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

and I triedтАФ"

I thought of ]ane's legs and arms.
Alien Jane тАв 85

"They have to put you in here for that, and at first I hated it, it was like the closet again. But now there's
Rousseau and Terry Louise.

"f don't do those things anymore, not really. I still... you hrow, I still say things sometimes, but even then
it's like I only do it to make myself feel bad. I guess the meanness is going out of me. Rousseau says f'm
better. She wanted me to leave a few months ago... but I screwed rp, I did it again ... one of the
orderlies, that stupid |ackson, pissed me off. But I could have been out only I... I couldn't remember
anymore how it felt, running in the grass."

Wax Jane, silent Jane. Ceiling-staring |ane.

"Suze is what I have left. If I mess that up I don't know what would happen. So I get funny sometimes. I
guess you don't have to shake her hand if you don't want to."

I closed -y eyes. It suqprised me when she answered. Her voice sounded like she hadn't used it in a long
time.

"I saw how she held you, how she touched you, you hrow? And I thought... how lucky you were that
someone would touch you like that. And then she held out her hand to me... I couldn't take it. It would
kill me right now to have anyone be that nice to me. I'd rather spend all day with those doctors poking
wires in me than one second with your girlfriend's hand in mine."

There was something in the way she said it; I saw again my father's face when he found the doll in a
stinking puddle, and my mother saFng hous could Aou, hons could Vou but never answering her own
question. Jane reminded me of how the world can be so different sometimes from what we expect. I got
up and poured her a cup of water and put it on the table by her bed. I knew she wouldn't want me to
touch her, even though I would have liked maybe just to hold her hand, not like with Suze but only
because she was scared and in a lonely place. I crawled back onto my bed and turned on my side away
from her, blinking against the light. I thought that in my life I had been little Rita, and Rita full of rage, and
crazy Rita, and now maybe I would be some other Rita: but I couldn't see her, I didn't know if she would
be someone who could run through the world and not fall down.
86 . Nebula Awards 3r

Rousseau came into my room the next morning. She looked funny, and she said a strange thing: "Rita,
please come with me down to the lab."

"Why?"

"|ane is asking for you. I'd like you to go be with her, if you don't mind."

We walked down the hall. Rousseau started for the elevator and I said, "I want the stairs, okay?"

She turned back so fast she almost caught Weird Bob's visiting sister with her elbow. "Sorry, I forgot
about the claustrophobia." She didn't apologize to the sister. That and the forgetting and the asking in the
first place made three strange things.