"Laura Anne Gilman - Strange Playmates" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Laura Anne)

Strange Playmates - Laura Anne Gilman
Jordan was a changeling, the other kids whispered in nursery school, at parties, when they got in their
cars to go home. The fairies had come and taken the real Jordan, leaving him behind in the crib. He
wasn't human. Wasn't real.

He heard them, of course. They meant him to. His mother held him when he cried. "You ignore them,"
she would say into his small, inverted -- mutant -- ears. "You ignore them, and know your momma and
daddy love you."

But daddy had left when Jordan was five, after one too many doctor's appointments, one too many
negative results. "Be thankful you have a healthy child," the last doctor said, out of patience with this man
who wanted his son to act like all the other kids on the block. "Ten years ago, you would have lost him at
birth."

"It's just you and me now, Jordy," his mother had said a week later, when the papers came from the
lawyer. At five, even smarter than most kids his age, Jordan hadn't understood how a bunch of papers
could say his parents hadn't ever been married, say that he couldn't -- didn't -- exist, and make it be true.
By the time he was seven, he understood. His daddy could get an annulment -- say the marriage never
happened -- because the Church didn't think he was human, either.

By the time Jordan was ten, he knew he wasn't human either. But that was okay. He knew by then that
being human wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

_____

"Overheads up!"

They were playing freeball. Three teams of three players each, and all you had to do was keep the ball
out of your zone, any way you could. Jordan, Marta, and Steve had come up with the basic idea during
the last, endless days of school last year. The rules were fluid: three players, one for each layer: ground
defense, air defense, and attack. A zone was one corner of the field, marked off by old soccer nets, one
for each zone. Score any way you could. Keep the other two teams from scoring any way you could.

Jordan was an okay attack-player, and the way his arms and legs were jointed helped him make some
catches nobody else could, but it was tough to lose with Marta on your side. She wasn't very tough, but
the membrane between her shoulder blades made her the best air-defense player in school. She could
jump like a frog, and hover like a kite just long enough to spike the ball away from their territory. Usually
onto some grounder's head.

Max was their grounder. He wasn't afraid to dive for the ball, or take a few bonks on the head, either.
He wasn't Changed, even though Marta was his twin. There wasn't much reason to how it happed,
Jordan's mom said. It just happened.

"To you, Steve, to you, catch it catch it!"

"Ah, bite me, Carly."

Jordan winced when Steve said that. Carly was sensitive about her serpent's teeth; in first grade she had
actually taken a chunk of skin from someone's arm when they were wrestling. Jordan couldn't remember
whose arm it had been -- wasn't him, but it might have been Ollie, who moved away the next year.