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

their Frisbee behind. The cop picks up the Frisbee, then goes back to
his car to let his dog out. The dog circles around the cop's legs,
banging its body against him, until the cop lets the Frisbee fly. Then
the dog takes off like black lightning, scaring the red-crowned parrots
in the palms until they scream and take flight. Beneath a cloud of
birds, Keith grabs for his bike, then hops on and races out of the
park, toward West Main. He's sick to his stomach from his last
cigarette, but he's also completely charged. This was almost
dangerous. The cop could have turned and spied him; the dog might have
attacked. You can get addicted to trouble if you're not careful. You
can feel like you're flying, when all you're doing is pedaling through
the Florida heat. Instead of heading straight home, Keith turns into
the driveway of the Burger King, where he isn't allowed to stop before
supper. As he walks inside, he reaches in his pants pocket for the
money he stole out of a classmate's locker just yesterday. It's there,
every cent of it, and Keith feels a wicked surge of elation. Sooner or
later, he's going to get caught.

Julian Cash slouches down behind the wheel of the patrol car as he
passes by the Burger King.

Through the plate-glass window, he can see the little truant from the
park devouring a burger and fries. Julian has seen dozens of these
hotshots, boys who pretend to be fearless and dare somebody to prove
them wrong. Julian himself isn't scared of much, but he avoids the
Burger King. He doesn't care what anyone says, he knows the truth
about the gumbo-limbo tree that grows at the edge of the parking lot.

On the night of his seventeenth birthday he crashed into it, and twenty
years later he still has the scar to remind him. The plain truth is,
he would rather confront a psychopath hopped up on drugs than be forced
to pull up to the Burger King's drive-in window.

Twenty years ago the Burger King didn't exist, and in its place was a
stretch of gumbo-limbos.

Julian used to park there with Janey Bass until dawn, then drive her
home and watch as she climbed up the drain pipe to her bedroom
window.
Back then, there were still islands in the marshes around Verity,
although some of them u weren't any bigger than half a mile across,
home to little more than cottonmouths and foxes. The town expanded
slowly, embracing the marshes with a Winn Dixie and a Mobile station,
and now all the islands are connected to each other by roadways that
funnel over the creeks and into the Interstate. There aren't any more
coral snakes in the branches of the mangroves and you can get USA Today
and The New' York Times as well as the Verily Sun Herald over at the
general store, and at Chuck and Karl's diner they now serve croissants
along with their hickory-flavored coffee. The first time Julian was
apprehended, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he was standing