"Lawrence Watt - Evans - One of the Boys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

of that might help, but I spent half my childhood throwing up. And as for sex, I haven’t even begun to
figure it out.“ His voice cracked slightly as he added, ”I don’t even know what the females of my species
look like!“

She stared, and took a step backward, almost stumbling over one of the hassocks. Those flat brown
eyes were locked on her own. He flexed his muscles, not like a man might, but like an animal dislodging
fleas, unthinkingly; and for the first time, she realized that those muscles moved in ways a man’s muscles
did not.

Or was that just the distortion of her vision? Everything had become nightmarish; she felt sick and
feverish.
He watched her. This was more than he’d told anyone, ever—he hadn’t even talked to his parents about
sex. He’d told the others, Red and Swift and the Amazon, that he was an alien, but he had never given
them any details. When the newspapers had reported he got his powers from outer space, he had never
denied it.

But until now, he had never really told anyone what that meant.

“We’re different species,” he said relentlessly. “We look alike, but that’s just a coincidence, or maybe
protective coloration, like those butterflies—monarchs and viceroys.”

“But then why…” she asked. “I mean, why are you a crimefighter? Why do you care about the rest of
us, if we aren’t the same species?”

“I don’t, really,” he admitted. “But I want to be human. Or at least, I want to fit in. I’m doing what a
human would do—aren’t I? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do, if you’ve got special powers? Be a
hero?”

She didn’t dare argue with him. She couldn’t keep her words straight, though. “I guess… but why do
you want to, if…”

He did the thing in his throat that corresponded to a sigh. “I may not be human,” he said, “but I get
lonely. I want a social life.”

She blinked, trying to clear the haze. “That’s a social life? Chasing crooks?”

“I’m one of the boys,” he said. “With Red Rover and Mr. Swift. And the cops, the Amazon, the Night
Man, the press people, even the mayor, they all talk to me, and I know what to say back.”

She was nearer the door, now, and the air seemed cleaner. She asked, “But couldn’t you, you know, get
to know your neighbors, go to parties, things like that? You have to go out hunting drug pushers to meet
people?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t work, having a regular social life. It’s too complicated. I don’t get the
jokes. I don’t pick up the signals. It’s all gray and blurry and hard to follow, there’s sex in everything,
and the food I can’t eat, and the body language I never learned to read. I tried. Believe me, I tried. But
my brain just isn’t wired the same way yours are; all the ways you people just naturally communicate
without words, things you take for granted, I don’t have.”

“So you chase crooks?” she croaked. It still didn’t seem to make sense to her.