"Paul Park - A Princess of Roumania" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

The Red Pig Comes to Berkshire County
Peter
In early August, after her best friend, Andromeda, had gone to Europe, Miranda
met a boy in the woods. She knew who he was. His name was Peter Gross. They
had no friends in common, though their high school was a small one. Miranda
was a good student, popular and well liked. Peter Gross was none of those
things.
He had curly brown hair, crooked teeth, tanned skin. Because of a birth
defect, he was missing his right hand, most of his right forearm. Miranda had
been aware of him for years. But she spoke to him for the first time at the
ice house, which was a ruined cottage next to a little stone dam in a few
wooded acres between the college and the golf course.
It was a place she visited occasionally, a small stone building half hidden in
the oleander bushes. It had a wooden roof that had fallen in. She used to go
there to read books, to be alone, and at first she was irritated when she saw
him in her secret place. Almost she crept back to her bike and rode away. Then
she thought
she'd wait for him to leave. Then she got interested in watching him; he had
built a weir under the dam with a piece of plywood to make a larger pool. He
had made a sluice gate for the water to escape, and he squatted on the dam to
catch minnows and frogs. His hand was quick in the water.
She stood under the willow trees while he caught a frog and let it go. After a
few minutes she could tell by a kind of stiffness in his shoulders that he was
aware she was watching him. Then she was too embarrassed not to go and sit
beside him and scratch her sunburned legs. She thought he might be grateful
for some companionship. He probably didn't know many people. But he was intent
on the water and he scarcely looked up.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
What did they talk about that first time? Later she couldn't remember. Miranda
had read in the newspaper about his mother's death maybe a year before.
Andromeda had mentioned something about it, tooтАФPeter's mother had been a
secretary in the English department at the college, where everyone's parents
worked, and where Stanley taught astronomy.
Knowing about her death made Peter easier to talk to for some reason, although
Miranda felt she had to tread lightly when she mentioned her own family. That
summer she was having some problems at home. One afternoon in the middle of
the month, she showed up at the ice house a little late. Everything she ever
did was wrong, she said, and there was no part of her life that Rachel didn't
want to supervise. She had no privacy. She'd got home and her shoes were lined
up under the bed, even though she'd asked Rachel not to go into her room.
Worse than that, the computer was on, though she was almost sure she hadn't
touched it. Maybe she
had. It didn't matter. She'd have to change her passwords.
Sitting on the dam, pulling at a loose piece of rubber on her sneaker, she
said, "I feel as though my life isn't my life. My house isn't my house, and my
parents aren't my parents. Which they're not, of course."
Peter was chewing on a long piece of grass, a habit of his. "What do you
mean?"
She sat cross-legged and examined a scratch on her knee. "I guess when Rachel