"Nancy Springer - Rock My Soul" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

Rock My Soul
by Nancy Springer

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Her secret slogan was, “I don’t get mad, I get even.” With this motto in mind she sat
pressing her bedroom phone’s redial button with grim per-sistence until she had
gone into a trance of spite and was startled when she actually got through.

“Dedication Hour, this is the Soul of Rock and Roll, hel-LO! Who are
YOU?”

It was the first time she had done this. She took a heartbeat to answer.
“Michelle.”

“Michelle. Well HEL-lo Mike. Does anybody ever call you Mike?”

“No.” She was sort of the class nerd, too inward, always thinking too much,
even though she had traded in her glasses on contacts. Who would call her Mike?

“Mickey? Shelley?”

“No.” Where did he get off making fun of her name? He didn’t even use his
own name on the air, just called himself the Soul.

“Just plain Michelle, huh?”

Plain was the word, all right. “Yes.”

He gave up on getting a reaction out of her. “Well, what can I do for you,
Michelle?”

“I want to make a hate dedication.”

“A hate dedication!” He pounced. “Oh, my goodness! How come? What has
somebody done to you, Michelle?”

“Well. . . .” Well, why not? Auto-matically she edited her speech to sound
more like a typical teenager and less like the geek she was. “There’s this guy, see,
and we were supposed to go to the junior prom tomorrow night. And I’ve got the
dress and everything . . . and today in the middle of the cafeteria he informs me he’s
going with his old girl-friend instead.”

“No kidding! Like, what a slimeball!”

“Yeah.” For the moment she let it go that the Soul of Rock and Roll was an
obnoxious deejay, his reaction felt so good to her. Though in fact she had not
managed to convey to him a quarter of the story. The boy who had broken her heart
was Robbie Diehl, a biker with a messed-up head and long bleached hair and a skull
painted on the back of his denim jacket, the only cool guy who had ever liked her.