"Ben Jeapes - Pages Out Of Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeapes Ben)

"Look, Tom. Remember?"
He squinted at himself in the three square inches of glass, and his jaw
dropped. He looked up.
"Have ... have you got a bigger mirror anywhere?"
"Bathroom's first on the right," I said. He bolted, and Jo and I stared at
each other.
"What's happening?"
"Some kind of breakdown?"
There was a scream from the bathroom. We found him, sobbing, staring at
his reflection through his fingers.
"Look at me!" he choked. "Look at me--"
I had a sudden flashback -- a memory that was six years old. Tom Melton in
the washroom at school, looking in the mirror ...
I was about to pursue the train of thought when my watch beeped. Was this
how Cinderella felt? It's amazing how doom-laden a clock striking the time
can sound. Somehow I knew that Tom, earlier, had been expecting just this
to happen. I led Tom gently back into the living room, sat him down and
gave him his package.
"This is for you," I said.
It was a red-cloth exercise book, of the type we had had at school.
Battered and old, but cared for. Tom opened it and began reading, while we
watched. At first he seemed absorbed, then his lips began to tremble, and
then with a wail he dropped it and curled up into a corner of the sofa,
sobbing again. It was a pathetic sight.
Jo comforted him and I picked the book up. The writing inside was in Tom's
own hand, and the first words meant I had to keep on reading.
"GREETINGS, TIME TRAVELLER!!!
Yes, that's right. Time traveller. You are Tom Melton, aged almost 14 in
a body aged 20. I'm Tom Melton, aged 20 in a 14-year-old body, and it's
a bummer for both of us.
It's 1985, and you're in your second year at university. But take heart,
you'll survive. It won't be easy, but you have the best friend any bloke
could ever have in Will Sutton. That's about the only good news I have
for you; the next best thing is that you're not going to die in the next
six years, are you? Think about it, Tommo--"
It made sense. Just. I could remember the scene that Tom went on to
describe, back in the changing room in 1979. Tom Melton, bullied and on
the verge of a breakdown, trembling and muttering that he was about to
flip. And flip he did -- to six years in the future. His own, personal
future.
Tom even produced an analogy.
"Look at it this way. Your life is a book, and every year is a page. The
book has a beginning and a middle and an end. In your case, the book
looks OK from the outside and it has the right number of pages, but when
you read it you find it was badly bound and twelve of the pages are out
of order. You start at the beginning and read up to page 13, but instead
of page 14 it has page 21. You read on to page 26 and find the next page
is 14. After another six pages you find they're all in order again.
I've been through everything you're going through now and I know exactly
how you feel reading this. You're frightened and you're the loneliest