Alena_Zybina: переводы

→Scott Kilpatrick. Biggest asshole on the planet. Absolute top of my shit list. Exclamation points. ALL CAPS.

→During a pause where I expect Sarah to jump in, she doesn’t. I let the silence go to see how long it lasts. After a few more seconds I know something’s up.

→We used to be systematic, working through the day class by class, hallway by hallway; now we jump around without missing anything. She describes what people and things look like and I list times and places and describe voices and sometimes sounds and odors so she can zero in on who I’m talking about to get a visual and other info later. I tell her about D.B. from Trig because I suspect he’ll be a pain and I might need more tools to deal with him. I mention the calm voice that shut down D.B.’s heavy jock voice and how it sounded familiar yet still not anyone I knew, like how listening to someone with an accent sounds like the other person you know with that accent even though they have different voices.

→While Petey describes the drama of saving the tetras in chaotic detail, I map out my pork chop with short stabs of my fork and dull knife and then saw the meat away from the bone. I’d caused a minor uproar when they first moved in because after I cut my food I don’t switch my fork to my right hand for each bite. This is a concept that (1) had never occurred to me, (2) is common etiquette supposedly, at least among people who still obsess about things like this, and (3) is something I find utterly bizarre. Even stranger was how Aunt Celia not only disapproved of this, and my dad for letting me do it, but also had some half-baked notion of stopping it. Uncle Sam saved us from the most ridiculous argument imaginable by saying the way I eat is how they eat “across the pond.” While this didn’t make it optimal to Aunt Celia, it somehow made it legitimate enough for her to let it go and save face. It was my first glimpse of what it would be like living with Aunt Celia under my roof.

→“He likes being an asshole,” Sarah says and almost sounds like she means it. “Eat your lasagna.”

→Well, except for two things. One, I really did almost run into the Reiches’ van, but that was a different day a couple weeks later. And two, my dad wasn’t lying at the bottom of the stairs. I found him still in bed, and he’d been dead for hours.

→That’s when I wake up, like always, but it’s exactly what really happened last June third, the week after school let out and two weeks after my sixteenth birthday.

→“Listen,” he says, still sounding nothing like he should if he were really lying at the base of the stairs. “Everyone has secrets, Parker. Everyone is a secret.”

→“Did you fall? What happened?”

→“Parker,” he says, his voice oddly flat. Not strained or injured.

→I head for the stairs and stumble on something in the hall. I squat and find my dad lying on the floor, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt.

→The instant I open the front door I know something’s wrong. I don’t smell any breakfast. Even cereal days include toast. In the kitchen I hear only the normal sounds of a sleeping house: refrigerator humming, clock ticking over the stove, my breathing, and when I stop that to listen more closely, my heartbeat.

→Ten sprints and I’m done. After crossing the street I jog to cool down, but I slow to a walk near the Reiches’ driveway. I heard the car move but once a problem occurs to you it takes a while to forget it. On the other side where the driveway slopes up to become sidewalk again, I speed up.

→Sixty strides gets me within two dozen walking steps of the far side. Then sidestep a bit to line up again because of drift. The still air is warmer than yesterday but feels cool as I fly through it. The worst heat of summer is weeks away.

→After five turns, it’s time to sprint.

→I reach the far fence at one hundred and forty-two steps. Pretty typical and all clear. After a few more minutes of stretching, I’m ready to run. Seventy-five strides at a fair pace, a couple dozen walking steps to touch the far fence, and back again.

→The field is over a hundred yards across. If any new obstacles have shown up since yesterday chances are low I’ll find them with a single walk-through, but as crazy as it is to run here at all it’s even crazier without walking it first.

→When I touch the chain link fence of Gunther Field I turn right. Fourteen steps to the gap and a left turn through it, one hand slightly forward in case today is the first time in years I misjudged the distance. I pass straight through, like always.

→I find the sidewalk again and continue as the van growls behind me. I wait at the corner until Mrs. Reiche shuts it off to listen for traffic. I hear nothing but chattering birds, so I step into the intersection.

→“Of course I’ll move it. It’ll be gone when you get back.”