"Stephen King. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon." - читать интересную книгу автора

they went around in a group and the bad kids didn't pick on them. At
Sanford Middle there was no computer club and he'd only made a single
friend, Eddie Rayburn. Then in January Eddie moved away, also the victim of
a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone's game. Worse, a lot of
kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated: Pete's
CompuWorld.
On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn't go down to Malden to
be with their father, their mother took them on outings. She was grimly
dedicated to these, and although Trisha wished with all her heart that Mom
would stop-it was on the outings that the worst fights happened-she knew
that wasn't going to happen. Quilla Andersen (she had taken back her maiden
name and you could bet Pete hated that, too) had the courage of her
convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had
heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone. "If Quilla had been
at Little Big Horn, the Indians would have lost," he said, and although
Trisha didn't like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom-it seemed
babyish as well as disloyal-she couldn't deny that there was a nugget of
truth in that particular observation.
Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom
and Pete, she had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the Shaker
Village in Gray, to The New England Plant-A-Torium in North Wyndham, to
SixGun City in Randolph, New Hampshire, on a canoe trip down the Saco
River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf (where Trisha had sprained her
ankle, an injury over which her mother and father had later had a screaming
fight; what fun divorce was, what really good fun).
Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a
rest. He had pronounced Six-Gun City "for babies," but Mom had allowed him
to spend most of the visit in the room where the electronic games were, and
Pete had gone home not exactly happy but at least silent. On the other
hand, if Pete didn't like one of the places their Mom picked (his least
favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium; returning to Sanford that day
he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind), he was generous in
sharing his opinion. "Go along to get along" wasn't in his nature. Nor was
it in their mother's, Trisha supposed. She herself thought it was an
excellent philosophy, but of course everyone took one look at her and
pronounced her her father's child. Sometimes that bothered her, but mostly
she liked it.
Trisha didn't care where they went on Saturdays, and would have been
perfectly happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf courses
just because they minimized the increasingly horrible arguments. But Mom
wanted the trips to be instructive, too-hence the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker
Village. On top of his other problems, Pete resented having education
rammed down his throat on Saturdays, when he would rather have been up in
his room, playing Sanitarium or Riven on his Mac. Once or twice he had
shared his opinion ("This sucks!" pretty well summed it up) so generously
that Mom had sent him back to the car and told him to sit there and
"compose himself " until she and Trisha came back.
Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a
kindergartener who needed a time-out - that someday they'd come back to the
van and find it empty, Pete having decided to hitchhike back to