Read On Little Wings for Free Online

saw her you wouldn’t even ask.”
    “So then… nothing?” Irritation weaved through Cleo’s words. She didn’t like quitters.
    “No,” I answered too defensively.
    “So then… what?” Cleo’s question dripped with unmet expectation.
    “I don’t know, Cleo,” I said in exasperation. “Did you think I would have a perfect plan already? Do you think I always know the perfect thing to do next? Like you?” I added, not taming the spite in my voice.
    She let one too many beats of silence fill the room before she answered calmly, “No, I didn’t think you would know everything. And I don’t think I know everything.” The flawless poise in her voice made me ashamed, and vaguely livid.
    I continued my criticism, fully knowing I was in the wrong. “What about ‘I told you so, I told you so’? Why don’t you tell me now? What do I do with an aunt I need to meet and a mother who hates the aunt? Maybe you should have come up with a plan while I was having the heart attack trying to talk to her. I’ve been kind of busy tonight.”
    Cleo reached out in the shadows to her nightstand and clicked on her small reading lamp, filling the room with the white glare. She picked up the stack of papers she had discarded earlier and handed them to me without a trace of irritation. “I was busy, too. I got half of it done.” In my hand were notes of several different paragraphs and page numbers written in Cleo’s straight, uniform script. Hanshaw’s assignment. “You still have to write out the quotes and explanations, but at least I found them all.” Only a hint of haughtiness leaked into her voice at the end.
    I apologized, silently cursing my temper. When she turned the light back off I stared up into the darkness, watching the charcoal shadows shift through the room. “I honestly don’t know, Cleo,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t want to hurt my mom, but I am going to Smithport. It’s strange, but I feel it. My bones vibrate from the inside-out whenever I think about it. Does that make any sense?”
    Cleo doesn’t like the supernatural, or the illogical, so it didn’t surprise me that she waited to respond. In the late night our answers were beginning to lag from fatigue. “I could help you get a ticket,” she offered in her planning voice. It is a business-like tone, unflinching and thoughtful. “If we buy the ticket, it will be harder to say no.”
    I yawned. “I thought you wanted to get me to my aunt, not get me killed!”
    Cleo made a sound between a sigh and a laugh and we laid still, my mind replaying the conversation, Cleo’s mind undoubtedly full of strategy and tactics. Sleep pulled me under first. The last sound I heard was Cleo’s quiet murmurs that meant she was formulating a plan, as the first staccato rain drops hit the window.
    Cleo woke the next day determined to get to work. The hard, fast instructions she threw at me all morning kept buzzing through my ears – you can’t be stubborn with her, Jennifer. She’s kept a grudge for twenty years so she is more stubborn than you are. Try giving her an impossible option before the real option. Tell her to come with you and make up with her sister – it went on relentlessly through breakfast and the walk home. I wanted to grab her head and tip her brain into my skull because everything she said sounded brilliant. I just knew I couldn’t say it like that. Cleo is harmless, but if she ever uses the power of her mind for evil, then God have mercy on all our souls.
    Adding to my nervousness, my father feigned total ignorance of the entire ordeal. From the moment I entered the door he talked solidly about the unseasonably wet weather, the need to re-stain the deck, and his menu plans for dinner. I’d never heard him speak so much in my life. It must have been a great sacrifice for him. Well into his ‘filibuster’ I stepped up to my mother as she peeled carrots at the kitchen sink. I ignored Dad’s frantic look