The Secrets of Flight Read Online Free Page A

and leave them in four different countries. She couldn’t “suspend her disbelief” that they would all end up together at the same school in London, even if it was touted as the best girls’ school in the entire world. She said maybe she’d believe it if I kept it to two sisters who didn’t know they were sisters, but not four. Like it was that easy to say sayonara to Anastasia and Eliona. She told me to “write what I know,” which would make a terrible story: here’s me, going to school, and watching Holden in physics, and babysitting my brothers. The only way I would be able to have anything to write about is if I switched places with Thea, or if Daddy hadn’t miraculously been healed.
    Â Â  20. Everything that I hate about my mother is everything I hate about myself. So it’s really hard to hate her, and that makes me madder.
    Â Â  21. I have always wanted to save somebody’s life. One time, before Daddy got sick, we were at McDonald’s and a man inhaled a Chicken McNugget and was turning blue until Daddy did the Heimlich and saved his life. Toby watchedand said, “Awesome!” and two-year-old Huggie was sort of fascinated and said, “What happened?” but I watched the whole thing and wanted to cry. It’s unfortunately how I react to any life-threatening situation, but I’m hoping that will change as I get older. Actually, I’ve never been in another life-threatening situation, but I have watched many on TV.
    Â Â  22. #21 is the reason I stayed when I discovered that the Public from the “Open to the Public/No Talent” group was just a bunch of senior citizens. I thought about turning around and pretending I was in the wrong room, but then I started dreaming for a moment. Maybe someone will fall out of his chair, and I could help him up. Or maybe I could do CPR on one of them, which I learned in a babysitting course. I wanted to be an unexpected hero. I wanted to be the kid interviewed on the Today show.
    Â Â  23. I thought about telling Thea that the group was elderly, but later, when she was asking me if there were any cute guys in it, something made my mouth say, “Just one. But he’s older.” When she asked if he went to Pitt, I said, “I’m guessing he’s like . . . thirty,” and she gasped, so I couldn’t make my mouth say, “Times three.” I thought about telling my mom that the group was not what I had expected, not in the slightest, but when she picked me up at the library and noticed I looked disappointed, she was worried that it was from criticism I might’ve received on my novel. “Oh, honey,” she said, patting my knee. “It’s not easy hearing painful truths from people who don’t love you,” she said. That’s when I decided that I wanted something to happen to me that my mother couldn’t protect me from.

CHAPTER 3
Miri Wants
    1938
    T he first secret starts with Elias Glazier, the wavy-haired lead actor from Hamlet whom my sister falls in love with in the winter of 1938. If it weren’t for Sarah making me her accomplice—entreating me to go along for their dates at the diner, or to lose myself in the library while she visits him after the matinee, pretending to our parents, all the while, that she and I are together—their affair would’ve never taken flight.
    The morning after my sister announces her elopement—“To an actor ?” Mama screamed, as if he were a gentile—my mother tells me that she’s made a decision: in two years, when I turn eighteen and graduate from high school, she’s sending me to college.
    â€œBut that costs too much,” I say, which is what Mama usually says about everything I want. Specifically, flight lessons at six dollars an hour, which we can’t possibly afford, which Imay not “save up” for because it’s dangerous and frivolous, and Uncle