The Secrets of Flight Read Online Free

wonder who they are, and if I will ever meet them. Aunt Andie says maybe they’re lost souls, looking for someone to tell their stories. Mom says this explanation is just one more example of Aunt Andie living “in a fantasy land.” Mom says Aunt Andie’s lying to herself by thinking she’s happy. When I said, “If she thinks she’s happy, then isn’t she?” Mom said, “It’s a deception, ” as if Aunt Andie’s “happiness” were somehow sinister. “No one changes jobs, changes cities, changes apartments every year ‘just to try something new.’” Mom wants Aunt Andie to accept that she’s actually un happy, so she can stop running away from herself.
    Â Â  15. I love that Aunt Andie only rents and never buys. I love that she calls herself an artist, even though she’s never sold a single one of her weird paintings. I love that she still believes in Soul Mates even though she hasn’t had a “viable boyfriend” (Mom’s words) in years. Mom says if Aunt Andie would just lose thirty pounds, or maybe be willing to date “heavier” men, she wouldn’t have had to borrow ten thousand dollars to freeze her eggs before her ovaries shrivel up. Mom lent Aunt Andie the money three years ago, and since then, the only conversations they have—when they speak at all—are about when Aunt Andie is going to pay her back. Mom doesn’t know that I go to Aunt Andie’s place after school sometimes or that we’ve met atthe mall for lunch. I don’t care what Mom thinks: I still love hearing about Aunt Andie’s hopeful First Encounters. She always says there’s nothing more romantic than being able to look back at that initial meeting so you could figure out where it all began. It’s the very reason I wanted to join the “Talent Not Necessary” Group.
    Â Â  16. My annoying brother Toby is the one who saw the ad in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . “Hey, guys, check this out: ‘Writers Wanted—talent not necessary!’ They’re talking about you, Elyse!” Daddy said they sounded like a pretty desperate group of people, and my mom was worried about the part that said “Open to the public,” which she thought was a euphemism for “Potentially Violent Wack Jobs.” But I had this fantasy that maybe I’d open the door to the conference room and Holden Saunders would glance up and pause—mid-pencil-twirl—to tilt his head to the side, trying to place me. I’d be tempted to tell him that we’ve gone to school together for five years and that, in fact, when my family moved to the Regal Estates last summer, it actually made us neighbors. At the end of the session, before I could tell him any of this, he would walk up to me and say, half-squinting, “Elyse, right?”
    Â Â  17. Mom, as usual, wanted me to consider the Pros and Cons of attending the group. Such as, if I write more, then I will have more insomnia and then my grades might suffer. The only Con I could imagine was from that old movie, Dead Poets Society , where one of us might be compelled to commit suicide for the sake of our art.
    Â Â  18. The reason I can’t sleep at night is because I am working on a novel about a group of four sisters who don’t knowthey’re sisters, who end up at the same boarding school in England. I have already finished writing one hundred pages, which means I’ll definitely finish my first novel before my sixteenth birthday, and hopefully be published before I graduate from high school!
    Â Â  19. When my mother read the opening of my novel, she told me that I shouldn’t have set it in the 1940s, because I’ve never lived in the 1940s, and that I shouldn’t have set it in London because I’ve never been to London, and that it doesn’t make sense that one woman would have four babies with four different men