Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  She sat up, reached for the iPad again, and googled “treatment for MS.” There was a lot of information, stuff about vitamins and injections of hamster placentas and changes in diet. She clicked on a few links and ordered some massive jars of vitamins and green juice powder from Amazon, paying the extra $6.99 so it would arrive the next day.

  That was just the beginning. Now it was September and faking it had become almost second nature. The fridge was stocked with green juices, Stuart had changed all the lightbulbs to ones that mimicked rays of real sunlight, and the bedside table was laden with self-help books about coping and parenting with MS. They’d replaced the couch in the open-plan kitchen-living room with a queen-size bed where Mandy spent all her time. Teddy had started playing and reading to himself on the bed so he could be near her. Stuart bought fancy organic frozen meals at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. The three of them ate dinner and watched movies in the bed. It was nice. But Stuart thought she was deteriorating. He was alarmed. He kept reminding her to call the doctor to set up “another round of tests,” maybe get a second opinion. Pretty soon Mandy was going to have to decide whether to continue faking it, or pretend to try some new vitamins or experimental drug and make a miraculous recovery.

  The thing was, she’d already gotten so used to pretending, it had become real. The idea of attempting to do anything—walk to the corner deli for toilet paper, open the mail, pay the bills, attend to the Blind Mice fan page, shop online for new clothes for Teddy—just seemed exhausting. She had always been the “responsible adult” in their marriage, the one who made sure the bills and taxes were paid and filed, Teddy’s shots up-to-date, Stu’s fan mail in order. Now she used Post-its for toilet paper until Stu brought home more. The bills stacked up under the bed, unopened, and the late fees accumulated. The fans continued to post adoring stupid shit whether anyone responded or not. And when Stu took Ted for his checkup, even Dr. Goldberg said Ted’s short pants looked fine with long socks.

  Besides, she liked it. She liked pretending to have MS and staying in bed. It didn’t feel like she was doing nothing. It felt like she was doing something earned and deserved. She was resting.

  * * *

  Breathless, Peaches returned from Key Food. “They didn’t have Pantene, but Suave is just as good.” She set down a plastic shopping bag containing three bottles of conditioner, a family-size box of Cheez-Its, and two cans of Dr Pepper. “I’m afraid you’re going to smell like coconuts for a while. Sorry, it was the only white conditioner they had.” She cracked open one of the cans and offered it to him. “I got us a snack too. I couldn’t resist.”

  Stuart put the soda can down on top of her desk. He hadn’t moved from her swivel chair since she’d left. Knowing he was infested with lice had immobilized him. He watched her tear open the box of Cheez-Its.

  “Love these things.” She stuffed a handful into her mouth and offered the box to him. “Please, take them away from me.”

  “Sorry.” Stuart held up his hand. “Not to sound like a total asshole, but I’m trying to only eat greens and drink fruit juices today. Mandy and I are trying to eat healthier.” The greens and fruit juice cleanse had been his idea, after reading some WebMD article about how the body absorbs vitamins better after a detox. He wasn’t sure he could make it all day, and he was pretty sure Mandy would cheat, but right now he was kind of digging the hollow feeling in his gut.

  Starve myself with fruits and veggies,

  Pants hang large, don’t give me wedgies!

  “Yours is a worthier soul than mine.” Peaches threw back another handful of Cheez-Its and tossed the box aside. “Okay.” She pushed her hair behind her ears, hoping the electric-orange Cheez-It residue stuck to her teeth wasn’t too unattractive. “This is going to be sort of messy.” She opened the door to the office closet. Mop. Bucket. Disposable thermometers. Tongue depressors. Ice packs. Paper towels. “I just wish I had some real towels.”

  Stuart looked down at his T-shirt. He didn’t mind getting conditioner on it, but it might put the nurse at ease if he wasn’t wearing it. He pulled the shirt off over his head. “Does this help?”

  Oh yes. Peaches tried not to stare, but it was useless. For someone with such a boyish face and skinny arms, Stuart Little had a very manly chest, with less hair on it than she would’ve thought, and no middle-aged paunch at all. His belly was concave.

  “Good idea. So helpful. Thank you. That’s great. Let’s get started.”

  Stuart swiveled around in the chair. Peaches retrieved a bottle of Suave Tropical Coconut conditioner and a stack of white paper towels. She tossed the paper towels on her desk and stood over him, holding the bottle of conditioner aloft.

  “I’m going to squirt a whole bunch of this stuff onto your head and comb through it. I’ll wipe the excess off on a paper towel. Hopefully we’ll be able to see what we’re getting. And hopefully we’ll get them all.”

  Stuart took a deep, shuddering breath. “Go for it.”

  Peaches popped open the cap, turned the conditioner upside down, and squeezed, ignoring the embarrassing farting and sucking sounds the bottle made as the thick white stuff oozed all over Stuart Little’s head. She put the bottle down and began to rub the conditioner into his scalp with her fingertips.

  “Run away, little fuckers,” she said as she picked up the lice comb. “Prepare to die.”

  Stuart closed his eyes once more and shivered. “I just want them off me.”

  Peaches dragged the comb through a section of hair. Conditioner piled up and oozed off the comb, dropping onto his shoulders in clumps, like wet snow. She swiped at them with a paper towel. “Sorry. Told you it was messy.”

  “Probably should’ve gone with a professional lice lady,” Stuart joked.

  Peaches snorted. Emboldened, she drew the comb through another section of hair, letting the excess conditioner ooze down the back of Stuart’s neck, over the slope of his bare shoulder blades, and onto the floor.

  She frowned as she combed through another section. “I’m not finding anything. Maybe they’re all hiding in one spot, or maybe you only had the one. Or maybe I was just seeing things before and you never had any at all.”

  “Keep going,” Stuart murmured. “It actually feels good.”

  Peaches smiled and shook her head. Why had she not thought to prop her iPhone in the corner and video this? Not that she wanted to post it on social media or anything, but for her own personal use.

  “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” she said. “Some kid is going to come down here with a fever, wanting to go home, and I’m going to be up to my elbows in conditioner.” And you with your shirt off, she almost added, but didn’t, because it had just occurred to her that maybe what they were doing was against school policy. It was very possible that she was breaking some code of staff conduct listed in a booklet she’d been given on her first day of work but had never read.

  “It smells great.” Stuart rocked the swivel chair gently from side to side. He felt like he was on vacation.

  The first sign of Mandy’s condition was back in late June. They were watching Saturday Night Live and she said, “My legs have felt weird all day, like my feet aren’t connected right. They keep falling asleep.” Stuart forgot all about it until the next weekend, when he’d planned to bike around Governors Island with Teddy on his new BMX bike. Mandy said she couldn’t because she was tired. Then on Monday she said she couldn’t walk Teddy to his first day at Little Mushrooms day camp. She went back to bed and stayed there. A week later she went to the doctor, and after that it was like she had a new job, but her job was taking vitamins and sleeping. Even when she was awake, she rarely got out of bed.

  Realistically, though, it wasn’t that much of a change. Mandy had always been beautiful, but lazy. She had always preferred watching television in sweatpants to getting dressed and going out. Now she had the perfect excuse not to go anywhere or do anything. She was sick.

  Back when they were in middle school, Mandy Marzul
li had been the first one to develop. In tenth grade, her braces came off and she started modeling. At sixteen she made the cover of the “School’s Out” issue of Seventeen magazine, wearing a white bikini on a beach in Montauk. Mandy was a junior and Stuart was a senior. Getting together had seemed sort of obvious. Mandy just hung around after one of his concerts and handed him a beer. Stuart took the beer and kissed her, and from then on, they were a couple. They walked out of school every day holding hands. Mandy didn’t even finish high school. She went on the road with the Blind Mice, traveling everywhere, drinking a lot and not getting much sleep, taking exotic vacations. It was a whirlwind. Then, at twenty-five she got pregnant. A year after Teddy was born they got married and the band broke up. They were both Brooklyn-born, he from Windsor Terrace and she from Bay Ridge, but they’d bought a place in Cobble Hill because the elementary school was supposed to be good and it looked like a nice place to grow up. Stuart started the same job he had now, and Mandy hung out with Teddy and watched TV.

  A photograph was taped messily to the wall behind Nurse Peaches’ desk. It was a picture of her playing the drums, her reddish-blond hair pulled up in a 1960s beehive hairdo, a giant grin on her red-lipsticked lips. She looked awesome.

  “You play the drums?” Stuart demanded.

  “Do I play the drums,” Peaches repeated. She dragged the comb through his hair with rapid, jerky strokes. “I do sometimes, yes. At this crazy bar no one ever goes into. I put on music and play along on the drums. It’s pretty lame, but also sort of fun.”

  “I need to check it out.”

  “No, you don’t.” Peaches hadn’t yet owned up to the fact that she knew who he was. Now was her chance. “You’re famous. And I’m really not that good.”

  Chapter 2

  Latin was Shy Clarke’s new favorite subject. She’d only started last year, and she’d hated it, but lately she couldn’t wait for Latin class.

  “Latin is a dead language,” her mother, Wendy, insisted. “You should be taking Mandarin. It’s the language of the future, whether we like it or not. That’s why all the private schools are offering it.”

  But her father had lobbied for Latin. Shy muddled through the first year, feeling a little insane for trying to learn a language no one spoke. She’d thought about switching to Mandarin. Now she was so glad she hadn’t. Second-year Latin at Phinney Collegiate was taught by Mr. Streko. And okay, yes, he had a mustache, which sometimes had bits of dried cappuccino foam in it, and he wore the same light gray V-neck sweater, which also sometimes had bits of food and cat hair on it, almost every day. He had tattoos on his forearms that she couldn’t quite make out because his hair was so thick and dark. But he was passionate about Latin—the other students rolled their eyes at him—so passionate, Shy had begun to feel passionate about it too.

  She’d hated her new school from the moment she started there last year. The kids rolled their eyes at her, too. They rolled their eyes at her Gucci sneakers, a spare pair her mother had brought home for her from the fashion closet at work. They rolled their eyes when she didn’t understand the people who worked at Just Salad when she attempted to eat out for lunch—what in bloody hell was Buffalo chicken? They rolled their eyes when she didn’t know how to play basketball or volleyball. They rolled their eyes when she asked where she could get a cup of tea. Now, a year later, Mr. Streko had changed all that. She felt like a rare butterfly, shedding her cocoon in his classroom.

  Today, Latin was just before lunch. They were attempting to translate Ovid’s Amores—poems about love.

  “Sin, sin, sin—who has it?” Mr. Streko demanded, his brown eyes flecked with bright orange light, his fuzzy black mustache doing that sad and sexy thing where it went down over the corners of his mouth. Shy wondered if he maintained his mustache on his own or if he had weekly appointments at the barber. “This is a good one,” he prompted. “Remember this one on Valentine’s Day.”

  “ ‘I can’t live either without you or with you,’ ” Shy translated, her long, frail body trembling with the effort it took to keep her voice normal and her eyes disinterested.

  “Yes!” Mr. Streko beamed at her with his straight, pearlescent teeth and perfectly curled black eyelashes, shooting out arrows of love that bullseyed her heart, almost knocking her out of her chair.

  “For tomorrow, translate the next four lines. Try to use your hearts and minds rather than your dictionaries. Remember, it’s poetry, so it has an emotional logic rather than a literal logic.”

  No other teacher said things like that. No one did. She could have listened to him for hours. But class was over. The other students were already packing up. Shy put her books into her backpack slowly. She planned to follow Mr. Streko and see what he did at lunchtime, if she could find a way to do it inconspicuously. She also wanted to get the hell out of the building while her mom was there.

  The meeting with the principal and Shy’s teachers wasn’t for another fifteen minutes, but Shy could already hear her mother’s voice echoing down the hallway, repeating the same diatribe she’d overheard last night while she was brushing her teeth.

  “What do you think she does all afternoon? Other girls play on teams or go to dance classes. She isn’t interested in anything. And she doesn’t ‘hang out’ with anyone. I’m not sure what that means, but isn’t this the age when you’re supposed to want to ‘hang out’? She only eats bread and Coke. I tried to eat like her for a day and I had to lie down. She’s so thin. I just wish she had interests.”

  Shy didn’t hate her mother exactly. She hated this side of her—the meddling, judging, overinvested, insecure side that thought her daughter’s grades, looks, behavior, and number of friends somehow reflected her capability as a mother. Why did she care so much? It was impossibly irritating.

  Mr. Streko strode down the hall and disappeared into the Latin office. Shy was about to rethink her plan when he emerged again, wearing a green down vest and round, mirrored sunglasses. He was going out.

  Walking down Court Street, it was easy to pretend she wasn’t following him. He paused outside of Starbucks, but there was a line, so he moved on. He seemed to consider going into the pizzeria, where there was also a line, then looked at his watch and carried on. He walked all the way to Atlantic Avenue and waited to cross at the light. Juniors and seniors were allowed out at lunchtime, but Shy never went this far, preferring to nurse a Coke alone on a random stoop. He was walking in the direction of Cobble Hill and home.

  Just past the Trader Joe’s, he turned in and pulled open a door. It was Chipotle, the Mexican fast-food place. Shy had never been inside. Should she go in and risk a face-to-face exchange? Would he address her in Latin, the way he sometimes did in class?“Salve, Shy Clarke.”

  And what would they talk about? Poetry? Emotional logic?

  She couldn’t do it. Instead, she darted into Trader Joe’s to buy a demi baguette and whatever the Trader Joe’s version of Coke was. The huge store was busy and crowded, the line even longer than at Starbucks. She pulled out her phone to check the time. Her mother’s meeting was just getting started. After lunch she had American history, Algebra II, and physics—all of her very worst subjects, taught by teachers who would most certainly not leave her to space out at the back of the classroom now that her mother had told them how clever she was and how she was wasting her potential. School’s over, she decided. She was almost home anyway. She put back the baguette and ducked outside again.

  “Salve, Shy Clarke,” Mr. Streko greeted her, his Chipotle bag clutched in his fist. “Grabbing lunch?”

  “I—I. Um,” Shy stammered. She raised her hand in greeting. “Salve, Mr. Streko.” Show me your tattoos. Take me away from here. I can’t live either with you or without you.

  He grinned in reply, suddenly seeming very young and hip outside the confines of the classroom. He probably played guitar and surfed and ate in those outdoor pop-up barbecue restaurants near the Gowanus Canal with dumb names like Pig Party and Cow Town. He probably had a be
autiful twenty-three-year-old girlfriend with a perfect body and amazing hair, piercings in all the right places, and even more tattoos.

  “Wanna walk back to school with me?” he offered.

  Shy shook her head. “I’m actually going home. I’m… um… not feeling that well.”

  The corners of Mr. Streko’s expressive mouth turned down in sympathy, his black mustache glinting sexily in the bright sun. He patted her on the shoulder and Shy flinched. He’d never touched her before. Was her face red? Could he tell how nervous and pathetic she was?

  “Bummer. Well, get some rest and feel better quick, okay?” He raised the brown paper Chipotle bag in his hand. “Think it’s rude to eat a burrito in a meeting?”

  Shy shrugged her shoulders and smiled, embarrassed that he’d asked for her opinion on an issue of such grown-up, professional importance and embarrassed that he was most likely meeting her mother.

  “Ita est vita,” Mr. Streko said, which was the Latin equivalent of c’est la vie. He said it all the time in class when the students moaned about an upcoming quiz or too much homework. “I get weird when I’m hungry.” He chuckled and Shy half smiled back. “Sometimes when I get weird I post dorky Latin quotes on Twitter.”

  Shy stared at him stoically. She wasn’t on Twitter, but in about thirty seconds she would be, just as soon as they parted ways.

  “See ya,” Mr. Streko called, striding away to make the light.

  His Twitter feed was long and adorable, filled with Latin quotes and links to pictures of his enormously fat black cat in comical situations. In one of the pictures the cat was asleep on its back on Mr. Streko’s chest—his bare, muscly, elaborately tattooed, very hairy chest! It was enough to send Shy crashing into a lamppost.

  “Sorry,” she apologized to the inanimate object and kept walking. Still staring at her phone, she continued down Court Street to Kane, then onto Strong Place and home.