"Hand, Elizabeth - Last Summer on Mars Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

ELIZABETH HAND

LAST SUMMER AT MARS HILL

Even before they left home, Moony knew her mother wouldn't return from Mars Hill
that year. Jason had called her from his father's house in San Francisco --

"I had a dream about you last night," he'd said, his voice cracking the way it
did when he was excited. "We were at Mars Hill, and my father was there, and my
mother, too-- I knew it was a dream, like can you imagine my mother at Mars
Hill? -- and you had on this sort of long black dress and you were sitting alone
by the pier. And you said, 'This is it, Jason. We'll never see this again.' I
felt like crying, I tried to hug you but my father pulled me back. And then I
woke up."

She didn't say anything. Finally Jason prodded her. "Weird, huh, Moony? I mean,
don't you think it's weird?"

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, then sighed loudly so that he'd be able to
tell she was upset. "Thanks, Jason. Like that's supposed to cheer me up?"

A long silence, then Jason's breathless voice again. "Shit, Moony, I'm sorry. I
didn't --"

She laughed, a little nervously, and said, "Forget it. So when you flying out to
Maine?"

Nobody but Jason called her Moony, not at home at least, not in Kamensic
Village. There she was Maggie Rheining, which was the name that appeared under
her junior picture in the high school yearbook.

But the name that had been neatly typed on the birth certificate in San
Francisco sixteen years ago, the name Jason and everyone at Mars Hill knew her
by, was Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Maggie would have shaved her head before
she'd admit her real name to anyone at school. At Mars Hill it wasn't so weird:
there was Adele Grose, known professionally as Madame Olaf; Shasta Daisy O'Hare
and Rvis Capricorn; Martin Dionysos, who was Jason's father; and Ariel Rising,
nee Amanda Mac Rheining, who was Moony's mother. For most of the year Moony and
Ariel lived in Kamensic Village, the affluent New York exurb where her mother
ran Earthly Delights Catering and Moony attended high school, and everything was
pretty much normal. It was only in June that they headed north to Maine, to the
tiny spiritualist community where they had summered for as long as Moony could
remember. And even though she could have stayed in Kamensic with Ariel's friends
the Loomises, at the last minute (and due in large part to Jason's urging, and
threats if she abandoned him there] she decided to go with her mother to Mars
Hill. Later, whenever she thought how close she'd come to not going, it made her
feel sick: as though she'd missed a flight and later found out the plane had
crashed.