"Shoot me now!" Pringles yelled.

"Gladly," Destiny muttered in her usual sullen tone. "Where can I find a gun?"

"Guys," Diana called in a mothering voice. "I'm your crew chief, and my first order of business is to ensure that no one is shooting anyone!"

"PR!" Pringles yelled. "I wanted PR!"

"SHUT UP!" everyone else said.

I looked around at the costumes area, basically the attic of the already tiny auditorium our school had. It looked like the lair of some monster made of fabric with poor organizational skills. Piles of fabric and old princess dresses were everywhere, with no order to them at all.

"Looks like a bomb went off," Rachel said, "or Petra came through." She turned and grinned at me, her ridiculous little-girl grin. It always seemed to me that she had turned five and never grown any older. Her hair was red, a natural red, not the dyed burgundy color of Diana and Destiny. Rachel had a childish face and acted like she was three years old most of the time. She had known me for a long time, and we had most of our classes together this year.

"Gee, thanks," I said. Rachel also had a knack for letting off the most sarcastic quips.

"Well," Diana said, clasping her hands like she was about to give a speech to a beaten down army about to fight the most controversial battle of the huge war we were fighting, except for the fact that she was significantly shorter than the rest of us. And also because we hadn't fought any battles yet (but we were definitely going to). I also don't think any army had only eight people in it, most of those girls. "Well," she began again, but Kyle stepped in.

"Okay, guys, so Diana doesn't know what she's going to say," he said, his smooth voice rippling over the stifling air of costumes. "We have our work cut out for us. It's the first show of the year, and I have no idea what they were doing in Pride and Prejudice last year, but we have the responsibility to clean it up. So I guess..." He trailed off and looked at Diana, but not in a way that made it seem like he was searching for words. Kyle? Not knowing what to say? Those were two things that didn't even belong in the same sentence.

"I guess we start now," Diana finished.

Destiny and Tori started applauding, but I held back. Was this entire year going to be like this? Diana getting our attention under the false title of crew chief, with our real leader being Kyle? He wasn't really known for his good leadership. Last year he was crew chief for set and he blew it to pieces. I liked our little crew of costumes.

"PR..." Pringles moaned.

"You're in costumes, now shut up," I said. "If you look on the bright side, we have all the clothes."

Charlotte had been going through a box on the floor, and suddenly she squealed. "Ooh! Ascots!"

Diana smiled and said, "See Pringles? It's not that bad."

I rolled my eyes. This year was going to suck.

2: Introduction the Second

Introduction 2:

"Eew!"

"I got that part!"

"This is disgusting!"

"It has been observed!"

Charlotte and I were cleaning the fabric room, sorting through fabric and spraying as much disinfectant as we could all over everything. The difference between us was that Charlotte was whining about everything, and I was sucking it up, for the most part.

"Destiny and Pringles are sorting SHOES!"

"Wanna trade?" came Destiny's sarcastic reply from the other room.

Charlotte shut up, but she was still oozing unpleasantness when we found the hole.

"What's this?" I asked of no one. It was a hole in the wall, about two feet by two feet. I tried to see what was through it, but there was total darkness and I couldn't see anything. "Charlotte, come and see this!"

Charlotte sighed heavily and crawled over piles of dark fabric to stand next to me. "What is that?" she asked.

"I thought you would know," I said. I thought for a moment, then I said, "I'm going in."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Charlotte asked, but I was already crawling into the hole.

"Holy-" I said. "Charlotte, you have to come and see this."

3: Chapter the First

Chapter 1:

"So tell me again what happened?" Diana asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.

"I crawled into the hole in the wall," I said.

"And then?"

"And then..." I sighed. She hadn't believed me the first time, why would it be different the fifth? "And then I saw this light, just barely around a corner or something. So I went after it. And when I came to it, I realized it was a ball of light. It was light blue, almost sky blue. And then, I don't really know how to say this...um, it expanded. It expanded so that I was in the middle of all that light, right in the middle. And then it sort of...I don't know, it pulsed."

"Pulsed?" Diana asked.

"Yes, pulsed. Like a heartbeat. It pulsed twice and then it blinked out. And suddenly I could hear Charlotte yelling at me to come out and...yeah."

"Okay," Diana said, like she had the last five times I told the story. "Okay."

"I'm not crazy," I said.

"What?"

"I'm not crazy."

"I never said you were," Diana said. Her eyes were wider than they had been.

"I...I don't know, I heard it though. I heard your voice in my head, saying that I'm crazy, that I should be locked up in a rubber room and straightjacket far away where no one can hear me," I said. The words just came spilling out of my mouth, too fast for me to stop them. "I'm not crazy, Diana. I'd offer to show you if it hadn't blinked out, just to prove that I'm not crazy. I swear I'm not." The truth was I wasn't sure. I heard Diana's voice in my head, clear as day, and I almost thought she was actually talking to me, but her lips weren't moving. "Diana..."

"Show me," she said, her eyes suddenly glittering with excitement. "Where is it?"

I ran down the hallway into the fabric room and stopped at the mysterious hole in the wall. Diana kept going; she crawled into the hole as fast as she could.

"Oh my god," Diana said in utter shock. "Oh my god. What...what is that?" She pointed at the light coming from around the dark corner. It was almost the same as mine, but it was a lime green, and when we went around the corner, it was shooting off sparks at aha appeared to be a thousand miles an hour. Instinctively I stepped back, but Diana stepped forward, towards the lime green light. It expanded, just like it had done with me, and I gasped. It pulsed, but instead of pulsing twice, like it did for me, it pulsed a good five times. I didn't know if it made a difference, but when the light winked out, Diana collapsed.

"Diana!" I yelled, and I pulled her up onto my shoulder.

"What...what happened?" Diana asked.

"Nothing! Well, a lot, but that's not important. Um, we need someone here, uh...Destiny!"

Destiny came running in, her face still smiling from a joke Pringles had told her, but the usual fearless fire in her eyes died when she saw Diana. "Oh my god, what happened?" she asked.

"You wouldn't believe me," I said. "You know people here better than I do. Does anyone know first aid?"

"Umm...Rachel's training to be a doctor?" Destiny said.

I face-palmed. The only person I knew well enough to talk to about anything was the one person I hadn't thought of. "Where is she?" I asked.

"Fitting gloves on Arvid and Nick."

"Downstairs?"

Destiny nodded, and I cursed loudly.

"LANGUAGE!" Tori called from the hats department. Destiny and I looked at each other as we thought the same thing.

"Tori!" Destiny yelled.

"What?" came Tori's astoundingly flat reply.

"Tori, run down and get Rachel. Tell her it's an emergency."

Tori seemed to understand and we heard her tearing off down the hallway and down the stairs. We waited for maybe another minute before Rachel and Tori both burst through the door. "What happened?" Rachel demanded in a no-nonsense tone I'd never heard her use before. "Tell me everything that happened from the beginning."

I stammered through what I had told Diana and what had happened to her, Destiny and Tori's eyes growing wide in disbelief. But Rachel, for some strange reason, seemed to accept everything I said, even nodding along at times. After I was finished, Rachel nodded grimly one last time and said, "Turn her over."

"On her stomach?" Tori asked.

"Turn her over!" Rachel repeated. "Now!"

Destiny and I turned Diana on her stomach, Tori too horrified to stay. She ran into the other room, and soon Kyle and Charlotte came to watch.

Rachel felt along Diana's back, pressing along both sides of her spine. Suddenly she grabbed a pair of scissors and ripped Diana's shirt open, and even Rachel gasped.

Along her back were two snow white feathery wings.

4: Chapter the Second

Chapter 2: Diana

I remember waking up in my room at home. Something felt strange on my back, like it was tickling me. "Blondie," I muttered, thinking it was my cat. I opened my eyes and found Blondie, my black cat, in front of me on the ground. So what was on my back.

I sat up, feeling a little dizzy when I did. I glanced over at the clock, groaning as the cobalt numbers glared 2:23 at me. Two thirty in the morning, and I was just waking up.

I tried to think over what had happened today, but the last thing I remembered was Petra telling me some crazy story about a light. I groaned again and crawled out of bed and to the lightswitch. I flicked it and walked over to the mirror, staggering the whole way. I glanced at my reflection, almost the same, but something was different, so of course I took a closer look.

Now, I could be wrong, but generally, people's eyes stay the same color day to day. I mean, it's not like most people see what I saw. When I went to costumes yesterday, my eyes were the same plain mahogany brown they had been every day of my life, but now, for some reason, all the color had left them. Now they were a pale, icy blue. "What?" I muttered, staring deeply into my new blue eyes.

Suddenly my blood ran cold. If this had changed, what else had? I remembered the tickling feeling on my lower back. I turned around, knowing in a way that you know you'll have a test when you fell asleep before finishing your homework that I was going to find something that shouldn't be there. I stared at my back, and with my spaghetti strap pajamas, I could see a pair of feathery, snow white wings.

I scrambled over to my desk, searching desperately for my phone. I grabbed it and scrolled through my contacts and called Petra.

"Hey, Diana," she said, almost unbelievably calm. "You awake?"

"No, I'm fast asleep," I said, glad my usual sarcasm covered my shock. "What are you doing awake?"

"Just studying for a chem test," she said, and I envied her easy answer. "What's up?"

"Well, uh..." I struggled to phrase it. "What...what happened in costumes today?" There was an infuriating silence, and the only sound I could hear was my own pounding pulse. "Petra, tell me what happened."

"How much do you remember?" she asked.

"Does it matter?" I seethed. "I think you know what I'm talking about. You were freaking reading my mind earlier!"

She got quiet again, and I waited for her to say something. After a long pause, she said, "I told you about the blue light. You didn't believe me, so I took you to the fabric room. I lead you straight to it, and then the same thing happened to you, only apparently...stronger."

"Apparently?" It came out more terrified than angry. "Apparently it's changing my DNA! Apparently it's changed enough that now I have feathers growing out of my back! Apparently is the dumbest word you could've used, Petra!"

"It isn't my fault!" Petra yelled, and I was stunned into silence. "You're not the only one who's changing, okay? Whatever...whatever crazy, insane thing is going on here, it's not my fault! So stop blaming me!"

I stood in silence and shock. She never acted this way; that's why she was the baby of costumes. She prided herself on accepting everything and anything that happened to her, and the only thing she wanted out of life was to breathe; even her motto was breathe to fight and fight to breathe.

"I'm sorry, Baby," I said, my voice quieter than I had heard it in my lifetime. "I'm sorry."

"No, Momma," she answered sweetly. "No, I'm sorry. Listen, something undeniably huge is happening. We have no idea what it is, right?"

I nodded, tears in my eyes, then remembered she couldn't see me and said, "Yeah."

"So we just need to stick with each other," she finished. "If you need anything, I'm here."

"And vice versa," I added. "I took a deep, albeit shaky, breath. "Okay. So what do we tell everyone else?"

"I guess..." I could picture her in my mind, her mouth in the pout it usually went into when she was thinking at a hundred miles an hour. "They've all seen your wings. They all know that it happened. I guess we'll tell them the truth."

I nodded. "Okay." I paused, then cracked a smile. "Honestly, Petra, maybe you should be Momma Costumes."

I heard her grin through the phone. "No, you're infinitely better than me."

"Well, thank you," I said, smiling.

"All right, well, I'll see you tomorrow," she said. "I'm gonna get back to studying."

"Okay," I said. "Hey, Petra?"

"Hmm?"

"Get some sleep, Baby."

"You too, Momma."

I hung up and flopped down on my bed, wincing in pain as my wings were crushed under me. I rolled over onto my stomach and pet Blondie. I fell asleep looking at the calendar, where I had circled the date of my eighteenth birthday.