"Lippman, Laura - Every Secret Thing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lippman Laura)

over, until Helen had snapped: "Don't be such a pleaser, Alice. You
weren't put on this planet to make other people happy. Not even me.
Especially me."

Ronnie's present was the next-to-last to be opened. The paper was red
and there were creases in the wrong places, so everyone knew it had
been taken off some other present, folded into a square, and reused. It
wasn't obviously Christmas paper no Santas, no holly, no candy canes,
just red but still, everyone knew. The girl next to Wendy whispered
something, who turned to tell Alice. Wendy's mouth was tickling
Alice's ear when the present emerged, and then everyone fell silent, so
the secret was never shared.

"Isn't that nice," Maddy's mother said, as she had said twelve times
already, with just the same inflection.

Ronnie's gift was a Barbie, and no one in the fifth grade at St.
William of York had played with a Barbie, not in public, for at least a
year. When they did play Barbie, they played Soap Opera Barbie, in
which Ken gets Barbie pregnant and they then have lots of serious talks
about what to do, and whether it was wrong to have so much sex, and how
they would never do it again if God would just take the baby away. The
whole point of Soap Opera Barbie was the beginning, where you put Ken
on top of Barbie and had them make funny noises. But that was a secret
game, played in twos. In public, the only proper response to a Barbie
was polite boredom, as if you couldn't quite remember what she was for.
As if you'd never seen her under Ken, going Oh! Oh! Oh!

So a Barbie was bad enough. But this was a black Barbie, which was
weird, because black Barbies were for black girls, they just were, and
not because of prejudice, which the St. William of York girls knew was
wrong. Maybe if a girl had, say, ten Barbies, one of them would be
black, because then a girl could really branch out, have an apartment
house full of Barbies. Maddy, in fact, was just the kind of girl who
might have her own Barbie town. Her parents were that rich. So,
although she was too old and the Barbie was black, that wasn't the
worst thing.

No, the worst thing was that it was a Holiday Barbie. In July.

She wore a red gown and a fur-trimmed cape, and even Alice, who was
sometimes slow to understand what other girls seemed born knowing,
realized the doll was some Toys for Tots leftover. Ronnie's father was
always bringing home stuff like this heart-shaped boxes of candy in
late February, chocolate bunnies in May, new lawn furniture in October.
Alice had heard her mother say that Mr. Fuller's Coca-Cola truck came
home fuller than it went out. She wasn't sure what that meant exactly,
but she had figured out it wasn't good, much less exquisite.

"Very pretty," Maddy's mother said, as if she meant it. "Say, "Thank