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

But mostly, it was the radio jocks themselves. Teenagers who wanted talk shows. Jocks who wanted to go back to their home states and do the wildly sick and funny and famous morning shows for commuters in Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami. Jocks who wanted to make it with their speaking voices, just as the bands wanted to make it with their songs and drumbeats.
Reeve thought: I'll be the next talk-show king.
He loved the vision of himself-famous and surrounded by admirers and sought after by other famous people. He could hardly wait to listen to the tape of himself after his hour was done.
Janie researched her own kidnapping in The New York Times.
Can you imagine? You go to the library and read about yourself on microfiche? You see a photograph in the Times of a sister and three brothers you never knew you had? An uncle and an aunt and grandparents
but most of all, a mother and father?
But even The New York Times doesn't know who took you. They only know the family that got left behind. The FBI, the Jersey police, nobody ever had a clue.
But you know. It has to be the parents you have right now.
Radio is partly about phone calls. Would anybody call in? Would even two or three people bother?
The part of Reeve that was conscious of anything beyond the mike was conscious of the phone.
Please, let it ring. Let it prove people are listening to me.
Trouble is, your parents are good, nice, responsible people. And you love them. Kidnapping is evil. Does this mean the mother and father you love are evil?
If you go and telephone that 800 number on
that milk carton, hey-it's finished. Over.
You lose. No more family.
So you try to figure out a way that you could
be u'rong. That it's made up. That the face on the milk carton is not you.
But you start finding proof
Like a box. In an attic. Under the eaves.
S S S
Brian Spring and his mother were still at Price Club. Mom's workdays were long, and by the time dinner was over, and homework supervised, and she could think of shopping, it was always late. In their new Dodge Caravan, they had headed out to stockpile food and drink and plastic bags and detergents.
When the twins were little (actually, a year ago), both Brendan and Brian loved shopping days. The huge warehouse was as awesome as an airplane hangar, with checkouts like tollbooths. You bought vast quantities of food-a case of hot dogs, econopacks of towels, a gallon of Wesson Oil.
Now Brendan scorned shopping. Brendan had better things to do. Along with the soccer team, he'd added weight lifting and swimming, so that he could become one of those guys who are scary before they're even out of junior high. He was planning to shave his head and get a tattoo.
For thirteen years the two boys had been sealed up like an envelope. They had lived in synchrony, without effort or bickering.
But now Brendan was a sports star and Brian hadn't even made the team. Brendan was quick to accuse people, including his twin, of being a girl. There was nothing worse than somebody who
threw like a girl, or ran like a girl. When Mom asked who wanted to go shopping, Brendan said, "Shopping! That's for girls." He gave Brian his look of contempt reserved for people who were girls.
Jodie also refused to go shopping. She had college catalogs to study.
So Brian had to go because his mother looked lost.
It was during shopping that they had lost Janie all those years ago. Whenever she took the remaining four children shopping, their mother was a dog trainer, her children on mental and eyeball leashes. You did not scout out a different display, because kidnappers might lurk only an aisle away.
But they were too old for that now. If somebody rotten appeared~ they'd just whap the kidnapper with a gallon of applesauce.
Now Mom was the one who was lost. Mom was trying to get her bearings in a world that had changed as much for her as school had changed for Brian.
School this fall had ended Brian's twinny life.
Since he and Brendan were reflections of each other, Brian had studied and read not one minute more than his twin, which was pretty much zero minutes. ~
On his own in a new school, and on his own in the huge, new house, with a private room for the first time in his life, Brian found out that he and Brendan were twins only on the surface. While Brendan was off being a star, Brian found himself in an American history class with the best teacher he had ever had: the only teacher to whom he had ever really paid attention.
He loved the conquistadors, the explorers of the Northwest Passage, the frontiersmen, the Indians who fought back.
Book bags were key.
People thought you were carrying extra sneakers. Nobody, including your twin, suspected that you had library books. Brendan, who thought reading was for geeks who hit balls like girls, did not know that his very own twin had fallen in love with information.
The Springs were not an academic family.
Mom and Dad expected their children to do well in school. Stephen did well because he wanted to get into a distant college. Jodie did well because she liked to come in first. Brendan did well because the school imposed standards on athletes.
Only Brian did well because he loved learning. I didn't know that before, he thought. It took a room to myself to find out what I love.
Whenever Stephen telephoned, Brian wanted to tell his big brother everything. But no useful sentences came out of his mouth. He said things like "Hey, Steve, how's Colorado? You climbed any mountains yet?"
Stephen-who had wanted so much to be a different person with a different family-would be happy for him. Stephen referred to his twin brothers as wasps. Friendly, but ready to sting if anybody interfered with their twinny lives. Brian wanted to tell Stephen that he didn't have a twinny life anymore: He missed it terribly, it hurt him like knives, and yet he was glad it was gone. Like Janie, he thought.
But he told Stephen nothing, and in return Stephen told him nothing, and Brian thought: No fair.
Mom piloted an immense shopping cart down wide aisles at Price Club. It was shrink-wrap heaven. Brian wished he had invented shrink wrap. Toothpaste, tuna fish, paint cans-all secured with plastic wrap so strong it might have been fending off chunks of space debris.
And the new house had acres of storage, so nobody had to surrender precious closet space to ten-packs of paper towels. Mom could buy meat lockers of hamburger, a dozen boxes of Cheerios.
Brian thought of early settlers planting a few grains of corn in a hill, a few seeds of squash to encircle them. He thought of little boys fending off crows and rabbits, of mothers drying and storing that grain, of long winters without enough to eat.
His mother heaved an immense strip of plastic-jacketed barbecued ribs into the cart. His mother seemed a complete stranger to him, just as his twin, now seemed a stranger. Like Janie, he thought again. I stand around watching strangers who are related to me. I love them, but who are they? And why?
His mother suddenly whipped around, eyes too wide, hands out.
"I'm here, Mom," he said reassuringly. "I'm right behind you."
His mother tried to laugh. Tried to act casual.