The Wright Brother Read Online Free

telling yourself that and I’ll just pretend that you don’t actually have a voodoo doll hanging up in your locker.”
    “I will stick a pin in you,” she growled, “just bet me.”
    “Yeah, you go ahead and do that.” She shook her head. Her friend might be weird, but Elisa pretty much thought Chastity hung the moon anyway.
    “Whatever,” Chastity snickered. “Anyway, homecoming. You going or what?”
    Chastity and her family had moved from Trinidad and Tobago to Sunny Cove three years ago. At first everyone had avoided the dark-skinned girl with dreds that fell long and heavy down to her butt. She’d been like a bird of paradise stuck inside a monochromatic garden of white roses. She just stuck out. But Elisa had seen beneath the unique exterior to the intelligent, cool girl beneath and in no time the two of them had developed a tight bond.
    Eventually Chastity had won almost everyone over; with her hint of an island accent and her silky, dark skin the boys had fallen prey to her charms and she’d gone from being the outcast to the girl everyone wanted on their speed dial.
    “I don’t know, probably, I guess. If he asks.”
    “Jeez, could it have taken you any longer to get that out?”
    She stuck out her tongue, curling her fingers through the worn threads of the one and only afghan blanket she’d ever attempted to crotchet. The colors were a mix of black, green, and blue. Colors she’d always loved. “Well, if I’m going, you’re going too.”
    “Nah, I don’t do dresses.”
    Which was entirely true. Chastity had one outfit. Tight black jeans, tight white tops, and a crucifix. Always the crucifix. She was the strangest pseudo goth/voodoo priestess Elisa had ever seen.
    Of course, she was the only one Elisa had ever seen, but that was just semantics.
    “Elisa!” Her mother’s shrill yell came up the stairs. “Please come here!”
    “Oops.” She jerked. “Coming, Mom. Chas, I gotta go. Dinnertime. Maybe we can go shopping for some gowns tomorrow.”
    “Keep dreaming, girlfriend.”
    With a cheery laugh and another goodbye, Elisa hung up. Slipping the cell into her pocket and holding the apple between her teeth, she flew down the stairs and skidded to a complete stop at the sight that met her eyes.
    It wasn’t dinner sitting on the kitchen table but the group sitting in the living room that’d made her mother call her down. Four people who’d become merely a memory to her.
    Mrs. Wright was no longer as tall as Elisa had once recalled her being. Her skin was pale, attesting to the fact that they no longer lived next to a coastline. Her once shiny sandy blonde hair was cut to bob length and now had thick strands of gray between the blonde.
    But she wasn’t the reason why Elisa suddenly felt like running back upstairs to her bedroom and locking the door.
    Three extremely tall males surrounded their diminutive mother. Realizing that she still had the stupid apple stuck in her mouth, she spat it out and rubbed it on her shirt. Which was kind of weird and dumb, but yeah, Elisa was completely taken aback.
    Mom smiled. “Okay, I’ll leave you guys to have your reunion.” She took Mrs. Wright’s hand and led her back into the kitchen where the banging of pots and pans resumed.
    “We’re back,” Christian, or Roman, said the moment the four of them were finally alone.
    It was really hard to tell the two apart. They looked almost identical. From the Hollister hip jeans to the collared polo shirts. They weren’t nearly as pale as their mother, but they weren’t as sun-kissed as she remembered them being once upon a time, either.
    Their hair was cut stylishly short and curled around the napes of their necks. She might be eighteen and them a few months shy of sixteen, but it was obvious to her that they were turning into super good-looking guys.
    The girls at school would eat them up.
    Their lips twitched and then the one wearing the red polo spoke up. At a guess she’d say he was Christian,