Read First Flight for Free Online Page A

met you. If you don’t know, you don’t know.” He shrugged.
    “Mother and father….” Chris could only remember red mouths and warmth, raucous mornings and quiet nights. It was the same with friends, with anything from before, it was all a jumble of pictures and feelings. He tried to remember names, but there were none like Jesse or Christopher or Ellen or Betsy. It was all just feelings. He felt that they were things like feeds-and-straightens and feeds-and-laughs and plays-with-stones and fell-from-tree . And other than the red mouths, there was nothing but black—blue-black, green-black, gray-black, brown-black; glossy and matte and leathery.
    “You don’t even talk about where you came from. And like I said, if you don’t know, then there’s no way you can, so it’s not a big deal.”
    “I fell,” Chris said, turning his face toward the porch rail. “There was light and dark, and I fell and then…. Then I was awake. And my wings were gone. And I have stupid feet, and I’m not doing things right.”
    “Who said you were doing things wrong?” Having stupid feet was weird, but what else was new? Jesse leaned his head on his hand and propped his elbow on his knee, looking at the back of Chris’s head.
    “No one said. I see it,” Chris said, and a fresh wave of misery broke over him. Again, he hadn’t really thought about it, but now it was obvious. “I found things, and I make food, but—and I can’t fly and I’m all wrong . And you….” How could he have fooled himself into thinking that Jesse would want him?
    Jesse was torn between putting his arm around Chris and calling his mom to ask her for advice. Instead of doing either, he decided to start with the thing he knew the most about and work toward the rest. “People can’t fly, not without an airplane or a hang glider or something. I can’t fly either, you know? And what about me?” I chose you . The idea was distracting, so he ignored it again.
    “I don’t know! ” Chris’s voice cracked on the last word, and he buried his face in his arms, fighting for breath. Each exhalation hurt, the air forced out in a choked sob.
    Jesse gave up and put his arm around Chris’s shoulders. By the time he’d calmed down, Jesse’s backside had started to go numb, but he could live with it. “Better, now?”
    “Don’t know,” Chris said and took a shuddery breath.
    “Uh, you started to say something, about me, earlier. You said ‘And you’, but then you stopped. Was it, uh, important?” Jesse hoped the question wouldn’t upset him again.
    “Don’t know,” Chris said. He felt muffled, empty; the thought of facing the public made him want to hide for a while. There was only one other place he could think of, besides the corner. “Want to go back to bed.”
    “Yeah, I bet you do. Come on.” Jesse got to his feet, then leaned over and helped him up. “Do you want to be by yourself for a while?”
    “I think so.” He must be doing something wrong, if Jesse wasn’t interested in his offerings. In him . Maybe if he thought about it, he could figure out the right thing to do.
    “Okay. Will you be okay if I go to the store?”
    “Wait,” Chris said, as he stepped into the house. “You have to finish breakfast.”
    “I’ll take the muffin with me, I promise,” he said, and gently pushed Chris in the direction of the stairs. “I gotta get some clothes on, anyhow. If I show up in my jammies, Betsy will have a fit.”
    Chris let himself be jostled, remembering the night he’d been carried into the bathroom and bumped into Jesse and the stranger. They’d been kissing , that was the word for it. But then they’d stopped, Jesse had dragged him outside and…. He sighed and climbed the stairs. “Okay.”
    Upstairs, Jesse pulled back the covers on his bed. “I know you like sleeping in my bed, so in you go.”
    It wasn’t so much the bed itself as it was being wrapped up in the scent that was Jesse , but it was one more thing he