Rabbit and Robot. Andrew Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ things like Cager Messer doesn’t like girls, as it turns out; or, Cager tried to force me to have sex with him, and then he got scared when I told him I wanted to, or dumb shit like that. Whatever. The truth is, I broke up with Katie St. Romaine because how could a guy like me trust anyone who was on my dad’s payroll?

      But for the record, and now, in light of me being stuck up here on the Tennessee, I do sincerely regret having broken up with her, and especially not having sex.

      No one wants to die a virgin, unless you really, really believe in God, and, well . . . whatever.

      I pulverized my Woz tablets into a small mound of blue powder at the edge of the game field while Paula finished fixing Billy’s hair. She was right. Billy Hinman did look good with his hair combed back, but Billy was exceptionally handsome anyway. He would have looked good if she shaved him bald. Some guys get all the breaks. And they’re the ones who generally throw most of those breaks away, too.

      I snorted the Woz.

      I sighed.

      “That’s too much, Cager,” Billy said. “You’re going to get sick and puke in the car going home.”

      Billy put his arm around me and hugged me close. I knew what he was trying to do. Distraction.

      I said, “I’m sorry in advance if I puke in Rowan’s car, Billy. You know I love you.”

      And that’s about how thrilling our real-kids parties got. Kids got their hair combed, or ended up dressed in new outfits, or had to give away something they liked as a sacrifice to one of the others until our next session of Hocus Pocus.

      Also, I passed out, unconscious on the couch beside Billy and Justin Pickett. So I was in a terrible mood, and physically unmanageable, when Billy tried to wake me up and take me to Rowan, who’d been waiting in the car for us for the past five hours.

      Mrs. Jordan was disappointed. Nobody got what they wanted that day, I suppose.

      “Sometimes you’re disgusting,” Billy said.

      He could say stuff like that to me. I wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else, though.

      And I said, “And the rest of the time, when I’m not disgusting, what am I?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Fabulous?”

      “Whatever.”

      I leaned all my weight onto Billy’s shoulder. He nearly fell over.

      “I need to pee before we go,” I said. “Come with me and hold me up, Bill, so I don’t bust my head open.”

      “No.”

      “What do you think I could do to get Cager off this shit, Rowan?” Billy asked from the backseat.

      I sat right next to Billy Hinman. He knew I was awake. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep any secrets from me.

      “You should get hacked up with me sometime, Billy. Rowan too. That would be fun,” I said.

      “No,” Billy answered.

      Rowan drove. He said, “Perhaps a birthday vacation is in order. Maybe that would help. You know, take some time away. Take Cager up on the Tennessee with you.”

      My father’s ship the Tennessee was as big as a midwestern city, staffed by hundreds of v.4 cogs, and affordable only to people like us—or the people who ran the government and military.

      “Isn’t that the one that got all filled with shit, and the people on board got sick because they had other people’s shit all over themselves and in their food and shit?” Billy asked.

      One of my father’s first lunar cruise ships, the Kansas, had a minor “incident,” as Mr. Messer liked to call it. It was actually not minor. The toilet systems reversed, spewing tons and tons of shit and other stuff that human beings put in toilets back out into every room and every deck. People got very sick, and a few dozen actually died. Also, nobody wanted to help the ones who were transported back to Earth. Nobody likes to touch someone who’s puking and covered in other people’s shit.

      I said, “No. That was the Kansas. The Kansas was the one that was full of shit. They fixed it, though. Well, they didn’t fix it, really. They just sailed it into the sun.”

      “Sounds like a reasonable way to clean up a bunch of shit,” Billy said.

      “Mr. Messer likes simple solutions.”

      I called my father Mr. Messer. I said, “Nobody would have gone on it after the shit thing. That’s why they built the Tennessee. No shit problems, so far.”

      Actually, the Tennessee didn’t have any glitches yet because it was new and it had never carried any human passengers besides the few coders who’d gotten it online and powered up. I’d visited it one time, before it was fully operational.

      Billy Hinman stretched out in the seat, extending his legs over to my side, so our feet touched. Billy Hinman was always horny. I kicked him.

      He said, “Well, you’d never get me up on one of those shit things. Cruises are what old people do right before they die. Trust me. I learned that.”

      Billy wasn’t entirely wrong about cruises either. When we were both ten years old, Billy and I went with his parents on an ocean cruise across the Pacific, from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was a very long cruise. Five octogenarians died before we got to Australia.

       Cheepa Yeep!

A Visit to the Hotel Kenmore

      I calculated that at about the same time Billy Hinman and I finished our fourth beer of the afternoon, the twenty-eighth war started.

      Twenty-eight!

      And it was my sixteenth birthday, too.

      Like Charlie Greenwell told us, wars don’t just fight themselves.

      Bonks were on the move, and this time the boys got to stay close to home. During beer four—or possibly five for Billy—the Canadian Navy sailed across Lake Erie and pounded the shores of Ohio and Pennsylvania with artillery.

      Canada was really mad at us. They had their reasons, I’m sure.

      Not too many people cared about it, outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that is, but the event did provide an opportunity for some undeployed bonks to get to work.

      “We should leave this shithole,” Billy said.

      We drank beer in Mr. Messer’s attic office. Well, to be honest, Billy Hinman was doing most of the drinking. I did have some beer, though, just because it was the right thing to do, us being best friends, and it being my birthday and all. Of course Rowan was in on Billy’s conspiracy—he got the beer for us—but Billy Hinman was convinced that in drinking beer I’d finally grown some balls, as he put it, СКАЧАТЬ