"Alice Hoffman - Turtle Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

week, when his only friend, Laddy Stern, dared him to pierce his ear
with an embroidery needle, Keith didn't even bleed. The following
afternoon he stole an earring shaped like a silver skull from a jewelry
concession at the flea market over at the Sunshine Drive-In. He has
never been a particularly good boy, but after eight months in Florida,
he is horrid. Already, he has been suspended from school three times.

He is willing to steal almost anything: lunch money, teachers' wallets,
birthstone rings right off his classmates' fingers. He keeps
everything in a secret stash in the laundry room down in the basement,
inside a hole he punched into the plaster behind a washing machine.

Punishments are pointless. They don't work with him. He is no longer
allowed to see Laddy Stern, not since they were caught cutting school
and drinking KaMtia and Coke, but who can really stop him? Laddy's mom
is the hostess at the yacht club restaurant, and she works odd hours,
so Keith still goes over to their condo whenever he pleases. That is
where he spends most of the first day of May, and by the time he
leaves, after a vicious argument that has left Laddy with a bloody
nose, it is already ninety-nine in the shade, although where he
bicycles, on Long Boat Street, there is no shade. He's dizzy from the
Miller Lites he drank and the half pack of Marlboros he chain-smoked,
and it isn't so easy to avoid the smashed turtle shells. Hard green
globes the size of Scooter Pies line the asphalt and clog up the sewer
traps. There is no point in Keith's trying to talk to his mother.

Most days he sneaks out of the apartment while she is getting dressed
for work, or he waits in bed until he's sure she's left, so he won t
have to see her and pretend to be normal or cheerful or whatever it is
she wants him to be.

He bikes as fast as he can, through the heat waves, past the surfers at
Drowned Man Beach.

He keeps at it until his lungs hurt, then he rides over the curb and
into the park at the corner of West Main and Long Boat, where he pulls
out the cigarettes and matches he stole from Laddy.

It isn't his parents' divorce that bothers him. He could have lived
with that. It was the way things just happened to him. He wanted to
live with his father, but who asked him? His parents argued with each
other until they came to a decision, and now his mother is stuck with
him, when everyone knows they have never gotten along.

He never climbed into her lap or held her hand.

He knows he was a difficult child, he's been told often enough. He
threw off his blanket, rattled the bars of his crib, bit baby-sitters
so hard he left teeth marks in their flesh. His mother can pretend to
want him all she likes, but the only thing he wants is to go back to