BEN Even before I was born, I knew I could fly. I mean, I really knew I could fly. Like somewhere deep within my heart and soul lurked the magic of flight, and my task, my challenge, my life's mission, was to achieve flight. Not with machines, mind you. I wouldn't have gotten into some machine and claimed I was flying even if I was at the controls. Like if you're in a boat, are you floating or is the boat? Right . it's the boat floating. Without that boat you'd sink like a stone.

So this was how I saw it--machines could fly, and people could operate machines. Two totally different things. Let me tell you right off that I wasn't born with wings . not visible wings anyhow. Not even stubby useless ones that were surgically removed in the cold, sterile environs of some subterranean operating room. No. There were no underdeveloped little nubs poking from my sweet infant back. No extra flaps of skin connecting my arms to my torso.

Nothing like that. But I always believed I had wings. In fact, I can't tell you how many hours I spent in front of the mirror with no shirt on, searching for some sign of those wings. And, believe me, it's hard to see your own back in the mirror. You really have to twist yourself up, and if you stay that way for too long, it's miserably uncomfortable. I never saw any sign of those wings, though, no matter how hard I tried. I decided I had some latent kind of wings, up under my skin, not yet emergent, so to speak, just snuggling in there morphing around till the time was right. Sometimes I thought I could feel them.

They scratched at my skin from the inside. They wanted out! There was something else I knew about my wings, something important. They weren't brightly feathered creations like those of birds. And any wings itching to hatch out of my back sure weren't an angel's wings. Anyone who knew me could've testified to that. Nor were my wings the tissue-thin, translucent, iridescent jewels some insects have. No. My wings were reptilian.

You heard me. Reptilian. And I know what you're saying because I'm sure it's the same thing my brother N always used to say. "Reptiles don't have wings!" Well, just slow yourself down, because get this--dragons are reptiles and dragons have wings. So don't be in such a rush to discount my words. IAN My brother, Ben, who was seventeen the last time I saw him, is twenty months younger than me, but an inch taller. He has blue eyes like the ocean, and curly hair that is like my mother's wedding ring--yellow, but also gold. Ben is like fire--captivating yet unpredictable.

He's smart, too. He can hear something one time and retain it for life. He never wanted to go to college, though. For Ben, higher education referred to altitude, and he said he'd achieve that when he got his wings. Ben always did have the quicker mind of the two of us. He rarely cracked a textbook when we were growing up, yet the only thing that blew his GPA was that he never turned in his assignments. He said there had to be something better to do after school than homework, and the thing he was talking about was flying. From my earliest memories, Ben thought he could fly.

I don't mean in a plane or anything like that. I mean like a bird. Or a dragon, to be truly accurate. It drove our mother crazy. She'd be in the kitchen peeling potatoes or cleaning fish, and out of the window she'd see Ben jumping from a tree or off the roof of the barn. She'd run out of the house trying to stop him, but she never reached him in time. IAN Ben must have been about a year old when he had his first major showdown with Gravity. He was such an innocent-looking little thing, with all these soft gold curls surrounding him like a halo gone haywire.

Ben didn't learn to walk, he learned to run. Everywhere he went, those little legs would be going like the scissors of a manic hairdresser. Ben was always busy, always moving. Usually we had.