"Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Link Kelly)

FOX IS A TELEVISION CHARACTER, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a
character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you
wish you had.

In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his
house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It's eight o'clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth
should be studying for the math quiz that their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long.
Instead they've sneaked out onto the roof. It's cold. They don't know everything they should know about
X, when X is the square root of Y. They don't even know Y. They ought to go in.
But there's nothing good on TV and the sky is very beautiful. They have jackets on, and up in the
corners where the sky begins are patches of white in the darkness, still, where there's snow, up on the
mountains. Down in the trees around the house, some animal is making a small, anxious sound: "Why
cry? Why cry?"
"What's that one?" Elizabeth says, pointing at a squarish configuration of stars.
"That's The Parking Structure," Jeremy says. "And right next to that is The Big Shopping Mall and The
Lesser Shopping Mall."
"And that's Orion, right? Orion the Bargain Hunter?"
Jeremy squints up. "No, Orion is over there. That's The Austrian Bodybuilder. That thing that's sort of
wrapped around his lower leg is The Amorous Cephalopod. The Hungry, Hungry Octopus. It can't make
up its mind whether it should eat him or make crazy, eight-legged love to him. You know that myth,
right?"
"Of course," Elizabeth says. "Is Karl going to be pissed off that we didn't invite him over to study?"
"Karl's always pissed off about something," Jeremy says. Jeremy is resolutely resisting a notion about
Elizabeth. Why are they sitting up here? Was it his idea or was it hers? Are they friends, are they just two
friends sitting on the roof and talking? Or is Jeremy supposed to try to kiss her? He thinks maybe he's
supposed to kiss her. If he kisses her, will they still be friends? He can't ask Karl about this. Karl doesn't
believe in being helpful. Karl believes in mocking.
Jeremy doesn't even know if he wants to kiss Elizabeth. He's never thought about it until right now.
"I should go home," Elizabeth says. "There could be a new episode on right now, and we wouldn't
even know."
"Someone would call and tell us," Jeremy says. "My mom would come up and yell for us." His mother
is something else Jeremy doesn't want to worry about, but he does, he does.

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he's never been there. He knows some
girls, and yet he doesn't know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there
are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes
without appearing to be perverted. Once Jeremy read a book about Mars out loud to Karl, except he
kept replacing the word Mars with the word "girls." Karl cracked up every time.
Jeremy's mother is a librarian. His father writes books. Jeremy reads biographies. He plays trombone
in a marching band. He jumps hurdles while wearing a school tracksuit. Jeremy is also passionately
addicted to a television show in which a renegade librarian and magician named Fox is trying to save her
world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, although he's a telegenic geek.
Somebody should make a TV show about him.
Jeremy's friends call him Germ, although he would rather be called Mars. His parents haven't spoken
to each other in a week.

Jeremy doesn't kiss Elizabeth. The stars don't fall out of the sky, and Jeremy and Elizabeth don't fall off
the roof either. They go inside and finish their homework.

Someone who Jeremy has never met, never even heard of тАФ a woman named Cleo Baldrick тАФ has