An Unrehearsed Desire

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Lauren B. Davis. An Unrehearsed Desire

IT COULD BE SERIOUS

DIRTY MONEY

NICE GUY

SURPRISE

LAST CUP OF TEA WITH BEN

GESTURES

SNOW LIKE SILENCE

THE PRETTY

NEIGHBOURS

WINGS

AN UNREHEARSED DESIRE

FOR MARLENE, WHO BECAME A BEAR

AN INTERLUDE

IN THE MEMORY HOUSE

RAT MEDICINE

Отрывок из книги

The prickly sensation started in the back of Alice’s throat, just a tickle really, a sort of hot, dry spot that swallowing didn’t soothe. Oh, please, she thought, don’t let me be getting sick again. Alice got sick frequently, not enough to be branded a weirdo like Arthur Spivak, a penicillin-smelling boy in her class who her mother said was “nearly translucent with illness,” and whose pale temples were marbled with blue veins, but certainly Alice caught more than her fair share of colds and earaches and bouts of tonsillitis.

Alice was playing Mousetrap in Felicity Moreland’s rec room. A room you were supposed to be allowed to wreck, Alice thought, whenever she heard the word, although of course that wasn’t true at all. It was a dingy, chilly room with a gray, poured-concrete floor in the basement of the Moreland’s three-bedroom red-brick bungalow. There were metal poles in the middle of the room that Alice assumed held up the house, and earlier Felicity had hung upside down from one of them and dared Alice to do the same, but she’d said no, because she was afraid of falling and cracking her head open. What an idiot she’d look like if that happened. Felicity now rolled the dice and moved her mouse. She collected a piece of cheese.

.....

“No,” said Kathy.

The two girls stood up. Kathy was taller than Carol, but both their noses were perfectly pert and their teeth were straight. Kathy had red hair, as wavy as Carol’s was silken and straight. Even Kathy’s freckles were perfect.

.....