Before Wings Read Online Free PDF Page A

the office porch as if they actually enjoyed her company. Adrien watched suspiciously, alert for any signs of suck-up or kiss-ass, but there didn’t seem to be any. Brain slumming, she decided. In order to survive, no, like her aunt’s tyrannical leadership, they had tossed mental efficiency out the window and reduced to low gear. Well, that didn’t mean she had to. At noon, she recorded her current total of small ugly red sweatshirts, and stood. “I’m going for lunch.”
    “Be back at one,” Aunt Erin said.
    As if Adrien couldn’t figure that out. She banged the screen door and ran heavily down the steps, then stood letting the wind hit her full in the face. From here she could see clear across the freshly cut lawn to the lake, which rolled and heaved under an approaching storm. Thunder rumbled faintly in a slate gray sky. An eerie fork of lightning flickered low to the water, and a small shiver of white echoed through the inside of Adrien’s head. Again, lightning forked the entire horizon. It was like watching her own brain, the knife lines of electricity that sliced through its heavy mass. Calling, the sky was calling her into the gray pulp of its brain, the dazzle of its forked currents. Come, we know you, come and be with us.
    Staff were heading to the dining hall. Someone shouted her name, but Adrien turned and ran across a lawn of translucent wings toward a sky that broke open, again and again, into fierce light. She was at the ridge, starting down the path, when she saw the spirits darting over the water’s surface like dragonflies, twisting as if in agony. She could make out arms and legs, different hair lengths, even breasts, but their faces were shadowed. The spirits were moaning, a low sound that seemed to be calling the storm toward the beach, where Adrien came to a halt, pushing to stay erect in the wind. She was sure the spirits were calling something specific—a short phrase, several words, repeated like the lightning that snaked the sky. Another sheer burst of white, and Adrien stepped forward into the wild lake, the call of the spirit girls, the energy of their brains dying across sky. Into some understood sameness.
    “Are you crazy?”
    Someone was dragging her out of the water onto the beach. She pushed, trying to turn back toward the lake, and was shoved onto the sand. A heavy weight sat on her. She fought until the white light bled from her brain, leaving her crumpled and soaked, covered with sand. When she opened her eyes, there was only gray sky and Paul’s face staring down at her. Mayflies crawled over them both.
    “Get off me,” she said.
    “D’you know what happens if lightning strikes water while you’re in it?”
    “I said get off me.”
    “What were you doing?”
    “Get the fuck off!” she yelled.
    They stood slowly, fallen trees righting themselves, trunks split open and rotting. She was so tired. How was she supposed to explain this?
    “Nice scenery,” she said.
    Lightning flickered again, illuminating the incredulous look on Paul’s face. She turned and climbed the path up the ridge, heading through the endless flutter of wings toward her cabin for a change of clothes.
    A bottom corner was wet, but otherwise the photograph was undamaged. Fortunately, she had tucked her wallet into the pocket of her dad’s lumber jacket instead of her jeans. Adrien stood shivering in her underwear, staring at the smiling faces of her aunt and the eight girls grouped around her. The picture was at least two decades old. Were people happier then? The girls’ grins seemed impossibly authentic,and each face held its happiness differently. She was sure she had never smiled like that, even before her aneurysm. Most teenagers needed group permission to laugh, and then it was a sharp loud sound that had a manufactured quality, but once she had heard a girl let loose a free sound so startling that Adrien had turned to stare. The girl had looked so ordinary—brown hair, glasses, pimply