"Duncan,.Lois.-.A.Gift.Of.Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Lois)

"This is what a Florida winter is like," Elizabeth said.
To Nancy it did not matter much whether it was summer or winter. Each day was so filled with problems that she could not have time to think about the weather. Sometimes she looked at Kirby and Brendon and wondered what was wrong with them that they could be so obviously contented in a place where she herself was so miserable.
To begin with there were the piano lessons. She was taking them because her mother wanted her to. The old upright piano that Elizabeth had bought through an ad in the paper was exactly the kind that she had practiced on when she was a child.
"With Kirby so tied up in her dancing," she said, "it will be nice for you to have a hobby too."
So Nancy went every Tuesday to a little woman named Mrs. Nettles who taught in the basement of the Unitarian Church, and Nancy practiced an hour each day out of the pale green book with three mice on the cover.
"I feel like an idiot," she grumbled to her mother.
"'Three Blind Mice' and 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'! At my age!"
"I can understand how you feel," Elizabeth said sympathetically. "You are starting a bit late. You'll be out of that beginners' book soon, though, and on to more interesting pieces, and it does give me such pleasure to hear a child of mine playing in this old living room. It takes me back to my own little-girlhood again."
So Nancy kept doggedly plugging away, although in her heart she was certain that she would be on "Three Blind Mice" for the rest of her life.
Brendon made it worse. Every time she played a piece, Brendon told her what was wrong with it.
"You're not holding that last note long enough," he would say, or "Can't you tell that chord's wrong? You need your third finger down a note." Sometimes he simply moaned and covered his ears and said, "The whole piano's so sour it makes me sick."
Once when he said this more rudely than usual (he made a gagging noise and pretended to stick a finger down his throat), Nancy told her mother about it.
"I can't practice with him around!" she wailed. "I just can't?"
But, as usual, their mother did not blame Brendon.
Instead she said, "Maybe he's right. It's a secondhand piano. Probably it hasn't been tuned for years."
The next day a man came out and adjusted the strings.
But worse than the piano, which was simply boring, was school. All day every day Nancy dreaded the moment when she would walk into Miss Green's social studies class. No matter how well prepared she was for her day's lesson, Miss Green would manage to find something wrong. Even when the answers themselves were right, as they nearly always were, Miss Green marked errors.
"Your i's look like e's," she would write on the paper, taking off five points for carelessness, and Nancy, whose handwriting was as clear and round and perfect as any page in a penmanship manual, would seethe with silent fury.
The other students in the class were noticing the teacher's unfairness.
"I've heard about her from my older brother," a girl named Barbara told Nancy. "She's been teaching here about eight million years, I guess, and she's awfully old and cranky. She always seems to choose one person out of her classes to pick on."
"Why don't you go to the counselor?" her friend Janet suggested sympathetically. "Mr. Duncan's awfully nice. All the kids like him. I bet if you tell him how things are hell get you transferred to another section."
"Do you think he could?" For one glorious moment Nancy pictured herself in another geography class. Then she thought of Mr. Duncan, and the happy picture faded out of her mind. Since the night that her mother had invited him to dinner, it seemed as though Mr. Duncan had been coming over to their house constantly. If he wasn't picking Kirby up at the dance studio he was taking Brendon for haircuts, and one Saturday he had even driven Elizabeth to do the grocery shopping. She would never give him the opportunity to do her a favor, never, ever as long as she lived.
There was nothing she could put her finger on to explain her violent feeling about Mr. Duncan. He had never been anything but pleasant to her, or to any of them. She only knew that every time she saw him her stomach knotted up with fear and apprehension. There was something that he was offering that she would not take, and there was something for which he was reaching that she would not, would not, give.
Besides that, it was he who had started that dreadful testing business with Dr. Russo.
The doctor had phoned several days after the card test and talked with Elizabeth.
"Nancy was right," he said. "She did not score well on the test, but that doesn't mean anything. It could have been the atmosphereЧhaving her family around herЧbeing in everyday surroundings. I would like very much to repeat the test in the privacy of my office."
"Would you be willing to try it, dear?" Elizabeth asked, and Nancy shook her head firmly.
"It would just be a waste of time," she said. "Besides, I'm too busy."
So Elizabeth said in her polite way, "Perhaps another time, doctor, and thank you for your interest in my daughter."
"Don't feel bad, dear," she said later to Nancy. "It was a silly test anyway. I can't imagine anybody doing well at it."
"I don't feel bad at all," Nancy told her.
The next day she had gone to the library and taken out a book on extrasensory perception. She started reading it before dinner and could hardly tear herself away to go set the table. After the meal she went straight back to her room and continued reading.
By the time Kirby came up she was three quarters finished.
"Thanks for leaving me with the dishes," Kirby said, starting her evening exercises.
"I'll do them tomorrow," Nancy said, not lifting her eyes from the page.
"And the next day too. You're two behind me. Brendon did the drying and broke a bowl." Kirby glanced over with interest. "What are you reading? OhЧheyЧwhere did you get that? It's about ESP, isn't it? Did Mr. Duncan give it to you?"
"Certainly not," Nancy said. "I got it at the library." She turned a page.
"Well, don't just sit there." Kirby went over and closed the door and came back to seat herself on the end of her sister's bed. "What does it say? Do you think you've got it?"
Nancy sighed and laid down the book. "You won't tell anybody?"
"Of course not. I never tell things."
"Yes," Nancy said. "I've got it. But good."
"Well, gosh! My gosh, Nance!" Kirby's eyes grew wide. "How exciting!"
"I don't think it's exciting," Nancy said. "I think it's awful. It's scary. Do you realize, Kirby, that I'm a weirdo? A freak? If people knewЧlike Dr. RussoЧif they had any ideaЧI'd be stuck off in a laboratory somewhere!"
You're kidding!" exclaimed Kirby. "They couldn't do that to you, could they? It would be kidnaping!"
"They've done it with other people," Nancy told her. "You should read the case histories in this book. There's a million kinds of tests they give. The card test is just for starters. They work them all out by mathematical statistics, and some people have to take them for years and years."
"What do they do that for?" asked Kirby. "What is it they want to find out?"
"Everything. What it is, why it is, the whole works. It seems like only a handful of scientists really believe that ESP exists at all. They keep trying to prove it does, and another bunch keeps trying to prove they're fakes, and the poor people who have it get caught in between."
"Well, what is it exactly?" Kirby asked. "Is there more than one kind?"
"There sure is." Nancy referred to the book. "There's one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what another person is thinking. Then there's clairvoyance; that means knowing when something's happened. There are two other kinds tooЧprecognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past."
"Which kind have you?" Kirby regarded her sister with fascination. "Telepathy, I guess. That's how you knew the questions on that geography test. I was thinking about them at lunch, and you got them out of my mind."