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

"Do you mind terribly?" Nancy asked worriedly. "I know how I'd feel if Brendon were put up with me. I'd just die."
"Well, of courseЧBrendon." Kirby gave an exaggerated shudder. "If it were Brendon, I'd die too. Can't you just imagine it? He'd come right before me alphabetically. Any classes we had together, he'd sit in front of me. He'd probably chew gum and stick it behind his ears, just to make me sick."
"I'm serious, Kirby." Nancy could not take the situation lightly. "You really don't mind? Even when you're a whole year older than I am?"
"Don't be silly," Kirby said. "Why should I mind? It means we can split the homework down the middle and each do half of it. I'll have gobs more time left for practice."
The answer was so typically Kirby that Nancy could not restrain a sigh. She almost wished that her sister would be upset about their grade placement. At least, that would show that she had an interest in something besides her dancing.
Ever since she had started her lessons at the Vilar Studio, Kirby seemed to have stepped into another world. She rose in the morning an hour before the alarm went off in order to do her exercises before breakfast, and she rushed out of the building after school without even stopping at her locker so she could catch a bus to the dance studio.
At home she talked about "the girls in the class," but it was her ballet class she meant, not her class at school. To Nancy it sometimes seemed that in less than a month's time she had lost claim not only to a father but to a sister as well.
If school was not important to Kirby, it was very important to Nancy. She was a good student and spent time on her studies. Her mother had been an excellent tutor, and her vast background of travel plus her natural love of reading had given her a far better background than most of her contemporaries. She did her assignments quickly and easily and knew in her own mind that she probably could have gone on into the ninth grade if it had not meant passing up Kirby, which would have been unthinkable.
Still, with all her ability as a student, Nancy found herself completely lost in the swirl of student life. She had never known many people her own age, and now suddenly she found herself thrust in a group a whole year older than herself. The boys stood a head taller than she, and the girls were beginning to fill out into feminine curves and to wear lipstick.
Beside them, Nancy felt like a stick.
"Are you sure you're in the right room?" a teacher named Miss Green had asked her the first day, regarding her with doubt. "This is an eighth-grade social studies class, you know."
"I know," Nancy said, flushing scarlet. "I am an eighth grader."
Every face in the room turned to inspect her curiously, and she felt like shrinking into a ball and rolling beneath the desk.
After class the boy who sat behind her gave her hair a tug as he followed her down the aisle.
"You'd better be nice to old Greensleeves," he said teasingly, "or she'll send you back to kindergarten."
Nancy didn't even bother to glance at him. The tone of his voice reminded her of Brendon's.
"Take your hands out of my hair," she hissed back in her most irritated-sister voice. "I just washed it last night."
The boy never bothered to speak to her again.
In fact, as the weeks went by, Nancy found that very few students made an effort to stop and talk to her. A few of the girls called "Hi" in the hallways, and there was one plump girl in her English class who always wanted to borrow paper. Aside from this, she felt as though she were invisible to everybody. They ran in cliques, predetermined the year before, and they seemed to look straight through her without seeing her at all.
At lunch periods, she and Kirby sat together. This was not very satisfactory because most of the time Kirby's mind was a million miles away. Kirby could have had dozens of friends if she had wanted them. There was something about her soft prettiness and the dreamy look of her eyes that had the ninth-grade boys jostling and shoving each other in order to stand next to her in the cafeteria line. But Kirby did not seem to notice or to think about popularity one way or another. She carried her tray from the serving counter without looking to right or left and sat with a little smile on her lips and mentally rehearsed the steps of the latest dance routine while she munched a tuna-fish sandwich.
Bored with no one to talk to, Nancy took up her old habit of reaching with her mind to the places beyond her. She could always find her mother; that was never any problem. Elizabeth had taken a job at the Palmelo Library, and when Nancy closed her eyes and stared at the inside of her lids, she could see her mother there, sorting through cards or stacking books on the shelves.
Their mother's decision to go to work had come as a great surprise to the children.
"I always used to dream about being a librarian someday," she told them one night at dinner. "And now, believe it or not, there's an opening for an assistant in the children's room of the library. Can you imagine at my age having your very first job!"
"I think it's great," Kirby said. "But won't you be kind of bored working in the children's room? Wouldn't it be more fun in the research section or something like that?"
"Goodness, no," Elizabeth said. "Facts are your father's area, not mine. I'd love to handle the books for children. I'm an expert on all the old fairy tales. I just adored them when I was little, and in the Children's Room I'll get to hold a regular story hour for pre-schoolers. Imagine being the one to give them their first introduction to fantasy and magic!"
"Magic!" Brendon exclaimed in disgust. "That's baby stuff. There isn't such a thing."
"Isn't there?" Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "I wonder. My mother was a highly educated person, but she believed in magic. She used to tell me there were people, some very special people in this world, blessed with the gift. I used to thinkЧ" She paused.
"What?" Nancy asked her.
"It sounds silly, I knowЧbut I used to believe that my own mother might be one of those people. She had a way of knowing thingsЧthings that people never told her. It seemed sometimes as though she could almost make things happen. Did I ever tell you that she knew about Brendon?"
"About me?" Brendon was intrigued despite himself. "But I wasn't even born until after she died."
"That's what was so strange," Elizabeth said. "Your grandmother told me once that she was going to have a grandson. She said he would be very much like his father, except he would have something his father did not have. A special gift. Goodness, I can't even remember what it was. She was so old then and so ill, she often rambled when she talked. I didn't always listen closely."
"I wish she'd been right," Brendon said ruefully. "I wish she'd given me a talent for flying. Then I could kind of hang in the air over people's heads and drop things on them."
"That's an awful thing to want," Nancy said. "Listen to him, Mother! Ever since he started going around with that dreadful Russo boy he's been saying those awful things. I bet he means it too, he would drop thingsЧrocks and ashtrays and paperweights!"
"And water bombs," Brendon said happily. "Greg knows how to make neat water bombs. He fills them with ink. He's great with ink."
"See, Mother!" Nancy squealed. "See how he is? Can't you do something about him?"
"He's only teasing, dear," Elizabeth said gently. "Boys always tease. Haven't you discovered that yet?" She never was willing to admit that Brendon was awful.
So now in the daytime, Elizabeth could be found behind a desk at the public libraryЧand at the grammar school, Nancy could sometimes see Brendon, thumping through the halls, poking people. She seldom spent much time looking at Brendon.
Many times she tried to reach out to her father, but she was never able to find him. That once she had succeeded, but since then he seemed to have drawn further and further away. His letters came, long, interesting letters telling of the places he was seeing and the things he was doing. He was photographing a warЧ"a tiny war," he wrote, "between little unimportant countries, but it is not unimportant to the people who are getting shot. They suffer just as much as if it were a large war with all kinds of great decisions at stake."
"Do you think he misses us?" Nancy asked.
"I don't know, dear," her mother answered. "He's so involved, I doubt that he has time right now to miss anyone. But I do know that he loves you."
"Do you miss him?" Nancy wanted to ask, but she did not do so. Something in her mother's eyes stopped her.
The day of Miss Green's social studies test, Nancy had been trying to reach her father. Kirby was late getting to the lunchroom, and Nancy sat by herself at the end of one of the tables, chewing her sandwiches and playing with her mind. She peeked at her mother, who was checking out books to a friend of hers, and even looked in on Brendon, who was doing arithmetic in long, sloppy columns and chewing gum.
Kirby rushed up at last, dumping her books onto the table.
"A pop quiz!" she said. "That darned woman! Honestly, NancyЧand I didn't even have time last night to read the unit!"
"You had time for your practicing," Nancy said. "You bounced around the bedroom for an hour and a half."
"Well, sure," Kirby conceded. "That's different. That's important." She collapsed onto the bench and began to unwrap her sandwich. "They weren't really very hard questions. I just hadn't read the stuff. You shouldn't have any trouble with them."
"I never do with social studies," Nancy said. "But Miss Green makes me nervous. She never has forgiven me for being twelve and in her class. I think it makes her feel the course is too easy if a twelve-year-old can keep up in it."
She turned to look at Kirby, and saw that she was already thinking about her dancing. They finished lunch in silence.
It was no surprise, of course, to walk into social studies class after the bell rang and find the pop quiz there waiting for her.
"Unexpected tests are one of the few ways to discover how well a class is keeping up in a subject," Miss Green informed them. "I put you on your honor not to divulge the questions to any of your friends in the classes that come later."