"Cooney, Caroline B - Janie Johnson 03 - Voice on the Radio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooney Caroline B)

He wondered if the excuse that he had needed confession would work; that talking had been good for him.
But the Catholic Church knew what it was doing when it kept confession down to a tiny room with two people. Confession to millions is not the same. Brian and Jodie, good Catholics, were going to cut that argument to pieces pretty fast.
He had planned to stand in the corridor thinking things through before he knocked, but they were waiting. Jodie opened the door and stood
back. She was more pixielike than Janie, but the look she gave him was not elfin.
Inside 616 was a little hail painted gum-wrapper green. Past Jodie was a large room with two enormous beds and an enormous television resting on a long bank of drawers. There was an armchair, a round table and a little sofa, the kind called a love seat.
There was Brian, looking very young: more elementary school than junior high. Bobbling around like a kid on a playground ready to fight.
Janie, presumably, was the roll of blanket.
Nobody said anything.
The radio was off. The television was off. They were too high to hear traffic.
My turn, thought Reeve, and he was afraid. "I'm sorry," he said finally.
Х S Х
There was no fight-or-ffight reaction in Brian. Only fight.
He wanted to slam Reeve to the floor, kick his ribs in, bash his skull. He wanted to hit-bite- kill. It was so primitive, so complete, that Brian's mind didn't have sentences in it; just images.'
Brian despised himself for being little, for being short and thin and a crummy athlete. He hated how Reeve's eyes passed over him, ruling him out. He wanted to protect and fight back, not be the little boy watching to see what the big boys did.
But if he attacked, Reeve would just hold him off, and Brian would be pathetic, and the girls would have to waste 'time separating ~ ~m, and somehow this would make it easier on Reeve.
So Brian stood still, pressing his angry arms against his heaving sides.
S S S
"You sold us!" said Jodie. "You took our story, the hard parts, the insider stuff, the things that hurt most, and you sold it."
"I'm sorry," said Reeve again. He was sorry. He was horribly sorry.
"You didn't think you'd get caught, did you?" said Jodie.
"No."
Janie's hair had spilled out of the blanket tube. If only he could fling the blanket off Janie, and tighten his, arms around her, and muss up her hair, and convince her that he really was a good guy. A mistake, sure, but hey. Shrug it off, Janie.
"How could you do it, Reeve?" screamed Jodie without raising her voice; a scream of intensity, not volume. "How could you actually say things like Janie not wanting us? Janie not having enough love to go around? Bad enough to mention what people already know from newspaper and television. But to tell what we kept safe in our hearts? How could you do that to us?"
The word safe and the word heart were terrible. "It didn't feel real," he said. "It was just airtime. It's just you and the mike. You're alone in a glass room and it isn't real."
She shook her head. "I don't buy that. We're radio fiends, too. The first thing in radio is to hook the listeners. You knew the audience was out there. You were buying listeners, Reeve."
He swallowed. "Yes."
"Buying them through me," said Janie.
Her voice jolted him terribly. It was still her voice. She's still who she was, he thought confusedly. A lump in his throat like broken pavement blocked speech.
"For fame?" said Jodie. "Was this part of your master plan to be rich and famous?"
"I guess so," he said. Janie did not move inside the blanket; she could have been dead. He said to the blanket, "Radio is exciting. It's live. People recognize your voice, and they call up the station and ask for you, and you have automatic friends. Strangers smile when they meet you." But Janie, he thought, Janie isn't going to smile when she meets me. Oh, God.
"If you did it so people would know you, why didn't you talk about yourself instead? The freshman experience or something?" said Jodie.
"Because I started so early," said Reeve. "I'd hardly even been a freshman when I began."
"You've been talking about us since August?" hissed Jodie. "How many of these little stories have you woven? How many nights a week? How many details? How many times?"
He could not answer that. It was too damning. He took refuge in his first sentence. "I'm sorry."
He looked at the misshapen blanket that contained the person who mattered most to him in the world. He sat heavily down on the bed, the way he always sat, letting go completely, so that the springs touched bottom.
He peeled the blanket down, and Janie's tired
eyes stared back at him. "I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean to. I was just being stupid."
Х Х S
It was Jodie who began to bawl.
Brian's sister was not given to tears; she was battle-prone, and often damaged her brothers. Jodie sobbing made Brian feel uneven, tippy. Wishing they had called Mom and Dad after all.
Brian felt defused. He had expected a monster. But Reeve was still Reeve. The same endearing, good-looking, nice person. The need, to damage Reeve faded. Brian just felt mixed up, with a headache on the side.
"We were getting there!" Jodie cried. She was mad at herself for crying, wiping tears away as fast as they fell. "You wouldn't even know my mother and father if you came down. They're happy. They're not worrying. They can let go of us. And look what you did. Threw us out there, like raw meat in front of wolves. Saying on the' air that Janie had better things to do than make an effort to love us."
Reeve didn't defend himself.
"You've ruined Boston for me. How am I supposed to get excited about attending school in a town where they know private, personal family. hurts?"
Reeve tried to explain how it had begun, how it had snowballed. He described the first night, the agony of having nothing to say. How Derek and Vinnie and Cal were going to laugh at him, along with his entire dorm.
Brian hated it that Reeve was a coward. Afraid of being a jerk for five minutes in front of some other jerks? That gave him the right to sell out the family?
"But I never used last names," said Reeve. "I never said Johnson or Spring. So it matters less than you think."
"It doesn't matter less, Reeve!" shouted Jodie. "It matters all the way, through and through!"
"People never called in ,and asked, for last names?" said Brian.
"Constantly. That was the point. Make them call in.,'