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

Because much as she loved it, Moony had always been a little ashamed of Mars
Hill. It was such a dinky place, plopped in the middle of nowhere on the rocky
Maine coast -- tiny shingle-style Carpenter Gothic cottages, all tumbled into
disrepair, their elaborate trim rotting and strong with spider-webs; poppies and
lupines and tiger lilies sprawling bravely atop clumps of chickweed and
dandelions of truly monstrous size; even the sign by the pier so faded you
almost couldn't read the earnest lettering:

MARS HILL SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITY FOUNDED 1883

"Why doesn't your father take somebody's violet aura and repaint the damn sign
with it?" she'd exploded once to Jason.

Jason looked surprised. "I kind of like it like that," he said, shaking the hair
from his face and tossing a sea urchin at the silvered board. "It looks like it
was put up by our Founding Mothers." But for years Moony almost couldn't stand
to even look at the sign, it embarrassed her so much.

It was Jason who helped herget over that. They'd met when they were both twelve.
It was the summer that Ariel started the workshop in Creative Psychokinesis, the
first summer that Jason and his father had stayed at Mars Hill.

"Hey," Jason had said, too loudly, when they found themselves left alone while
the adults swapped wine coolers and introductions at the summer's first
barbecue. They were the only kids in sight. There were no other families and few
conventionally married couples at Mars Hill. The community had been the cause of
more than one custody battle that had ended with wistful children sent to spend
the summer with a more respectable parent in Boston or Manhattan or Bar Harbor.
"That lady there with my father --"

He stuck his thumb out to indicate Ariel, her long black hair frizzed and bound
with leather thongs, an old multicolored skirt flapping around her legs. She was
talking to a slender man with close-cropped blond hair and goatee, wearing a
sky-blue eartan and shabby Birkenstock sandals. "That your mom?"

"Yeah." Moony shrugged and glanced at the man in the cartan. He and Ariel both
turned to look at their children. The man grinned and raised his wine glass.
Ariel did a little pirouette and blew a kiss at Moony.

"Looks like she did too much of the brown acid at Woodstock," Jason announced,
and flopped onto the grass. Moony glared down at him.

"She wasn't at Woodstock, asshole," she said, and had started to walk away when
the boy called after her.

"Hey -- it's a joke! My name's Jason --" He pointed at the man with Ariel.
"That's my father. Martin Dionysos. But like that's not his real name, okay? His
real name is Schuster but he changed it, but I'm Jason Schuster. He's a painter.
We don't know anyone here. I mean, does it ever get above forty degrees?"