Bright Young Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

movement around them, and their necks craned to look up.
    “What is it?” Cordelia asked a woman in a geometric-patterned dress that hung loosely over her long frame. On the woman‧s head was a soft gray felted hat shaped like a helmet.
    “Don‧t you know?” The woman turned to Cordelia and Letty with an air of irritated surprise. She blinked at them for a moment, but it was clear that it pained her to remove her gaze from the sky even for a moment. “It‧s Max Darby, the famous aviator, performing one of his tricks …”
    Who? was the question on Cordelia‧s lips, but the woman had already gone back to doing what everyone else was doing, her hat tipped back and her nose pointed upward. Cordelia‧s eyes traveled in the same direction, and she saw—in a field of perfect blue, higher even than the skyscrapers—a small silver capsule, twisting about and emitting a white smoke. She flattened her palm and put her index finger to her brow to soften the glare.
    “Oh, no!” Letty gasped. “His plane is on fire.”
    “No, it‧s not,” said the woman in the gray hat impatiently. “The smoke is for skywriting.”
    “Oh,” both girls replied in quiet unison, faces turned heavenward.
    A glittering sensation passed through Cordelia‧s body as she gazed at the daredevil spinning white letters over Manhattan. A curling P followed by an A and then an R … she hadn‧t the faintest notion what it would come to spell, but the spectacle had nonetheless stolen her breath. It confirmed for her, with its breezy beauty, that she had not been wrong—that New York was more extraordinary than a girl from Ohio could possibly have imagined, that it was a place of wonders where the citizens used the sky as their tablet and airplanes for pens. And to think—the city was not yet even an hour old to her.
    “Should we see what it feels like to ride in a taxicab?” Cordelia asked after a while, once the aviator‧s message— PARK ROYALE NOW OPEN , whatever that meant—became enlarged and blurry against the blue sky. Then she took several long steps toward the traffic, holding her old suitcase against her hip, and raised her arm in the air.
    With a blast of its horn, a square black car careened across two lanes and toward Cordelia, coming to a halt just in front of her. For a moment Letty thought the man was going to drive right through her and onto the sidewalk, and it took several seconds for her breathing to become normal again. Then Cordelia gave a gleeful little bow, opened the cab‧s back door, and with a flourish of her hand shepherded Letty into the backseat.
    Impressive was one word that had been used in Union to describe her friend, because of Cordelia‧s swift, impatient walk and the high, sharp planes of her face and her ability to hold a stare. And of course, there was the way she‧d stolen John, the handsomest boy in town, from Reverend Wallace‧s daughter, without ever seeming to lift a finger to draw his attention. That was the way Cordelia always did things—with a coolheaded stealth that never failed to catch her detractors unawares.
    Letty‧s hands moved from her lap to the leather seat, and she had trouble lifting her gaze much higher than her knees. What one did in a taxicab was a mystery to her, but she hoped Cordelia, who had placed the two pieces of luggage between them and was closing the door behind her, had some inkling.
    “You girls actresses?”
    Letty‧s eyes darted up, and she saw the reflection of the driver in the rearview mirror. He might have been poking fun, she knew, but there was something likable about his weak chin and soft cap and the way his blue eyes stood out against his drab, worn face. A face like that wouldn‧t make fun. Anyway, she knew she had that indescribable quality—the same one Cordelia saw, the reason they both knew they had to try their luck in a big city—and perhaps people in New York were just more adept at recognizing that kind of thing.
    “I am,” Letty said