“I’m gonna barf,” I whispered to Fang, wiping my sweaty hands on my jeans.
“You’ll be fine,” he whispered back. “You always are.”
“I’m gonna die,” I moaned.
“You can’t die,” he said, a hint of a smile in his voice. “You’re the indestructible Max.”
“I’ve never faced anything this hard before.” Yes, I sounded like a pathetic weenie. I prefer to think of it as showing my softer side.
“Max?” My mom stood at the door, smiling at me. She was all dressed up and looked fabulous. I would be lucky if I grew up to look like her. Which I guess would be hindered by my refusal to girlify myself. I looked down at my clean T-shirt and jeans. Mom had thoughtfully supplied me with a nice actual dress, but when I’d tried it on, I felt — I don’t know. Vulnerable? Like I couldn’t move, couldn’t fight.
Well, we all have issues.
At least my clothes were totally clean, though my T-shirt advertised Güero’s Taco Bar in Austin, Texas. On top of that I wore my traditional oversize, loose Windbreaker, because why would I want Congress staring at my wings?
Yes. Congress. There, in a nutshell, was my whoopsy-daisy life: Many evil people wanted to kill me, or sell me, or use me for evil purposes, and on the other hand, there I was, testifying about global warming to the Congress of the United States. Sometimes the lines got a little blurry.
“Okay, do you have your notes?” Brigid Dwyer came up and brushed some lint off my jacket, as if that would help.
“Yep.” I held up my sheaf of paper. Brigid, Michael, and the other scientists from the Wendy K. had helped me come up with what to say. All except Brian. He’d turned out to be another mole for the UD. He was in jail. There’s always one — or in this case two — in every crowd.
“I think they’re ready for you,” my mom said, gesturing at the open door. I could hear the buzzing of voices inside and wished fervently that the Capitol Building had an open ceiling that I could escape through if necessary.
“This is your mission,” said Jeb, smiling at me. “You’re fulfilling your mission right now, right here.”
I nodded, took a deep breath, and gave one last look at my flock. They were lined up, scrubbed clean, looking awed and a little freaked. Angel waved at me, and I waved back.
Showtime, folks.
73
MY HANDS SHOOK. The microphone in front of me seemed too big, and I’d made it squeak by getting too close. I wished I could just beat someone up and get the heck out of here.
I cleared my throat and looked down at my speech.
“Thank you for inviting me here today,” I said, my voice sounding nothing like me. “I’m here to testify about things I’ve seen and experienced myself. I’m here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We’ve gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we’ve harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous superjets. We’ve even created new kinds of people, like me.
“But everything mankind” — I frowned — “personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we’re all gonna have to pay.”
I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes, and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this.
I put the speech down, picked up the microphone, and came out from behind the podium.
“Look,” I said. “There’s a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know, what the world needs to know, is that we’re really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic way than anyone has ever imagined.
“I mean, I’ve seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome, beautiful things in it. Waterfalls and mountains, thermal pools surrounded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside, like it’s done for hundreds of thousands of years.
“I’ve also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently, I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climatic changes caused by . . . us. We, the people.”
I suddenly remembered a catchy (if annoying) song I’d heard over and over in a Saturday morning cartoon — the one that was supposed to teach kids about the Constitution. The words of the preamble, which were quoted in the song, came flooding back to me. “ ‘We the People of the United States,’ ” I began, “ ‘in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’ ”
The room was silent. I looked around at all the faces. “A more perfect union? While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want, and other people live in subway tunnels? Where’s the justice of that? Kids right here in America go to bed hungry every night, while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare? Where’s the general welfare of strip-mining, toxic pesticides, industrial solvents being dumped into rivers, killing everything? Domestic tranquility? Ever sleep in a forest that’s being clear-cut? You’d be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty? Yes. I’m using one of the blessings of liberty right now, my freedom of speech, to tell you guys, who make the laws, that the very ground you stand on, the house you live in, the children you tuck in at night, are all in immediate, catastrophic danger.”
I took a deep breath, really getting warmed up. The flock was standing all around me, and Mom and Jeb were off to one side. I glanced at Mom, and she looked so proud. I hoped that Angel wasn’t turning into a bird of paradise, and that Nudge wasn’t making pens fly toward her. And if there was a God, Gazzy would not demonstrate his new skill right here in Congress.
“Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We’ve cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loss of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we’re raising the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. Well, we only have the one atmosphere! What do you plan to do when it’s destroyed? Can we all hold our breath until we get a new one?”
No one shouted out an answer.