The problem was that Claire really loved school. Loved books, and reading, and learning things - okay, not calculus, but pretty much everything else. Physics. What normal girl loved physics? Abnormal ones. Ones who were not ever going to be hot. And face it, being hot? That was what life was all about. As Monica had proved, when the world had wobbled off its axis for a few seconds to notice Claire, and then wobbled right back to revolve around the pretty ones. It wasn't fair. She'd dived in and worked her ass off through high school. Graduated with a perfect 4.0, scored high enough on the tests to qualify for admission to the great schools, the legendary schools, the ones where being a brainiac mutant girl-freak wasn't necessarily a downside. (Except that, of course, at those schools, there were probably hot tall leggy brainiac mutant girl-freaks.) Didn't matter.
Mom and Dad had taken one look at the stack of enthusiastic thumbs-up replies from universities like MIT and Caltech and Yale, and clamped down hard. No way was their sixteen-year-old daughter (nearly seventeen, she kept insisting, although it wasn't really true) going to run off three thousand miles to go to school. At least not at first. (Claire had tried, unsuccessfully, to get across the concept that if anything would kill her budding academic career worse than being a transfer student at one of those places, it was being a transfer student from Texas Prairie University. Otherwise known as TPEwwwwwww.)
So here she was, stuck on the crappy top floor of a crappy dorm in a crappy school where eighty percent of the students transferred after the first two years - or dropped out - and the Monickettes were stealing her wet laundry and dumping it down the trash chute, all because Monica couldn't be bothered to know anything about one of the world wars big enough to rate a Roman numeral.
But it isn't fair! something in her howled. I had a plan! An actual plan! Monica slept late, and Claire had gotten up early just to do laundry while all the party crowd was comatose and the studious crowd was off to classes. She'd thought she could leave it for a couple of minutes to grab her shower - another scary experience - and she'd never even thought about anybody doing something so incredibly low.
As she bit back her sobs, she noticed - again - how quiet it was up here. Creepy and deserted, with half the girls deep asleep and the other half gone. Even when it was crowded and buzzing, the dorm was creepy, though. Old, decrepit, full of shadows and corners and places mean girls could lurk. In fact, that summed up the whole town. Morganville was small and old and dusty, full of creepy little oddities. Like the fact that the streetlights worked only half the time, and they were too far apart when they did. Like the way the people in the local campus stores seemed too happy. Desperately happy. Like the fact that the whole town, despite the dust, was clean - no trash, no graffiti, nobody begging for spare change in alleyways. Weird.
She could almost hear her mother saying: "Honey, it's just that you're in a strange place. It'll get better. You'll just have to try harder." Mom always said things like that, and Claire had always done her best to hide how hard it was to follow that advice. Well. Nothing to do but try to get her stuff back.
Słownictwo
- wobble - trząść się
- axis - oś
- leggy - długonogi
- clamed down - podjąć zdecydowane kroki
- howled - ryczeć
- comatose - otumaniony
- sobs - łkanie, szloch
- decript - zgrzybiały
- lurk - czaić się
- oddities - ciekawostki
Pytania
- Put sentences in the right order.
a) Claire's frustration.
b) Acceptable distance between Claire's parents house and school.
c) Claire reminded her mother's advice.
d) Claire description.
e) School description.
f) Claire chose time to do washing. - True or false?
a) Claire wanted to study near family house. T F
b) The school looks horrible. T F
c) It's not easy for Claire to follow her mother advice. T F
d) Claire's favorite subject is math. T F
e) Claire gets up late to do laundry. T F - Should parents decide where their children study?
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