"Betty Miles - The Trouble With Thirteen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miles Betty)

"Hold that bite!" She put her camera to her eye.
"Rach-I'm all sticky!" I wiped at my chin and tried to look dignified.
Rachel snapped my picture. "Let's go to the bookstore," she said.
We must have been there hundreds of times, from way back before we could read. It's a good bookstore. They let you browse. We headed for the paperback
rack in the side room and twirled it around to see what was new.
"Hey, remember this?" I stopped the rack and took down Ramona the Pest.
Rachel grabbed it from me. "Is this the one where the TV announcer scolds her?" She began to flip through the pages.
"Rachel! I got it first!"
She laughed. "You sound the way you used to in the third grade!"
"You act like it! Come on, let's read it together."
We stood there laughing over the book. On every page there was something we remembered. It's strange how the look and feel of a book can take you back in time.
Rachel took my picture in front of the book rack. Then she suddenly reached up and pulled out another book. It was Now and Forever.
"Erica says this is one of the best books she ever read," she said. "She says John Paul Marsten really understands the way kids feel. I'm glad I saw this- I'm going to get it."
I stopped myself from making a quick remark. Maybe it was a good book. If Rachel liked it, I could borrow it from her. You can probably learn a lot from a book like that. I had a lot to learn. I suddenly remembered what I was going to tell Rachel. "Let's go to Woolworth's," I said, to put it off.
We always love to browse around in there. For years our favorite place was the toy section, where we'd pore over jacks sets and play money and doll furniture. We still sometimes sneak down that aisle to buy rubber monsters and wind-up cars for each other for Christmas stockings.
Rachel wanted me to pose on the bucking-bronco ride outside the store, but I talked her out of that. We went inside, and I let her take my picture at the toy counter with a Little Kiddie Doctor bag in my hand. But then some real little kids came along and I was embarrassed.
"Hey, Rachel-let's do the photo booth!" We love to go in there and take crazy pictures of ourselves. We have a whole collection of them.
We ran over to the photo booth and pulled the curtain and put our money in and posed. We did a normal pose first and then we made a face. Real fast, we changed the pose and leaned back languidly like movie stars. Then Rachel pretended to take a picture with her camera. When the pictures came out, the movie-star one was pretty good.
"We ought to make a whole set of these," Rachel said. "In all different glamorous poses."
"We should have makeup-lipstick and stuff."
"Let's go buy some!" Rachel said right away.
So we went over to the makeup counter and picked out a dark red lipstick and some black mascara and took it back into the photo booth. We pulled the
curtain shut and began to make each other up, watching ourselves in the mirror and giggling. When we made smudges, we used Rachel's lens tissue to wipe them off. We were cracking up the whole time, but when we had finished we sat back and stared at ourselves in the mirror in amazement. We looked about ten years older, and quite beautiful.
Rachel put in the money, and the camera began to click. We didn't make faces. We stared straight at the mirror and let the camera take us the way we were. The way we might get to be.
"Rachel," I said suddenly, before the last click, "I got my period."
"Oh, Annie!" Rachel turned in surprise, blurring the picture that came out a minute later. "So did I!"
We grabbed each other and hung on, laughing. I guess we probably never felt more identical to each other in our lives than we did just then. Just then, when we were going to have to part.
1O
Probably anyone who saw us waiting for the New York bus the next Saturday would have thought we were just two girls going to the city for fun. But it was more complicated than that. I felt nervous about the trip. I knew it would make Rachel's move seem more real. I was afraid of acting stupid because I didn't know my way around New York City that well. I was shy about meeting Erica and Bruce, which was part of the plan. And then-it was the first time Rachel and I were going somewhere since we'd told each other. I think it made us both feel a little awkward, the way people do when they wish they could change the subject but don't know how.
We stood in the shade of the post-office building and looked up the street for the bus, without saying much. Two women were waiting there with us. They
had pants suits and handbags and beauty-shop hairdos.
"Going to the city, girls?" one of them asked.
"Yeah," I admitted. I hoped she wasn't going to try to take care of us.
"Well, it's the perfect day for it!" She patted her hairdo. "Now yesterday, that was something awful, the way it rained-"
Luckily, the bus came just then. Rachel and I settled into a seat. Rachel took out her camera. I checked my bag to be sure I had everything-money, hairbrush, the subway map Mom had made me take. I'd die before I'd use it in front of anyone, but if I got lost I could go into a toilet somewhere and lock the door and look at it.
The bus drove past the bank and the drugstore and Memorial Park. Madison looks different when you're riding through it on your way somewhere. I wondered if Rachel already thought of it as where she used to live. After a while we turned onto the highway. I leaned back and watched the scruffy woods and industrial parks and shopping centers go by. We passed an office building, and I read the words on a window without really thinking. Then I looked again, and started laughing.
"Hey, Rach-did you see that sign? It said 'Stephen Berger, Attorney,' but there was a big space between the p and the hi"
"What's funny about that?"
"Step-hen!" I explained. "Get it? Step-hen Berger, Attorney! Like, Order in the court, the chicken wants to speak, cluck, cluck, cluck!"
Rachel began to laugh, and pretty soon neither one of us could stop. We were practically hysterical. My bag slipped down, and when I leaned over to get it I hit my head on the seat in front of me. Rachel howled. I howled, too, even though it hurt. I laughed so hard I thought I might throw up.
But then the bus stopped for a crowd of people, and we drove around a ramp and onto the bridge. Rachel leaned over, held up her camera, and snapped. "I can't believe I'm going to live there," she said. She stopped laughing, and so did I.
We followed the crowd through the bus station and down to the subway platform. The women from Madison were there. They didn't seem to fit anywhere-in Madison you could tell they were going somewhere and here you knew they'd come from somewhere. I felt sort of sorry for them.
The train came in, and we got on. Rachel leaned back and shut her eyes. I kept mine open and read the advertisements while the train lurched downtown, screeching around the curves. At 125th Street a bunch of black girls with Afros and high wedge shoes burst on and grabbed straps above us. They were shouting and kidding around about one girl's boy
Mend. I felt self-conscious sitting under them. I wondered if they guessed I came from the suburbs.
The train slowed, and Rachel opened her eyes. "Here's our stop," she said, without even looking out to check. I followed her up some steps and through the turnstile and out to the bright street. It was crowded with people. A man was selling neckties from a suitcase.
"This way." Rachel started off around him.
I hurried after her. "I don't see how you know."
"You just do," she said vaguely, pushing through an opening in the crowd.
I pressed after her, but two men with briefcases got between us so I couldn't see her. For a minute I was afraid I might get lost. Then I looked up and saw her bending over a pushcart at the corner.
"Ices!" she said when I caught up to her. "My father says New York is the only place in the world besides Rome, Italy, where you can get a decent Italian ice." She handed me a little paper cup.