something.

"Nudge, getting your wings taken off won't make you not a bird kid," I said. I am not at my best in situations like this and mostly just wanted to smack someone and say, "Snap out of it!" So I was really stretching here. "Being in the flock is more than just about having wings. You're different from other people all the way down to your bones and your blood cells."

She sobbed harder, and I backtracked quickly.

"What I mean is, you're special, every bit of you. More special than any other kid in the whole world, including the ones you want to be like. You're beautiful, and powerful, and unique. Kids without wings don't have your strength, your smarts, your determination. Remember that guy in the junkyard when we were stealing those bits of cable? Whose idea was it to hit him with a two-by-four, huh? Yours!"

Nudge sniffled.

"Remember when Gazzy was really starting to imitate things, all the time, and he kept sneaking up on us and making a police-siren sound, and we'd always freak? Who was it who taped his mouth shut with duct tape while he slept? You."

She nodded against my soggy shoulder.

"And what about that time we tried to shoplift underwear from Walmart, and the store manager was chasing us? You ripped a fire extinguisher right off the wall and hurled it at his feet, didn't you? He went down like a lead balloon, and we got away."

Nudge was silent. I was congratulating myself for averting disaster when she said quietly, "There's a difference between being special and being a total freak. I'm a total freak. And I'm staying here."

19

THEN SHE SAID that she is a total freak and that she's staying here. After everything I came up with, everything I could think of, she said she's staying here."

My voice seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet night air, and I lowered it. Next to me, Fang leaned back against a huge boulder that was still warm from the day's sun. After my unsuccessful emo-weep-apalooza in Nudge's room, Fang and I had flown out into the desert, to a bare place where we could see anything coming from miles away.

Fang frowned and rubbed his forehead. "She's confused," he said. "She's just a kid."

"You know we have to go," I said. "What if she really won't come with us?"