take these broken wings (so far)

I *MIGHT* use this for Nanowrimo.
The title will make sense later! I assure you!

Someone said that we all act different when we’re not around others, that we have little quirks we never show others. I say that’s completely true. Now, you’re probably expecting me to start a lengthy ramble about how I’m shy around my peers but more outgoing when I’m all alone. That’s true, but it’s not what I meant. I can talk to people who you will never see. It’s not because you aren’t there to see them, it’s that they’re invisible to everyone except myself.  

My name is Ava Marie Costello, and I am most certainly not invisible. I actually have friends that you can see (what a shocker) and two sisters who I’m stuck in the middle of. The older one’s Celeste, and she’s the only girl in her high school class who preferred band over cheerleading. Talia, or Tally, is the baby of the family, and she’s stuck up and “pretty” and popular, Celeste’s polar opposite. I don’t mind being a middle child because I can get away with anything. Or at least I could, until the day that changed everything.

Two weeks before that day, I was walking home from school with one of my “invisible” friends, talking to her all the way. No one heard me because I took a different route than most people. There were only one or two other kids that walked that way. They were all older than me, and they never paid any attention to the way I seemingly talked to myself.

The girl I was walking with was named Cindy, and she was at least a head taller than me. I can still remember her long red curls and her dark blue eyes and the corners of her mouth creasing in a warm smile, but no one else I knew at the time had ever seen her. I’d only met her that day when I was outside running laps to please my evil gym teacher. She ran with me but no one noticed. She had a good pace, not too fast but not too slow.

Our conversation took an interesting turn when Cindy said something like “So this is the twenty-first century, eh? I always thought y’all would have rocket ships and whatnot by now, zooming across the sky like in my time, but here we are, walking home from school like old-fashioned weirdos. I should really read my history books better...” That was how I finally learned the truth about her and the other invisible people: they were time travelers.

If you read as much as I do, you’d know that traveling through time is impossible because you can’t alter the course of history and all these crazy paradoxes would happen if you did. That was why Cindy and her kind were invisible: so they wouldn’t change things too much, so nobody would be able to see and remember and have conversations with them. Nobody, that is, except for a few. Like me.

As we were talking about time travel and other sensitive topics, we were being eavesdropped on. I was too young and naive to even suspect such a thing at the time, but I know better now. I know far better.

The person who was watching us looked to be a typical high school senior, tall and gangly, fists jammed in his hoodie pockets while listening to music through his earbuds. I’d seen him around school for a while. He was on the track team last year with me, and he was one of the best at the 800-meter run. At the time, I didn’t know his name.

Cindy and I reached my house, and she said her farewell. “Next time I come ‘round here, I’ll watch out for you, Ava Costello. You can see me, after all, and that’s something to notice.” The boy who’d been following us was gone, walking off down my street. I didn’t suspect a thing. I just thought he lived nearby when he was actually from a world away.

The next two weeks passed by normally and uneventfully, with Tally rambling on and on about her popular clique at school (she was in seventh grade back then) and Celeste trying to get her in trouble and me, the awkward middle sister, starting to give up on making them get along. To escape the day-to-day chaos of my house, I went on absurdly long bike trips to the library, where I’d sit and read for hours at a time.

On the last day of my first life, I was in that library, poring over a particularly thrilling book, when I felt someone poke the back of my neck. I can still recall the way I jumped, startled, out of my chair, thinking it was a murderer. It was actually Celeste, bringing me the awful news that would change my life forever.

Tears were streaming down her face that day, a rare sight. “Ava…. I…. I’m so sorry,” she wept quietly. “I’ll drive you home. Mom will explain everything.” At the time, Celeste was in her first year of college.