But once she started, she knew she couldn't walk. She was running. Running through the backyards of houses, hearing dogs barking, and her legs wet from unmowed grass. Running, through a parking lot, mostly empty, where a boy pushing carts stopped to look at her, and into the lot behind, and the sweet reek of trash, where she stopped, panting, and held her sides. There it was, the thin disguise of trees and the small river that flowed through it.

"Spike! Lutie!" Kaye called, frightened by the breathless gasp of her own voice. "Please…"

Nothing answered her but silence.

Kaye staggered down the hill, her boots sinking in the mud. The eggshells were gone. There was only the stink of stagnant water. The shattered bottles shimmered like jagged jewels through her new eyes. She stopped, awed by the beauty.

"Please, Lutie, someone…"

No one answered.

Kaye sat down in the cold mud. She could wait. She would have to wait.

Kaye stretched and turned. The leaves over her shifted and blew with the morning wind. Drops of cold water tapped her cheek, then her arm, then the lid of her one eye. Kaye sat up. Her eyes felt hard and her lips were sore and swollen.

There was a green sheen to Kaye's skin when she turned her arm against the light. Her fingers seemed too long and curled fluidly with a new fourth joint, coiling like snails when she made a fist. She brought up her other hand, where the skin had come loose last night. Beneath it, her skin was a dusky emerald.

No one had come. Another droplet spattered her bare leg, and she jerked upright. Her nightgown was filthy, and she was shivering, even under her sweater.

Biting back tears, Kaye folded her arms around herself and started walking. She couldn't go home—not yet, not when she knew she wasn't the girl who belonged there—but she had to get out of the rain. At least Janet couldn't call her a liar this time.

She stopped in a parking lot and twisted the side mirror of a car toward her so that she could see her profile. Her hair was matted in a nimbus of twigs, wet with dew, and she saw that her skin was shadowed with the lush dark green of moss. Not a stain, but a tint, as though a veil of green lay over her. Her ear was longer, sticking up through her hair to the top of her head. Her cheek, sunken and sharp, and her eye, slanted and black, all shiny black, with a pinpoint of white pupil. Like a bird eye or a single bead.

She reached up and touched her face. The skin tore easily, revealing a strip of grass-green skin.

Her hand hit the mirror, spiderwebbing the glass, and surprising her. Ignoring the pain in her wrist and the damp burn of blood on her knuckles, she started to run.

Corny squinted. A girl in green makeup ran across the street and under the awning of the gas station. She looked up, and he thought he recognized her, but when she got closer, he wasn't so sure.

"I was going to Janet's," she said, sounding just like Kaye. "But I just remembered she's at school."

Up close the girl didn't look anything like Kaye. She didn't look anything like anybody. Her upturned eyes were black as oil spills. She was too thin. Tall ears parted her tangled hair on either side of her head. Her skin seemed to be flaking, showing patches of green underneath.

"Kaye?" Corny asked.

The girl smiled at him, but her smile was too fierce. The skin tore on her lower lip.

He was frozen, staring at her.

She scooted past him into the office, stretching her twiglike fingers. He stifled a whimper, trying to keep his eyes focused on the credit-card unit, the dirty papers, the laminated nude air freshener, all familiar things. He could smell her, a weird combination of pine needles, moss, and leaf piles. It was making him dizzy.

She sat down on the floor on top of papers and fast-food boxes.

"What the hell happened to you?"

Kaye held out her hand and tilted it slightly in the light. "I'm sick," she said. "I'm really sick."

He crouched down and looked at her again. There was a luminescence to her skin, a kind of brightness about her that made her eyes glitter feverishly. There was something about her shape itself that was strange, a hunching of the shoulders, a slight bulge of the back.

He picked up a block of wood with a dangling key. "Let's go in the bathroom. The light's better and you can wash more of this crap off."

She got up off the floor.

"I could take you over to the hospital," he said. She didn't reply, and he didn't pursue it. He knew this wasn't a hospital-type thing—he just felt like he ought to say it.

The bathroom was grimy. Corny certainly couldn't recall anyone doing more than changing the toilet paper in all the time he had worked there. The once-white tiles were cracked and grayed. There was barely enough room for two people, but Kaye squeezed in obediently next to the toilet and stripped off her sweater.

"Take off the rest of it. There's something on your back."

She threw a considering look at him and seemed to decide either he didn't care or she didn't. She kicked off her boots, pulled off the sweater and then the nightgown until she was only in her panties.

Bunching up her nightgown under the faucet, he got it sopping wet. He used the cloth to scrub off what was left of her skin and the pigment of her hair. Her skin was thin as crepe on her back. As he rubbed the cloth over the bump between her shoulders, the skin cracked.

A thin whitish fluid leaked out between her shoulder blades.

"Uuughh!" Corny moved back from her.

Kaye looked back at him, and her face said that she just couldn't take any more weirdness. Of course it was hard to know whether he was reading her strange eyes right.

"Its okay," he said in as soothing a voice as he could. Outside he heard a car pull into the gas station. He ignored it.

"What happened?" There was something moving under the surface of her back, something slick and iridescent.

"Hold on," he said. The thick fluid was wiping off, showing white-veined iridescence all the way down her back. Suddenly something flicked loose, rising so that it almost slapped Corny before it fell wetly against her back.

"Oh, God," Corny said. "You have wings."

The damp things moved feebly.

The sight of it sent a thrill through him, despite the fear. This was the real thing.

"C'mon," he said. "My house."

Kaye sat down gingerly at the edge of the couch, so that her new wings hung off the edge and wouldn't get crushed if she moved suddenly or leaned back.

She was wearing a pair of Corny's jeans, belted and rolled at the cuffs, and a black, hooded sweatshirt. Corny had taken a pair of scissors and cut a large section out of the back of it so that they could feed her wings through. Her skin was so sensitive that she imagined she could feel particles as they drifted through the air.

Corny poured himself a glass of Mountain Dew. "Can you drink soda?"

"I think so," Kaye said. "I could before."

He poured some in a mug and handed it over to her. She didn't sip it—it was the same color as her skin.

She could smell the soda, smell the green dyes and the chemical carbonation. She could smell Corny, the acid of his excited sweating and sourness of his breath. The air she breathed tasted of cigarettes and cats and plastic and iron in a way she had never noticed before—it nearly made her gag with each breath.

"It's starting to sink in," Corny said. "I can almost look at you without wanting to bang my head against the wall."