"Jane Yolen - Lost Girls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

She turned, ready to ask who He was. But the boy, dressed in green
tights and a green shirt and a rather silly green hat, and smelling like fresh
lavender, held a finger up to his lips. They were perfect lips. Like a movie
star's. Darla knew him at once.
"Peter," she whispered. "Peter Pan."
He swept the hat off and gave her a deep bow. "Wendy," he countered.
"Well, Darla, actually," she said.
"Wendy Darla," he said. "Give us a thimble."
She and her mom had read that part in the book already, where Peter
got kiss and thimble mixed up, and she guessed what it was he really
meant, but she wasn't about to kiss him. She was much too young to be
kissing boys. Especially boys she'd just met. And he had to be more a man
than a boy, anyway, no matter how young he looked. The copy of Peter
Pan she and her mother had been reading had belonged to her
grandmother originally. Besides, Darla wasn't sure she liked Peter. Of
course, she wasn't sure she didn't like him. It was a bit confusing. Darla
hated things being confusing, like her parents' divorce and her dad's new
young wife and their twins who were тАФ and who weren't exactlyтАФher
brothers.
"I don't have a thimble," she said, pretending not to understand.
 "I have," he said, smiling with persuasive boyish charm. "Can I give it to
you?"
But she looked down at her feet in order not to answer, which was how
she mostly responded to her dad these days, and that was that. At least for
the moment. She didn't want to think any further ahead, and neither, it
seemed, did Peter.
He shrugged and took her hand, dragging her down a path that smelled
of moldy old leaves. Darla was too surprised to protest. And besides, Peter
was lots stronger than she was. The two boys followed. When they got to a
large dark brown tree whose odor reminded Darla of her grandmother's
wardrobe, musty and ancient, Peter stopped. He let go of her hand and
jumped up on one of the twisted roots that were looped over and around
one another like woody snakes. Darla was suddenly reminded of her school
principal when he towered above the students at assembly. He was a tall
man but the dais he stood on made him seem even taller. When you sat in
the front row, you could look up his nose. She could look up Peters nose
now. Like her principal, he didn't look so grand that way. Or so
threatening.
"Here's where we live," Peter said, his hand in a large sweeping motion.
Throwing his head back, he crowed like a rooster; he no longer seemed
afraid of making noise. Then he said, "You'll like it."
"Maybe I will. Maybe I won't," Darla answered, talking to her feet again.
Peter's perfect mouth made a small pout as if that weren't the response
he'd been expecting. Then he jumped down into a dark space between the
roots. The other boys followed him. Not to be left behind, in case that
rooster crow really had called something awful to them, Darla went after
the boys into the dark place. She found what they had actually gone
through was a door that was still slightly ajar.
The door opened on to a long, even darker passage that wound into the
very center of the tree; the passage smelled damp, like bathing suits left