"Kelley Eskridge - Alien Jane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eskridge Kelly)

the Badge, chief white hat of the night shift. The thinskin lay silent as Madg" and a no-name nurse made a
sling of the sheet under her and moved her onto the empty bed, the one near the door because I liked the
window view: it was just the sidewalk to the parking lot, but I could see people walking away. I thought
about away for a while until the nurses finished with the sheets and the needles and left me alone with her.
Then I got up and took the few steps across the linoleum floor.

"You shouldn't be in my room. I don't want you, and if you give me any hassle I'll hurt lou, I swear."
She had her eyes closed until then but she opened them wide, bright blue. And she laughed, laughed. She
howled. Two nurses came running into the roorn and one held her down while the other shot her up, and
the whole time she made noises until her face turned pulple.
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They shot ffie, too. I hate that, but the worst was the thinskin and how she scared me.

She slept almost the whole next day. I got to where I could shake the sleepydrugs off pretty fast but she
was an amateur, down for the long count. The nurses had her under Close Observation; they came in
every fifteen minutes to check on her. "She's still gone, what did you people give her, can I have some?" I
kept srying, until they finally made me leave the room. I thought *"ybe she didn't want to come back up,
maybe wouldn't, but later I looked in from the hall and there she was cross-legged in the bed, loohng
fuzzbrained, the blankets and sheets twisted .rp around her waist.

"You're up. I've been up for ages. You missed breakfast, you missed lunch but it was crap, Iunch I mean,
so I guess you're better off and dinner'll be here soon. You wanna come down to the TV room and
watch Remington Steele?"

She blinked for a while and then she said, "I have to go to the bathroom." She had a low voice, the hnd
that always makes me want to practice so I can sound like that. You can talk onto a tape to do it. I used
to think about being an actress but that was all crap too, getting up in front of people and letting them see
you cry.

I got my first good look at her while she was try.tng to get out of bed: older than ilтВм, maybe twenty-five,
yellow dirry hair and those blue eyes. She was a mess, bandages everywhere, and where she wasn't all
wrapped up she was the pastypale color that white people get when they eat meat all the time and don't
work it off. She made my fingers itch to stuff an entire head of broccoli down her throat. She moved
slow; and she looked at me. She pulled one l"g out of the covers, and looked at ile, then the other, and
looked, until I finally said, "You see something you don't like?"

She shook her head. "Last night... you said ..."

"Oh, hijumadre, forget it, I don't like nights and I don't like thin-skins, but I won't hurt you. I was just
being mean."

"Thinskins?"

"Yeah. New patients, you know, start by crying and yelling that they don't belong up here with all the rest
of us really crary people which of course they aren't, crary I mean, and it's all a mistake. Then
Alien Jane ' 77

they get pitiful for a while and won't talk to anyone and shake all the time. They go off if you say boo to
them. Thin shnned."