zemeniite: переводы

→“Not far,” she said quickly. “Just behind the building. This street’s got weird overnight parking rules.”

→I grimaced. “Well, I’m glad it won’t get towed, but he should’ve had me move it! Even if it’s not far, he could ruin the transmission.” “I’m sure it’s fine,” said Jill. There was a strange note to her voice.

→It was handy having the bond as a source of information, but her words made me panic more than if the car actually had been stolen. “He what?’’

→“Oh,” said Jill from the backseat, sounding slightly nervous. “I saw through the bond. He, um, moved it.”

→Angeline’s clock at school was ticking, so the rest of us had to leave. I’d driven three blocks away when I realized I’d left my purse on the grass. With a groan, I looped around and returned to his building. My purse was there, but the Mustang was gone.

→“Of course it does,” I said. It was hard not to roll my eyes. “A 289. I want to know what the horsepower is.”

→“Um. not sure,” said Adrian. “I know it’s got a V-8 engine.”

→To be fair, what happened next wasn’t entirely her fault. He really should have left her alone when she said no, but I guess he was too caught up in his feel-good mood. He actually managed to drag her to her feet, and that’s when Angeline made her disapproval perfectly clear.

→The warning note in Eddie’s voice stopped me as I was about to return to my homework. That kind of concern could only be reserved for Jill, and I immediately looked at her again. Only, she wasn’t the issue. Angeline was. One of the Koolin’ Around members was trying to coax her out and even grabbed her hand. Angeline shook her head emphatically, but the guy seemed oblivious. Angeline might be okay around wild dances in the backwoods of West Virginia, but this was not a situation she was comfortable with.

→“Not when he uses his ‘I insist’ voice,” came the muttered response.

→Koolin’ Around mercifully reached their last song, a big production number celebrating the joys of feeling good and living a healthy, happy lifestyle. They pulled up members of the student body to dance with them, earning a variety of reactions. Some students just stood there frozen and embarrassed, wearing expressions that said they were counting the seconds until this ended. Other students—particularly those who normally sought attention in class—made the biggest, most outlandish spectacle they could of themselves.

→“Ugh. That’s it,” I muttered. I sought out Jill again. She was watching with kind of a stunned disbelief, but just like earlier, there was none of that despair or melancholy. Some gut instinct told me why she’d had the mood change. Adrian hadn’t snapped out of his gloom. Most likely he was drinking his way through it. Sometimes Jill would pick up some of the sillier side effects of intoxication— like the giggling I’d observed earlier—but eventually, alcohol actually numbed the spirit bond. The bright side of his indulgence was that it spared her some of his depression. The down side was that she could actually suffer the physical effects of a hangover later.

→The only time I tuned in again was when Koolin’ Around had moved on to the evils of alcohol. One of the lyrics in their particularly atrocious song was, “Don’t listen to what your friends say / Bourbon will totally ruin your day.”

→“Exactly,” I said, not looking up from my homework. “In trying to be ‘hip’ and ‘relatable,’ they’re trivializing issues that need to be taken more seriously.”

→The first song was called “STDs Are Not for Me.” That was when I took out my math homework.

→Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle that followed —mostly because never in my craziest dreams had I imagined weighty social issues would be addressed in musical numbers. The group performing for us called themselves Koolin’ Around, and the inappropriate use of that K was nearly enough to make me walk out then and there. Before each song, they’d give a quick and totally vague info-blurb about the topic or—even worse—a skit. These little lectures always began with, “Hey, kids!”

→“Maybe you drank liquid sugar,” I said. “Mine was sugar free.” I hoped I sounded convincing.

→“The slush. That thing’s like 99 percent sugar. You just drank one, Sage.” He seemed to interpret my silence as though perhaps I hadn’t understood. “You just drank liquid sugar.”

→We finished shortly thereafter and tossed the cups in the trash. When we got back in Latte, Adrian sighed wearily and rubbed his eyes. “God, those are awesome. I think I needed that. The vodka may have hit me harder than I thought. Glad you decided to branch out into something that isn’t coffee for a change.”

→He nodded and slurped loudly on his. That dark mood still hung around him, and I knew a childhood beverage wasn’t going to undo what his father had done anytime soon. The best I could hope for was a few moments of peace for him.