“That’s great, Dad,” Shy complained. “Thanks.” She wasn’t about to give them any information.
“It’s not my problem you’re ‘just talking’ to one of the known perpetrators of the playground fire. He’s an arsonist, which you probably think is sexy, in your twisted way. For all I know, you’re carrying his little arsonist child. I don’t mind, really. Girls far younger than you are getting married and raising children in some countries.”
“Ha!” Shy shouted.
“Settle down you two,” Wendy said jealously. Roy and Shy could have these little I’m-only-pretending-to-hate-you-spats because they were so close. She and Shy never had spats. Shy’s older sisters had always been jealous of it too. “What do you mean he’s an arsonist?” She was having trouble processing all this information at once. Her brain was still hung up on the Latin teacher and his tattoos.
“Never mind,” Shy grumbled, glaring at her father as she began shaping the cookie dough into balls and placing them in neat rows on the trays. It was always easier to keep her mother a little bit in the dark. Now her dad had spoiled it.
“Did any of your teachers have tattoos?” Wendy asked Roy, and Shy was relieved.
He laughed. “None.”
Wendy was so good at compartmentalizing. She couldn’t be bothered about Shy’s possible boyfriend because she was focused on Shy’s crush on her Latin teacher, which was alarming, but perfectly harmless. Wendy was so capable, too. In a moment she’d be minding the clock, making sure the cookies weren’t burned. She never got so preoccupied with the unnecessary that she couldn’t function. Unlike himself. He hadn’t even gotten dressed yet and it was what, six o’clock? Meanwhile Wendy was running Fleurt. Before they were married, Wendy wrote a feature a day, supporting him through the writing of Yellow. She didn’t even insist on a big fuss of a wedding. They were both too busy. They did it at the Kensington and Chelsea registry office. It took fifteen minutes.
“Maybe you should take a pottery class instead,” Wendy told Shy.
“Instead of what?” Shy pointed at the oven and Wendy slid the trays in and set the timer on the microwave for eleven minutes.
“Table tennis.”
Shy clattered the mixing bowl into the sink and whirled around. “I’ve already signed up for it, Mum. I’m trying to get involved in things like you said. For college.”
“Did you know,” Roy interrupted, trying to dilute the tension, “that one of the best subjects to study at college as far as jobs and salary is pharmacology? The worst are education and social work, that sort of thing. There are too many of them and the pay is shit.”
He stopped talking. His wife and daughter were staring at him.
“I’ve become somewhat addicted to Google,” he admitted. “You can find everything on it. You just type in a question and loads of answers pop up.”
“Welcome to Earth.” Shy rolled her eyes and sucked the cookie dough off her fingers.
Roy rolled his eyes in response, a poor imitation. “I would never want to be your boyfriend.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Wendy watched the cookies spread and glisten in the heat, feeling left out in her own kitchen. Roy was completely absorbed with his new book. Shy was becoming a typical American teenager. They were both thoroughly stuck in.
“Pharmacology,” she repeated, and sipped her wine.
* * *
“Hey! Excuse me? That’s mine!”
Mandy froze. She knew if she put down the Farm to Front Door box it would be an admission of guilt. Instead, she clutched it to her chest and turned around to face her accuser, an auburn-haired man wearing a neatly ironed white shirt and navy-blue suit pants. Aside from the permanently wounded look in his sad eyes, he appeared to be the type of Cobble Hill resident who could afford to donate a few boxes of food to her cause.
“Um, I order from here all the time.” Mandy jutted out her chin in defiance. “I have a subscription. How else could I shop and make dinner for my family? I have MS.”
The man frowned as he approached her. He was tall but also sort of small. He peered at the box. “Yes, but I’m pretty sure the label says T. Paulsen. That’s me.”
Mandy squinted at the label, shifting into clueless mode. “Oh yeah.” She put down the box. “Sorry. Wow, what a screwup.”
T. Paulsen made no move to pick up the box. He shoved his hands into his suit pants pockets and looked over Mandy’s head, scanning the street with his wounded blue eyes. “Did my wife put you up to this? Elizabeth?”
Mandy was ready to go back inside. Scrutiny was not her thing. Neither was chatting on the street. Neither was feeling unkempt and dumpy next to a tall, skinny, well-dressed guy.
“Who?”
“Elizabeth Paulsen. The artist. She’s my wife.”
“Sorry. Don’t know her.”
“She’s close, I can feel it.”
As if things needed to get any weirder. Mandy did not enjoy conversing intimately with strangers.
“I was just picking up my dinner. Which turns out not to be my dinner. I better go call”—she glanced down at the box—“Farm to Front Door. Let them know they fucked up my order.”
T. Paulsen squinted at her. He flexed his fingers. “So this is not one of Elizabeth’s pranks?”
Go home, Crazypants. “Nope. I just got the wrong box. Sorry for the mixup.”
Mandy headed back down Kane Street. Never again would she round the corner for food boxes. She was only trying not to milk her direct neighbors dry. But they were never home and were quite possibly Russian spies. She could keep on milking indefinitely, helping out her country by starving the enemy.
“If you see her, tell her I’m cooking!” T. Paulsen shouted after her.
Mandy turned the corner, her sights already on the orange Full Plate truck with the nice driver, just pulling up in front of the house next door. Mandy had been enjoying Full Plate so much she’d even logged onto their site to write a five-star review: “I used to be scared to use the stove,” she wrote. “Your recipes are so easy and so, so good. The meal choices for next week look amazing too. Yum. Can’t wait to cook!”—Jodi, West Virginia
“They’re in the Bahamas!” she called to the driver. “I don’t know why they don’t just cancel.”
“Want it upstairs again?” he asked, like they were an old team and he knew the drill.
“Yes, please,” Mandy said. “You’re the best.”
Chapter 13
“This sucks,” Black Ryan complained. He leaned back against the bathroom door and gazed forlornly at the wet-toilet-paper-strewn floor. “It smells so bad.”
Liam had been hanging out with Black Ryan a lot recently. Both boys had pretty much the same take on what had happened in the schoolyard that night: Bruce was an asshole, and all of this was his fault. Bruce was the only one who really owed all those kids an apology, and he alone should be doing community service at the school to make up for it. But Bruce’s and Ryan’s parents had chipped in five thousand dollars apiece for repairs to the schoolyard so their sons wouldn’t have to clean toilets and could “choose their own” fake community service. Liam’s and Black Ryan’s parents weren’t about to cough up five thousand dollars. They wanted them to be punished. So here they were, cleaning the kindergarten boys’ bathroom.
“It smells like ass,” Liam said.
Black Ryan shook his head. “Not my ass.”
Liam turned off the hot-water tap and heaved the bucket of sudsy gray water out of the sink and onto the floor. He plunged the mop into the water and then thwacked it down on the tiles.
“Hey, you’re not going to mop without picking up all that paper, are you? That’s disgusting, man.”
Liam was sort of hoping that the toilet paper would just disintegrate into the water and disappear, but Black Ryan was already dutifully putting on a pair of blue rubber gloves. Liam dropped the mop and put on a pair too.
They began to scoop up the damp, dirty toilet paper and chuck it into the gar
bage.
“Oh, that’s nasty. That had streaks on it. Actual shit streaks,” Black Ryan moaned.
“Pigs,” Liam said. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask, do you mind when people call you Black Ryan? I mean, does it offend you?”
He’d been wondering this forever. Ever since he’d met Black Ryan in ninth grade homeroom and heard everyone, including Mr. Vonn, their homeroom teacher, call him Black Ryan.
“They call me that?”
Liam glanced at him in shock. He had to know. He had to have heard it.
Black Ryan smirked. “I’m joking, you idiot. They call me that to my face. I’m pretty sure you’ve called me that to my face.”
Liam picked up a particularly nasty wad of brown paper towels, gum, and hair. “But does it bother you?”
Black Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s confusing. Why not call the other Ryan White Ryan, right? And me just Ryan? Is Ryan a white name that I appropriated, so just to clarify things let’s call me Black Ryan?”
Okay, so it did bother him. And he’d thought about it a lot.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s stupid.” Liam pushed the full bucket out of the way with the toe of his sneaker. “From now on I’m just calling you Ryan.”
“Whatever,” Ryan said. “Hey, after this do you want to get pizza? I can’t really think about food right now, but I know I’m hungry.”
Liam was supposed to report to his mom after he finished in the bathrooms.
“Yeah, sure. I have to meet my mom first though. She’s the nurse here, remember?”
Ryan grinned. “Oh, I remember. Your mom is cool, but she hates us. She wants us to lick this bathroom clean.”
Liam laughed. “She does. She totally does.”
When he’d shown his mom the crappy dark video of Bruce attempting to slide down the schoolyard slide through a puddle of flaming vodka, all she’d said was, “Idiots.”
“My mom is always talking about how nothing bad has ever happened to me. Like, we didn’t have to relocate to a refugee camp where I had to walk ten miles barefoot through the snow to learn math. She’s hoping this is the thing that will make me not take my ‘privilege’ for granted.”
Ryan chucked a tiny stray SpongeBob sock into the trash. “Your mom and my mom sound like they’re both smoking the same hookah. Actually, she calls me Black Ryan sometimes too, kind of making fun of our school and all the assholes who go there. She’ll be like, ‘Time to set the table, Black Ryan,’ when I’m on PlayStation too long, or, ‘Black Ryan, did you read your Dickens?’ My dad would not think it’s funny at all, but he doesn’t get to have an opinion because he doesn’t even live here.”
Liam knew Ryan’s parents were divorced. His dad lived in Florida.
“I told my mom it’s not funny, it’s offensive. Like, maybe if I came up with the name myself it’d be funny and empowering, but I didn’t.”
“Yeah.” Liam was sorry the whole Black Ryan thing was even a thing.
“Okay, I’m going to start mopping now, so we can get out of here.” Ryan retrieved the soaking-wet mop from the bucket of gray sudsy water and slapped it down on the grimy tiles. “There’s a Sublime drop tonight. Like a Silenciaga collaboration?”
Liam had heard other kids at school talk about these drops, but he’d never been.
“Yeah, I was hoping to get there and spend some of my Strategizer money,” he said. His mom was always insinuating that he looked like a math nerd, and now that he was hanging out with Shy he wanted to dress better. After all, she wore Gucci.
Ryan whistled. “How much money have you made? That shit costs like nine hundred dollars for one hoodie, you know that, right? When I buy stuff I have to put it on my housekeeper’s credit card and beg my mom to pay her back. She gets so mad. It’s fine though. It’s worth it.”
Liam blinked at the floor for a moment. My housekeeper’s credit card? It seemed like everyone at his school was rich except for him. Ryan did have some really cool clothes though. “Maybe I’ll just get a belt or a beanie or something.”
Ryan grabbed the jumbo aerosol can of Lysol. “I’m gonna spray the shit out of the toilets and flush and pray they don’t overflow. At least it’ll smell better in here.”
Liam shook his head as he swirled soapy gray water over the brown linoleum floor. “Can’t believe we have to do this ’til December.”
Ryan flushed all three toilets and wheeled the cleaning cart out of the bathroom. Liam backed out after him, mopping as he went. The bathroom was practically gleaming. As much as he complained about it, he actually enjoyed seeing how much better they’d made it.
“Boys?” His mom’s voice echoed down the school hallway.
Liam swung around, mop in hand.
She shot him her favorite new look of withering disdain. “You done already?”
Liam shrugged his shoulders. “I think we’re done.”
“We’re definitely done,” Ryan said.
“Well, do you have plans tonight?”
“Maybe.” Liam didn’t really want to explain the whole drop thing because she clearly didn’t think he deserved to do anything fun or interesting ever again.
“Whatever,” his mom responded.
It had been almost a month, but she was still so angry with him and his “entitled asshole friends” that she still wasn’t really speaking to him. Not like before.
“I offered for you to babysit Ted Little tonight, but his dad turned me down. Obviously he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for his son, who might be a tiny pyro, to hang out with a big pyro like you. He told me he already had a sitter, but I could tell he didn’t. Anyway, you can get your own dinner. I’m going out. Your dad has his music group tonight. I expect you to be in bed when I get home.”
“Okay,” Liam said, refusing to engage. It wasn’t like he didn’t feel bad. He’d confessed. He’d told her he felt bad. But she thought he needed to feel worse. “See you later, Mom.”
“Nice meeting you,” Ryan mumbled as they shuffled past her to put away the cleaning cart.
* * *
Peaches noticed the handwritten sign in the window of Monte that morning when she stopped by on her way to work: KARAOKE TONIGHT. 8 P.M.–.
Elizabeth was back.
She’d left a typically cryptic note for Peaches on the bar: Please invite friends and open up by 8. I’ll do the rest.
Dutifully, Peaches took a picture of the sign and sent it in separate texts to Stuart Little, Roy Clarke, and Dr. Conway.
Dr. Conway was the first to respond.
Fun! Let me know if you want me to bring anything ; )
Roy replied with a series of dollar signs, ampersands, and hashtags. Peaches wasn’t sure if he was trying to indicate expletives, as in, “Holy fucking shit!” or if he just didn’t know how to use his phone.
When his phone bleeped on the subway, Stuart took a screenshot of Peaches’ sign and texted it to Mandy. Mandy loved karaoke—not the singing so much, but watching other people make asses out of themselves. If Stuart got drunk enough, he would sing and make an ass out of himself too, which she especially enjoyed.
Mandy texted back a thumbs-up emoji and the words, if you can get Ted a sitter!
Stuart was just happy she was up for it. Mandy had crazy amounts of energy lately.
Almost immediately Peaches texted him with, Liam is available to babysit if you need him.
Stuart knew she meant well, but he couldn’t accept. Liam was a bad influence on Ted. Thanks, he texted back. Sitter situation already taken care of.
And for the rest of the day, he couldn’t concentrate on the cat food commercial he was composing for. He really wanted to go out tonight, and there were so many teenagers in the neighborhood. Surely one of them could hang out in the house while Ted—who was no trouble—ate chicken nuggets, played a game on the iPad, and went to bed.
He left work early to pick up Ted from the after-school program in the school gym. On their way home, he saw her.
Stuart
had seen her in the neighborhood many times, walking to school or grocery shopping with her father, the author Roy Clarke. She looked about sixteen or seventeen. A teenager who helped out her parents and was never late to school. She seemed pretty responsible. It didn’t seem that weird to follow her on their skateboards to the corner of Kane and Strong, grab his and Ted’s boards, and call out to her.
“Hi. Excuse me. You live around here, right? You’re Roy Clarke’s daughter?”
“Dad, why are you yelling at her?” Ted whined. He was always whiny after Hobby Horse at school. He missed the Strategizer.
“Shhh,” Stuart said and squeezed his shoulder.
The girl stopped and turned around. She had long legs like a baby giraffe, and she seemed to have trouble keeping her head up, making eye contact difficult. She was clearly not fully formed. But then again, neither was he, and he was thirty-six.
“I’m Stuart Little. This is Ted. He goes to PS 919, right here. Anyway, our sitter for tonight kind of didn’t work out, so I was wondering if maybe you would hang with Ted while we’re out? We won’t be far away and we won’t be out very late. Say, eight to eleven. Twenty dollars an hour?” Even though she was only a teenager, he thought he ought to offer something above minimum wage. He smiled a goofy, friendly, harmless dad smile. “I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name.”
She smiled then, not at him but at the neighborhood in general. “It’s Shy. Shy Clarke.” Her voice was low and her accent was very English. He hadn’t expected her to sound so English. “I can babysit for you. I just have to do my homework and check in with my parents.” She held out her long arm and impossibly long fingers. “Give me your phone. I’ll put in my number and you can text me the address.”
Obediently Stuart handed over his phone. She was weirdly direct. There wasn’t anything fake or pretentious about her. He liked that.
Shy wasn’t sure why she’d said yes. She’d never done any babysitting. Twenty dollars an hour seemed like a lot though, and she’d been in a weird mood ever since she and Liam had smoked his mother’s weed in the park. She felt restless, like she needed to be out of the house, away from her dad and his cheese toasties and cinnamon rolls and tea.
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