darinadarina: переводы

→Mom probably wasn’t going to go for that, though. Ever since Dad was back, whenever he wasn’t working, she was all about the family sitting together at the table without phones or games or books. She kept quoting something she’d read in a magazine—some kind of study that having dinner together was supposed to make Zach a happier adult and make her lose weight. Why they did it only when Dad was at home, if it was so important, Zach wasn’t sure.

→He dumped his backpack out on the bed and sprawled on his stomach, reaching for his social studies book. He read the chapter he was supposed to and then started on punctuation, toeing off his sneakers. It was hard to concentrate. His stomach gurgled with hunger, and the smell of dinner made waiting to eat even harder. He was tired from practice, and the last thing he wanted to do was more schoolwork. He wanted to sit in front of the television and watch the show about ghost-hunters or the one with the thief who worked for the government. Ideally, he’d be watching them from the couch, with a huge plate of spaghetti and sausage on his lap.

→“I guess.” Zach shrugged off his dad’s grip and went up to his room.

→Since his dad had come back, he’d been really fond of saying that kind of thing.

→“You’re growing up,” he said, which seemed to be one of those weird things adults would say sometimes, stuff that was really obvious and to which there was no reply.

→“Okay,” Zach said. As he walked through the living room his dad was coming down the stairs. He clapped his hand heavily on Zach’s shoulder.

→His mother stuck her head out of the kitchen. She was wearing sweatpants, and her long brown hair was pulled back in a bunch of clips. She looked tired. “Dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t you start on your homework, and I’ll call you when it’s time to eat.”

→The kitchen smelled like spaghetti sauce and frying sausages, a warm, safe smell that drove away all thoughts of the night and the eerie wind.

→Suddenly he felt overwhelmed by a wash of terror. It was all-consuming and, despite feeling silly, he ran, racing across his lawn to the small brick house where he lived. He hit the front door, his palms slamming against it, and had to stumble back to jerk it open.

→An eerie wind sang through the untrimmed trees in front of Mr. Thompson’s old house at the end of the block. It sounded like someone shrieking from a long way off, but getting closer with every second. Zach sped up his pace, walking faster and faster, feeling foolish as he did it. He felt the tickle of the hairs on the back of his neck, as though whatever was coming was right behind him, as though he could feel its breath.

→So he walked home by himself, feeling a little bit lonely as he made his way through the early autumn evening, kicking the carpet of fallen leaves. He didn’t know how else to make things go back to normal. It wasn’t like he could shrink himself back into being the same as before.

→Even Alice acted strange around him sometimes. When she was with her school friends, instead of her talking to him like she usually did, the whole bunch of them giggled uncomfortably. That very afternoon, after practice, he passed by Alice and a few girls from the theater crew. They fled in a fit of shrieking laughter before he could ask Alice what had been so funny or whether she wanted to walk home with him.

→Everyone at school looked at him differently all of a sudden. The guys were wanting to hang out more, slapping him on the back, and laughing louder at his jokes. And the girls had just gotten weird.

→That past summer, the mysterious thing that had stretched other boys like taffy had started to happen to Zach. He’d always been tall, but now he’d almost reached his father’s height, with hands so big that catching a basketball was a lot easier and legs so long that he could jump nearly high enough to touch the net. The year before, he’d hung back on the court, but now he was thundering down it.

→Even after he folded the questions back into the shape of a football and tucked it into the front pocket of his backpack, the feeling of the story being close stayed with him. Zach doodled pictures in the margins of his notebook, drawings of cutlasses and blast rifles and crowns next to geometry homework and facts about the Battle of Antietam.

→Sometimes William has dreams about being buried alive. He dreams that he’s woken up and everything is black. He only knows where he is because he feels a heavy pressure on his chest and it’s hard to get enough of a breath to scream. Usually, it’s the trying to scream that wakes him. He finds himself swinging in a hammock in his quarters, in a cold sweat, his green parrot peering at him suspiciously with her single black eye. And he tells himself that when he’s buried, he’s going to be buried at sea.

→They passed notes back and forth, especially if one of them was about to get grounded or before someone went on a trip. He always felt a flush of excitement—and a little bit of dread—when he got a folded-up paper. It was a part of the game that felt particularly risky. If a teacher got ahold of the note or Alex saw it—just thinking about the possibility made the back of Zach’s neck burn with embarrassment.