"Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ruff Matt)

keeping a step ahead of me that way. And no energy wasted on yelling. It seemed, I donтАЩt know,
efficient.

But it was also frustrating. If I havenтАЩt made it clear already, there wasnтАЩt a lot for me to do in Siesta
Corta, and once you took away the stuff I shouldnтАЩt be doing, life got really dull really fast.

The low point came about ten days in. My aunt and uncle didnтАЩt own a TVтАФof course they didnтАЩtтАФbut
they did have a lot of books in the house, and one day in desperation I started rooting through their
library. Now I donтАЩt want to give you the wrong impression. I wasnтАЩt illiterate, and I wasnтАЩt allergic to
books the way some people are, but still, on my list of preferred leisure activities, reading anything more
demanding than Tiger Beat ranked somewhere down around badminton and pulling taffy. But there I
was, on a perfectly good Friday afternoon, curled up in an easy chair with a Nancy Drew mystery in my
lap.

I wouldnтАЩt have guessed youтАЩd be a Nancy Drew fan.

I wasnтАЩt, really. I was a Pamela Sue Martin fan. She was the actress who played Nancy Drew on
televisionтАФhad played her, until she got kicked off the show for being a troublemaker. She was one of
my role models. On TV she was squeaky-clean, but in real life she had a reputation for being a bad girl
who wouldnтАЩt take shit from people. SheтАЩd been in Playboy, and done R-rated moviesтАФjust that year
sheтАЩd starred as John DillingerтАЩs girlfriend in The Lady in Red. So because of Pamela Sue Martin, I had
this image of Nancy Drew as a sort of closet bad seed, cooler than she had any right to be.

The book turned out to be strictly G-rated, but I got sucked into the story anyway, and by the time I
came up for air, most of the afternoon had gone by. Which freaked me out when I realized, because, you
know, sitting in the same spot for hours, barely moving, thatтАЩs the kind of thing Phil would do.

You were worried about turning into your brother?

Yeah. I know it sounds comical now, but at the time? That really was a panic-inducing thought for me.
So I got up right then, went and got my money, and made a beeline for the highway.

What about your promise to Officer Friendly?

Well, I wasnтАЩt really going to run away. It was more like a test runтАФkind of a hitchhiking feasibility study.
Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted
something really interesting.

It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member
of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. SheтАЩd
gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunterтАЩs blind, and she was
hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually
oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out
across the road.

At cars?

That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy
over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the
pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he