The Kaleidoscope Sisters by Ronnie K. Stephens

Author:Ronnie K. Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2018-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Quinn and Meelie had been in the desert for what felt like days. Their water was gone, and their legs were beginning to cramp. Quinn was having muscle spasms in her forearm from gripping the pole, yet she refused to relax her fingers. The butterflies were stronger than she imagined, and she was convinced that they’d take off into the sky in an instant if they could. That pole was her only hope of saving Riley; without a butterfly net, they’d be forced to set up camp in the desert until the sky was bright enough to navigate.

“You okay back there?” Meelie asked, breaking the silence that had settled between them.

“I’m sore, but I’m managing. How much farther do you think they’ll take us?”

Meelie peered up at the sky. “Hard to say. The night’s still young.”

“Do you have any clue where we are?”

“I surely don’t. Truth is, there’s a lot to this place that I never bothered to learn. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve only seen a sliver of this world.”

“How big is this place, anyway?”

“I can’t say for sure. I know back home the chickens could cover seven or eight miles in an hour. Figuring that this one here is a whole lot bigger, she can probably cover at least twice that. I’ve gone as many as five hours in any one direction, so that works out to . . .” Meelie trailed off, drawing numbers in front of her.

“About eight hundred miles of desert,” Quinn broke in.

Meelie whistled. “Man alive. You sure that math is right?”

“Pretty sure. I’m in Algebra 2 right now.”

“Algebra 2? Your school has more than one kind of algebra?”

“Well, no. The math is the same, but the second class covers more complicated types of problems.”

“Wow. Most girls I knew had already quit school by the time they were your age, kid. But that was a different time, then. Few people cared if we girls had finished school. Most jobs offered to women didn’t require much education anyhow.”

“Did you finish high school?”

“I did. Bounced around a bit to get there, but I managed. Mother even set me up at a junior college for a bit. Didn’t stick, though.”

“Why not?”

“You know about the Great War?”

“You mean World War I? Or World War II?”

“I’d forgot all about there being a second war,” Meelie said, her voice cracking. “Should have seen that one coming with that man in Germany riling up all of Europe.” She went quiet.

“So you quit college because of the war?”

“I guess you could say that. I went to visit my sister around Christmastime, and the hospitals were just full of our boys from the war. I couldn’t stand the idea of not helping, so I left school and started volunteering at a hospital with the Red Cross.”

“Do you ever regret not graduating from college?”

“Not for one minute. The hospitals are where I got an itch for flying, listening to the boys and all their stories about the Royal Flying Corps.”

“I never pictured myself dropping out of high school.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.