Название | Playlist for the Dead |
---|---|
Автор произведения | Michelle Falkoff |
Жанр | Детская проза |
Серия | |
Издательство | Детская проза |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 9780008110673 |
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
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Copyright © Michelle Falkoff 2015
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015
Michelle Falkoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008110666
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008110673
Version: 2014-11-26
For Erik, in memory
Contents
ALL MY YEARS of watching TV made me think it was possible you could find a dead body and not know it until you turned the person over and found the bullet hole or stab wound or whatever. And I guess in some ways that was right—Hayden was lying under the covers, tangled up in a bunch of his lame-ass Star Wars sheets (how old were we, anyway?), just like he always was when I slept at his house.
Hayden had always been a hard sleeper; sometimes I had to practically roll him out of bed to get him to wake up. Which wasn’t easy—he was short and kind of round, and while I’m a lot taller, I’m more of a string bean kind of guy, and when he was out cold he was hard to move. When I saw him lying there I sighed, trying to figure out how to incorporate the apology from the night before, the apology I’d come over to give him, with the apology for dumping him out of bed onto the floor.
The sound of my sigh seemed loud to me, though, and it took me a minute to figure out why: Hayden wasn’t snoring. Hayden always snored. My mom, who’s a nurse, thought he had sleep apnea; the sound of his buzzing made it all the way down the hall to her room when he stayed at my house. She kept trying to get him to talk to his mom about getting some kind of mask that would help, but I knew that would never happen. Hayden didn’t talk to his mom unless he absolutely had to, and he was even less likely to ask his dad.
The silence in the room started to freak me out. I kept trying to convince myself it was nothing, that Hayden had just found a good position to sleep in that quieted his steady drone or something, but that would have been some kind of minor miracle, and even after five years of Hebrew school I didn’t really believe in miracles.
I gave his leg a little shove. “Hayden, come on.”
He didn’t move.
“Hayden, seriously. Wake up.”
Nothing. Not even a grunt.
I was just about to grab a stormtrooper’s head and pull down the sheets when I saw the empty vodka bottle on Hayden’s desk,