"Susan Palwick - Going After Bobo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palwick Susan)

be mean, this time. "I can't stand not knowing."

"You do know," she said. She sounded very sad. "You just won't let yourself know
that you know."

"OK," I told her, my throat tight. "I can't stand not seeing, then. Is that better?"

She took her hands off my shoulders and sighed. "I'll call Letty, but it's not going to
do any good. Is your brother home?"

"No," I said. David should have been home an hour before that. I wondered if he
even knew that the satellites were back up.

Mom frowned. "Do you know where he is?"

"Of course not," I said. "Do you think I care? Call the sheriff's office, if you want to
know where he is."

Mom gave me one of her patented warning looks. "Michael—"

"He let Bobo out," I said. "You know he did. He did it on purpose, just like all the
other times. Do you think I care where the fuck he is?"

****

"I'm going to go call Letty," Mom said.

David hated Bobo the minute we got him. He was my tenth birthday present from
Mom and Dad. The four of us went to the pet store to pick him out, but when David
saw the kittens, he just wrinkled his nose and backed up a few feet. David was
always doing things like that, trying to be cool by pretending he couldn't stand the
rest of us.

David and I used to be friends, when we were younger. We played catch and rode
our bikes and dug around in the dirt pretending we were gold miners, and once
David even pulled me out of the way of a rattlesnake, because I didn't recognize the
funny noise in the bushes and had gone to see what it was. I was six then, and David
was ten. I'll never forget how pale he was after he yanked me away from the rattling,
how scared he looked when he yelled at me never, ever to do that again.

The four-year difference didn't matter back then, except that it meant David knew a
lot more than I did. But once he got into high school, David didn't want anything to
do with any of us, especially his little brother. And all of a sudden, he didn't seem so
smart to me any more, even though he thought he was smarter than shit.

I named my new kitten Bobcat, because he had that tawny coat and little tufts on his
ears. His name got shortened to Bobo pretty quickly, though, and that's what we
always called him—everybody except David, who called him "Hairball". By the time
Dad died, Bobo was a really big cat: fifteen pounds, anyway, which was some
comfort when David started "accidentally" letting Bobo out of the house. I figured