"Ransom, Candice F - Kobie Roberts 04 - Fourteen and Holding" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ransom Candice F)

Fourteen and Holding-Ransom, Candice F.
Chapter 1.
Certain things in life are inevitable. Like when you don't know the answer, the teacher is bound to call on you. Or when you go to the store in your rattiest clothes, and you haven't washed your hair in a week because you've had the flu, you run into the cutest boy in school.
It happens all the time. I know. I haven't lived fourteen years for nothing.
So it was inevitable that on the first day of my freshman year at W.T. Woodson, I woke up to discover a pimple on my forehead. Not any ordinary bump, either, but a great big shining red zit in the exact
center of my forehead.
"Oh, no!" I flew from the bathroom out to the kitchen where my mother was blearily cooking my father's breakfast.
"Look at my face!" I cried as I yanked open the refrigerator. "I've got to put something on it right away!" I began jerking bottles and jars out of the refrigerator. "Ice is supposed to make the swelling go down. And I read in Seventeen that lemon juice will take the redness out."
"If you add a little sugar you'll have lemonade," my father said, in what I thought was a poor attempt at humor, considering my whole high school future was at stake.
"Very funny. We don't have any lemons!" I shrieked. "Mom, what'll I do! Today is my first day of high school! I look like I'm wearing a miner's lamp!"
My mother set a plate of eggs and toast in front of my father. "Kobie, put that stuff back in the refrigerator before somebody trips. Let me see your face." She tilted my chin up to the light. "Why don't you dab a little of my foundation on that bump? That'll cut the glare, at least."
"You could always wear a paper bag over your head," my father suggested.
"Easy for you to talk," I said scornfully. "You don't have to go to work looking like a radio tower!"
"Kobie, don't go overboard," my mother warned. "What do you want for breakfast?"
"A Coke float. I'll fix it myself."
"Coke for breakfast? Do you want a face full of bumps?"
"It hardly matters now," I said, swinging on the refrigerator door. "I look awful, anyway."
"Eat something nutritious," my mother insisted.
"This is nutritious," I said, pouring soda into a tall glass. "Coke has lots of tiny little good-health bubbles. See? And everybody knows ice cream is loaded with vitamins." I added two ice cubes to tame the fizz and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
My mother shook her head as if I were completely beyond hope.
As I carried my breakfast drink back to my room, I heard her ask my father, "What am I going to do with that girl?"
"Well, she is in high school now," my father replied in a dubious tone.
In my room, I put a stack of 45's on my record player and got dressed. My first-day-of-school outfit was a far cry from the Ugliest Dress in the World I had had to wear on the first day of school the year before. The gray-blue corduroy miniskirt and matching Oxford cloth long-sleeved shirt was a little warm for September in Virginia-to be truthful, cellophane would have been cooler-but it was my best outfit. I was determined to make a good impression.
Next I struggled into the white vinyl boots my mother had ordered from Alden's
catalog. They were the cheap kind without a side zipper, and they were also a size too small, which meant I needed the assistance of a front-end loader to get them on.
The ice cream in my Coke float had melted into a grayish scum, just the way I liked it. I finished my drink, then went into the bathroom to work on my face. First I covered Mt. Rushmore with a Band-Aid, but that only drew attention to my forehead. I removed the Band-Aid and liberally applied my mother's Max Factor pancake makeup stick over the pimple. That cut the glare, all right. It looked like someone had lobbed a wad of clay at my forehead.
I wiped off the excess with toilet paper, combed my bangs over the spot, and practiced confident, there's-nothing-wrong-with-m7/-face expressions. When I had arranged my features into a mask of cool indifference, I collected my lunch money and my notebook, and headed out the door.
"Aren't you going to give me a kiss?" my mother asked, coming in from the kitchen. My father had already left for his job as foreman of the Grounds Department for Fairfax County schools. My mother looked a little sad, although I thought she'd be overjoyed to have me out of the house at last. All summer long she'd hovered around the calendar, counting the days till
September, and now she looked as if she had lost her best friend.
"Give me a kiss good-bye," she said again, as if I were going to Alaska.
"Mo-ther! I'm in high school!"
"You're never too old to kiss your mama."
I could see this was going to be one of my mother's difficult days. I pecked her cheek.
"My little girl's growing up," she said, standing back to look at me.
"Your little girl is going to miss the bus if she doesn't hurry." Actually, I didn't want my mother to notice I had helped myself to her eyebrow pencil while I was doctoring my face.
I waved to her as I went out the door, feeling a little like Stanley going off to search for Dr. Livingstone. Woodson High, here comes Kobie Roberts!
The bus was late and jam-packed. I found Gretchen shoehorned in the backseat beside J.C. Brown-she hadn't been able to get our usual seat, third from the front on the right.
"I was lucky to get a seat at all," she told me. "J.C., move and let Kobie sit down."
J.C. stared at me insolently. "Why should I?"
"Because she's a girl," Gretchen said, as if that fact wasn't immediately discernible. "You're supposed to give up seats for girls."
I leaned down and said in his ear, "J.C., if you don't get up and let me have that seat, I'll tell everybody in Woodson that you once wet your pants on the playground and lined your shorts with an old Popsicle wrapper so the teacher wouldn't find out."
He got up. Nothing like the power of blackmail to make a boy suddenly realize he's a gentleman, after all.
"I'm glad Woodson is so big," J.C. said as we changed places, "so I won't have to look at your mug, Kobie Roberts."
"Don't do me any favors." I sat down next to Gretchen.
Yet I could see J.C.'s point. I knew every single kid on the bus and had known them since first grade. We had all been together nearly nine years: six years at Centreville Elementary, then two years at Robert Frost Intermediate, and now we were starting high school. We knew who threw up on her third-grade teacher's shoes, knew who forgot his lines in the fourth-grade Christmas pageant and shouted them out when the play was over and the curtain was coming down, knew who got sent to the principal's office for popping milk cartons. Not to mention the Popsicle-wrapper incident.
At first it had been hard getting used to junior high, because our little Centreville group was only one of several grammar schools dumped into Frost. I felt lost and outnumbered. But now that I was going to high school, I really didn't want to drag my past behind me. I wanted a fresh start, especially after my disastrous eighth-grade year.
At least this year I had a few decent outfits to wear and also I was a whole year smarter. The only problem was that Gretchen wasn't going to high school with me.
Gretchen Farris has been my best friend since second grade. That year we were in different rooms, but because both second-grade classes had recess at the same time, we had noticed each other on the playground. One day our teachers made all the second-grade girls play "Ring Around the Rosie," or something equally cutesy and nauseating, while the second-grade boys got to have fun and kill one another on the monkey bars.
Gretchen and I were on opposite sides of the big circle. I was holding hands with Deborah Clark, a pale red-haired girl, and Laurie Alien, the teacher's pet. We skipped
around the circle, singing that stupid song until the line, "Ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN!" Instead of dropping to the pavement like a normal person, Deborah Clark keeled over like she'd been poleaxed, dragging me and Laurie Alien over on top of her. While I was struggling to get up, a puff of wind blew my dress over my head and everybody on the whole playground saw my slip.