"Hoffman-HauntedHumans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

make the dirt look so -- so clean. Like nothing had ever stepped on it since the
dawn of time. Morgan hated that kind of clean. If blackboards were bare in his
college classes when he got there, he always chalked something on them before he
sat down. If the dirt were blank he just had to put a footprint in it. If things
were wide open, any force, good or evil, could enter and control them.

So the floor was no longer blank, either, not peppered with those chunks of
earth that had fallen out of the waffle-stomper soles of his hiking boots.
Morgan looked at the bits of squared dirt and slid his left hand in between the
third and fourth buttons on his shirt, hiding it against his chest. One of his
insiders, Shadow, always wanted to hide Morgan's hands.

"Miss Deej?" Morgan said, his knees knocking against each other, not because he
was cold, just to be doing something.

He could only see the top of her head over the wall that hid the desk from him
and everybody else. She had messy frizzy brown hair that she parted in the
middle. He watched the part lean back until he could see Deej's eyes, green like
the devil's, over the divider as she looked at him.

"Yes, Morgan," she said. One of her better voices. Not the first-time-&phone
voice which said, I'm-here-to-help,-don't bother-to-know-I'm-human. Definitely
not the I-can't-have-a-relationship-with-you-because-it-wouldn't-be-prof
essional voice. She'd given up on that one after he'd been seeing Dr. Dara
Kabukin for two months. Not the don't-bother-me-I'm-in-the-middle-of-something
voice, and not the okay,-okay-yes-I-guess-I-can-look-up voice. More of a
I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-but-I'm-glad-for-a-distraction voice. Actually he
didn't think he'd ever heard her use this one before.

Morgan figured Deej must have insiders since she had lots of voices like he did.
Also, she was one of the few people who could recognize his insiders just by the
way they talked. Even Dr. Dara got confused sometimes, but Deej always knew who
was talking if it was anybody she'd ever talked to before. Timmy liked to play
tricks on Deej, but even he was happy when the tricks didn't work. Morgan
wondered if Deej had ever thought about being a doctor. Even though her hair was
messy and she had the devil's eyes, he might go see her if she was a doctor.

"I'm thirsty," he said.

"Would you like some water?"

"Yes, please. And paper? Pencil?" The voice that asked the last part belonged to
the newest insider, who wasn't used to using Morgan's vocal cords and wasn't
supposed to talk until Morgan had gotten to know him, anyway. The new insider's
voice hadn't sorted itself out yet; it sounded a lot like Morgan.

Deej stood up so he could see about a third of her, the top third. She was
wearing a blue and white shirt, and some little bits of color on her lips, just
the outside edges. Mostly if she had any color on her lips it was all over them.