"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - The World Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

The record player leaped high into the air, then smashed down on the floor, its
casing broken, parts spilling from it.

"Pell!" Aria said. "No!"

The albums shot from their sleeves on the shelf, sliced through the air between
the people sitting at the table, and crashed into the wall beside the entrance,
shattered, fragments sliding down into sharp-edged rubble on the floor.

Tears ran down Mother's face. She cried without sound except a hitch in her
breath.

"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry," Aria muttered, wrapping her arms around her
head, elbows jutting out. "I'll be good I'll be extra good I'll be so good you
don't know I'm here..."

"My music. All my music ... I can never replace those records," Mother said, her
voice strangled. She sniffed. She patted the tears from her face with her
napkin. "Never."

"Tell me their titles," said Mrs. Bridge. "I'll see what I can do about getting
you replacements. I'm sorry. I feel responsible."

"How can you be responsible when it's Ari who does these things?" Mother said.

There it was. Usually Aria did not discuss Pell with Mother. Usually Pell did
small irritating things and both of them pretended this was just some normal
inconvenience that everyone had to deal with at home. Mother had never before
blamed Aria for what Pell did. Not directly, anyway.

Aria, mired in guilt and the spill of sorties, rocked in her chair and hid her
head with her arms. If only Pell would go away and never never never come back.
Pell wrecked everything. Pell broke things. Pell scared people. Pell hurt
Mother.

Mrs. Bridge touched her arm. "Aria," she said. She poured tea, sugared it,
tugged Aria's arm down. "Here, sweetie."

It took Aria a while to stop rocking and scratching herself up on the inside.
Pell had never broken something so important before. Mostly Pell thumped things
that wouldn't break. But the tea cup last year, that had hurt a lot. Not as much
as the loss of the records, though.

She managed to stop saying she was sorry. She took the tea from Mrs. Bridge and
sipped it. The feeling of being a horrible evil person didn't go away.
She glanced at Mother's face, saw the lines of suffering. The music was one of
the few things that made Mother feel better when she came home from work. How
often in the evening Aria had watched Mother as Mother listened to the music,
her eyes looking at something far away and beautiful, something that carried her
away from a world of dirty dishes and steaming water and the realities of a