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

"What I mean is that it's not fair that they get to have the adventures
and you get to clean the house," Darla explained carefully.
"Who will clean it if we don't?" Wendy asked. She picked up the mop
and handed it back to Darla. "Not them. Not ever. So if we want it done,
we do it. Fair is not the matter here." She went back to her place in the
line of girls mopping the floor.
With a sigh that was less a capitulation and more a show of solidarity
with the Wendys, Darla picked up her own mop and followed.
When the room was set to rights again, the WendysтАФwith Darla
following close behind тАФ tromped into the kitchen, a cheerless,
windowless room they had obviously tried to make homey. There were
little stick dollies stuck in every possible niche and hand-painted birch
bark signs on the wall.
SMILE, one sign said, YOU ARE ON CANDIED CAMERA. And another:
WENDYS ARE WONDERFUL. A third, in very childish script, read:
WENDYS ARE WINERS. Darla wondered idly if that was meant to be
WINNERS or WHINERS, but she decided not to ask.
Depressing as the kitchen was, it was redolent with bakery smells that
seemed to dissipate the effect of a prison. Darla sighed, remembering her
own kitchen at home, with the windows overlooking her mother's herb
garden and the rockery where four kinds of heather flowered till the first
snows of winter.
The girls all sat downтАФon the floor, on the table, in little bumpy, woody
niches. There were only two chairs in the kitchen, a tatty overstuffed chair
whose gold brocaded covering had seen much better days, and a rocker.
The rocker was taken by the oldest Wendy; the other chair remained
empty.
At last, seeing that no one else was going to claim the stuffed chair,
Darla sat down on it, and a collective gasp went up from the girls.
" 'At's Peter's chair," the littlest one finally volunteered.
"Well, Peter's not here to sit on it," Darla said. But she did not relax
back against the cushion, just in case he should suddenly appear.
"I'm hungry, Wendy," said one of the girls, who had two gold braids
down to her waist. "Isn't there anything left to eat?" She addressed the
girl in the rocker.
"You are always hungry, Madja," Wendy said. But she smiled, and it
was a smile of such sweetness, Darla was immediately reminded of her
mom, in the days before the divorce and her dad's new wife.
"So you do have names, and not just Wendy," Darla said.
They looked at her as if she were stupid.
"Of course we have names," said the girl in the rocker. "I'm the only one
truly named Wendy. But I've been here from the first. So that's what Peter
calls us all. That's Madja," she said, pointing to the girl with the braids.
"And that's Lizzy." The youngest girl. "And that's Martha, Pansy, Nina,
Nancy, Heidi, Betsy, Maddy, JoAnne, Shula, Annie, Corrie, BarbaraтАж" She
went around the circle of girls.
Darla interrupted. "Then why doesn't PeterтАФ"
"Because he can't be bothered remembering," said Wendy. "And we
can't be bothered reminding him."
"And it's all right," said Madja. "Really. He has so much else to worry