Read Flight for Free Online Page A

mouth, Prissi cocked
her head like a cocker spaniel and, to break the tension, puppy
moaned until her roomie laughed.
    “Bad puppy. Give me my FRZ-B.”
    Prissi backed up a step and growled.
    “Puppy!”
    Prissi extended her neck; Nasty Nancy took
the disk, gave Prissi a pat, then, all three teenerz plopped onto
their rough hewn perches. Hiding her eyes with her spineless hair,
Prissi studied Jack and compared him to his cousin. Where Joe’s
hair was blond and curly, Jack’s was caramel-colored, slightly wavy
with a sheen that looked more greasy than healthy. Where Joe’s
chest came before the rest of him like an ice breaker plowing the
northern seas, it was Jack’s sleek otter head that arrived before
his narrow chest and indifferently slumped shoulders. Where Joe’s
eyes were bright blue, round and innocent, Jack’s were dark and
lazy. Joe was mostly forthright; Jack seemed to prefer corners and
alleys. All in all Prissi thought Joe was more attractive, but Jack
was more DISTRACTIVE. Prissi shivered in delight…and guilt.
    After taking a long and purposefully loud
slurp of his caffe-mucho and tapping out the opening of Beethoven’s
Fifth on the table top, Jack Fflowers complimented Prissi on her
catch.
    Prissi demurred, “It’s all in the wings. How
much time do we have?”
    Nancy looked at her mypod, “About an
hour.”
    Exchanging the girl-to-girl look, Prissi
stated in the way generations of teener girls have, so that her
statement sounded like a question, “We better go get cleaned
up?”
    As the trio flew toward Jack’s dorm, they
looked down at the temporary stage that had been set up for the
dedication of the new science center. The light covering of snow,
which blanketed the rest of the hilly Bissell campus, had been
removed from in front of the stage with blowers. Sitting on
brilliant spring green grass was a battalion of folding chairs and
perches in close formation. From high above, Prissi could imagine
an ancient army awaiting the clarions. Rising imposingly from
behind the stage, just to the right of Grayswold Hall was that
ancient science building’s replacement—the six-story, six-sided
pink and gray granite Joshua F. Fflowers Scientatory. A half-dozen
members of the Bissell grounds crew were fussing over barrels of
brave school blue tulips looking forlorn against the snowy
backdrop.
    As she passed over the stage, Prissi was more
than a little surprised when she realized that the little man
painfully mounting the temporary stairs and shuffling his way to
the podium was Vartan Smarkzy. Prissi flew in a tight circle so
that she could watch her mentor look out over the non-existent
audience before taking a sheaf of papers from his pocket and
sticking them on a shelf under the podium’s top.
    Prissi pounded her LTs and caught up with
Nasty Nancy and Jack just as they dropped down and landed in front
of the tower which jutted from the front of Hoch Hall.
    “Did you see who that was? Dr. Smarkzy.
What’s Bissell doing letting my favorite Dutton teacher talk?”
    Jack grinned, “Our arch-rivalry is dead for a
day. Except for FRZ-B. Smarkzy is giving the dedication. He and my
grandfather went to school together. My grandfather told me Smarkzy
did some real CE work back then.”
    Nancy gacked her patented cynical laugh,
“What was cutting edge back then? Battery-operated flashlights? He
creeps me. He’s like a crab, but with no shell.”
    Prissi fought the urge to argue with her
roomie. Ever since coming back from Winter Break and finding Adam
Lin no longer had an interest in her, Nancy had been putting on
weight. With each kilogram of flesh gained, Nasty Nancy had become
nastier—more sarcastic, more critical, more cynical. Given the way
her friend was panting after a sortie that hadn’t changed Prissi’s
breathing at all, the teener guessed that Nancy was only a few
kilos away from having her wings clipped. For Prissi, that was a
very scary thought. Even though Nasty Nancy Sloan did not