Кристин Ханна – Rirefly Lane / Улица Светлячков. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 4)
Kate clutched her books against her chest, wishing she hadn’t picked her pimples last night. Or that her jeans weren’t Sears Rough Riders. “H-hi,” she said, stopping on her side of the road. “The bus stops on this side.”
Chocolate-brown eyes, rimmed heavily with black mascara and shiny blue eye shadow, stared at her, revealing nothing.
Just then, the school bus arrived. Wheezing and squeaking, it came to a shuddering stop on the road. A boy she used to have a crush on stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Hey, Kootie, the flood’s over,” and then laughed.
Kate put her head down and boarded the bus. Collapsing into her usual front-row seat – by herself – she kept her head bowed, waiting for the new girl to walk past her, but no one else got on. When the doors thumped shut and the bus lurched forward, she dared to look back at the road.
The coolest-looking girl in the world wasn’t there.
Already Tully didn’t fit in. It had taken two hours to choose her clothes this morning – an outfit right out of the pages of
When the school bus drove up, she made a split-second decision. She wasn’t going to go to school in this hick backwater. Snohomish[26] might be less than an hour from downtown Seattle, but as far as she was concerned, she might as well be on the moon. That was how alien this place felt.
No.
Hell, no.
She marched down the gravel driveway and shoved the front door open so hard it cracked against the wall.
Drama, she’d learned, was like good punctuation: it underscored your point.
“You must be high,” she said loudly, realizing a second too late that the only people in the living room were the moving men.
One of them paused and looked wearily her way. “Huh?”
She pushed past them, grazing the armoire so hard they swore under their breath. Not that she cared. She hated it when she felt like this, all puffed up with anger.
She wouldn’t let her so-called mother make her feel twisted up inside, not after all the times that woman had abandoned her.
In the master bedroom, her mom was sitting on the floor, cutting pictures out of
“I’m
“Oh.” Mom flipped to the next page, then reached for her scissors and began cutting out a spray of flowers from a Breck ad. “Okay.”
Tully wanted to scream. “Okay?
“My job is to love and support you, baby, not to get in your face.”
Tully closed her eyes, counted to ten, and said again, “I don’t have any friends here.”
“Make new ones. I heard you were Miss Popular at your old school.”
“Come on, Mom, I—”
“Cloud.”
“I’m not calling you Cloud.”
“Fine, Tallulah.” Mom looked up to make sure her point had been made. It had.
“I don’t belong here.”
“You know better than that, Tully. You’re a child of the earth and sky; you belong everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita[28] says…”
“That’s it.” Tully walked away while her mother was still talking. The last thing she wanted to hear was some drug-soaked advice that belonged on a black-light poster. On the way out, she snagged a pack of Virginia Slims[29] from her mom’s purse and headed for the road.
For the next week, Kate watched the new girl from a distance.
Tully Hart was boldly, coolly different; brighter, somehow, than everyone else in the faded green hallways. She had no curfew and didn’t care if she got caught smoking in the woods behind the school. Everyone talked about it. Kate heard the whispered awe in their voices. For a group of kids who’d grown up in the dairy farms and paper mill workers’ homes of the Snohomish Valley, Tully Hart was exotic. Everyone wanted to be friends with her.
Her neighbor’s instant popularity made Kate’s alienation more unbearable. She wasn’t sure why it wounded her so much. All she knew was that every morning, as they stood at the bus stop beside each other and yet worlds apart, separated by yawning silence, Kate felt a desperate desire to be acknowledged by Tully.
Not that it would ever happen.
“…before
Kate lifted her head from the table. She’d fallen asleep on her open social studies textbook at the kitchen table. “Huh? What did you say?” she asked, pushing her heavy glasses back up into place.
“I made Hamburger Helper[30] for our new neighbors. I want you to take it across the street.”
“But…” Kate tried to think of an excuse, anything that would get her out of this. “They’ve been here a week.”
“So I’m late. Things have been crazy lately.”
“I’ve got too much homework. Send Sean.”
“Sean’s not likely to make friends over there, now, is he?”
“Neither am I,” Kate said miserably.
Mom faced her. The brown hair she’d curled and teased so carefully this morning had fallen during the day and her makeup had faded. Now her round, apple-cheeked face looked pale and washed out. Her purple and yellow crocheted vest[31]—a Christmas present from last year – was buttoned wrong. Staring at Kate, she crossed the room and sat down at the table. “Can I say something without you jumping all over me?”
“Probably not.”
“I’m sorry about you and Joannie.”
Of all the things Kate might have expected, that was not even on the list. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters. I hear she’s running with a pretty fast crowd these days.”
Kate wanted to say she couldn’t have cared less, but to her horror, tears stung her eyes. Memories rushed at her – Joannie and her on the Octopus ride at the fair, sitting outside their stalls at the barn, talking about how much fun high school would be. She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Life is hard sometimes. Especially at fourteen.”
Kate rolled her eyes. If there was one thing she knew, it was that her mother knew nothing about how hard life could be for a teenager. “No shit.[32]”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that word from you. It’ll be easy because I’ll never hear it again. Right?”
Kate couldn’t help wishing she was like Tully.
Mom dug through the baggy pocket of her skirt and found her cigarettes. Lighting up, she studied Kate. “You know I love you and I support you and I would never let anyone hurt you. But Katie, I have to ask you: What is it you’re waiting for?”
“What do you mean?”
“You spend all your time reading and doing homework. How are people supposed to get to know you when you act like that?”
“They don’t want to know me.”
Mom touched her hand gently. “It’s never good to sit around and wait for someone or something to change your life. That’s why women like Gloria Steinem[33] are burning their bras and marching on Washington.”
“So that I can make friends?”
“So that you know you can be whatever you want to be. Your generation is so lucky. You can be anything you want. But you have to take a risk sometimes. Reach out. One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don’t do in life.”
Kate heard an odd sound in her mom’s voice, a sadness that tinted the word
“It’s true, Kathleen. Someday you’ll see how smart I am.” Her mom smiled and patted her hand. “If you’re like the rest of us, it’ll happen at about the same time you want me to babysit for the first time.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mom laughed at some joke Kate didn’t even get. “I’m glad we had this talk. Now go. Make friends with your new neighbor.”
“Wear oven mitts. It’s still hot,” Mom said.