"Stephen King. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon." - читать интересную книгу автора

and brother paused in their oh-so-interesting argument, looking behind them
to see how sis was doing, and saw a strange man and woman instead, they
might be worried about her.
Good! Give them something else to think about for a few minutes.
Something besides themselves.
The trick, her mother had told her on that better day in the woods two
years ago, wasn't going outdoors-girls could do that every bit as well as
boys-but to do it without soaking your clothes.
Trisha held onto the conveniently jutting branch of a nearby pine,
bent her knees, then reached between her legs with her free hand, yanking
her pants and her underwear forward and out of the firing line. For a
moment nothing happened-wasn't that just typical-and Trish sighed. A
mosquito whined bloodthirstily around her left ear, and she had no hand
free with which to slap at it.
"Oh waterless cookware!" she said angrily, but it was funny, really
quite deliciously stupid and funny, and she began to laugh. As soon as she
started laughing she started peeing. When she was done she looked around
dubiously for something to blot with and decided-once more it was her
father's phrase-not to push her luck. She gave her tail a little shake (as
if that would really do any good) and then yanked up her pants. When the
mosquito buzzed the side of her face again, she slapped it briskly and
looked with satisfaction at the small bloody smear in the cup of her palm.
"Thought I was unloaded, partner, didn't you?" she said.
Trisha turned back toward the slope, and then turned around again as
the worst idea of her life came to her. This idea was to go forward instead
of backtracking to the Kezar Notch trail. The paths had forked in a Y; she
would simply walk across the gap and rejoin the main trail. Piece of cake.
There was no chance of getting lost, because she could hear the voices of
the other hikers so clearly. There was really no chance of getting lost at
all.


Second Inning

THE WEST SIDE of the ravine in which Trisha had taken her rest-stop
was considerably steeper than the side she had come down. She climbed it
with the aid of several trees, got to the top, and headed over more even
ground in the direction the voices had come from. There was a lot of
underbrush, though, and she swerved around several thorny, close-packed
patches of it. At each swerve she kept her eyes pointed in the direction of
the main trail. She walked in this fashion for ten minutes or so, then
stopped. In that tender place between her chest and her stomach, the place
where all the body's wires seemed to come together in a clump, she felt the
first minnowy flutter of disquiet. Shouldn't she have come to the North
Conway branch of the Appalachian Trail by now? It certainly seemed so; she
hadn't gone far down the Kezar Notch branch, probably not more than fifty
paces (surely no more than sixty, seventy at the very most), and so the gap
between the two diverging arms of the Y couldn't be very big, could it?
She listened for voices on the main trail, but now the woods were
silent. Well, that wasn't true. She could hear the sough of the wind