“I’m a big admirer of your dad’s,” Stuart said.
She grunted, typing rapidly with her thumbs. Something about this dad and his mini-me son with their faded black skinny jeans, high-top sneakers, and matching skateboards made her feel a bit obnoxious.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to pretend you’ve read his books. No one has.” She thought of mentioning the fact that she had no babysitting experience whatsoever, but then decided it would be unprofessional. “I’m in there now.” She handed back his phone. “Under C for Clarke in your contacts.”
“So you’ll do it?” Stuart asked. “It’s kind of important. My wife has been sick and she doesn’t get out much, but she’s been feeling better so…”
“Sure.” She glanced down at the boy and tried to smile at him without being too creepy, but he was staring intently at a crack in the sidewalk and didn’t seem to be paying any attention at all.
“Great. Thanks so much. I’ll text you,” Stuart said and hauled Ted hurriedly away.
* * *
Roy was staring at his computer screen again. He hated when he did that. Sometimes he even nodded off. It was embarrassing. He felt so old and stupid.
“A Russian assassin on Mars,” he said aloud so that the pain of his humiliation would be even more acute. If only he could put on a hair suit and flog himself.
“Dad, I’m babysitting tonight!” Shy shouted when she came home from school. “They’re paying me loads of money!” She charged upstairs and slammed the door to the bathroom.
Roy continued to stare at his screen. Peaches would be at the karaoke thing. Peaches could help him. He hoped Wendy wouldn’t be too busy at work to come. She loved parties and going out and they never went anywhere anymore—which was entirely his fault. He reached for his phone.
There’s a fun-sounding gathering at a bar in the neighborhood tonight. Meet me there?
Chapter 14
The bar was unlocked. A karaoke machine with two microphones, a large screen for reading the lyrics, and two huge speakers stood beside the drum set. The wooden bar top gleamed and the whole place smelled of Murphy Oil Soap and something else Peaches couldn’t quite nail down. She checked the bathroom. The white porcelain toilet and sink were bleached clean. Ten individually wrapped rolls of fresh toilet paper were stacked on a shelf. The paper towel dispenser had been filled and the wastebasket emptied. Elizabeth had been busy.
Peaches’ relationship with Elizabeth and Monte began in August, when she was required to show up at the nurse’s office every day, even though the students would not be in attendance for almost a month. Once she’d ordered supplies and arranged her office, she had nothing to do except attend staff meetings and make copies of emergency contact forms. She took long lunch breaks and went for walks. One day, she walked past Monte and spied the drum set through the window, just sitting there collecting dust. The bar was open—at least, the door was unlocked—so she went inside. There was no one around. The bass drum had been set up wrong and the cymbals were missing a screw. Peaches wiped the drums down with a Kleenex from her bag and fixed the bass drum. Then she sat down and played a Pretenders song with two ballpoint pens, really whacking the drums hard with them because it was only Wednesday and her work week had been so long, hot, and boring. When she looked up, Elizabeth was standing behind the bar, pouring herself a shot of vodka, wearing nothing but a black bikini top and black vinyl shorts, splattered head to toe with metallic silver paint, looking ten feet tall and scary as hell. But she was civil to Peaches.
“I’m Elizabeth,” she said. “You can come in and play whenever you like. I’m here very infrequently.”
“Sorry about the pens, I didn’t see any sticks. I’m Peaches,” Peaches said. “I’m supposed to be the school nurse, but it was not necessarily the correct career path for me.”
And so it began.
The bar was a welcome escape from Peaches’ smelly office. Elizabeth would leave notes with instructions on the drums. Would you mind meeting the beer guy? He comes from 3 to 5. Or, Toilet paper, paper towel, and napkin truck dropping off boxes today 4 to 6. She’d disappear and then reappear again. They rarely spoke and then only cursorily. Elizabeth spent most of her time in the basement. The week before school started, she’d disappeared altogether—until now.
Formaldehyde, that was what she smelled. A heavy thud resounded beneath Peaches’ feet, followed by a muffled, exasperated growl. Peaches had been instructed to never enter the basement. Elizabeth would be up when she was ready.
She ordered pad thai from the Seamless app on her phone and sat down behind the drum set. She’d been playing drums since her boring but weirdly intuitive parents put her in a Girls Rock summer day camp at the age of nine. The crazy thing about it was, despite being married to a musician, she didn’t know how to read music. She didn’t even know the official terms for anything she did. Her music teacher at the camp had been all about “feeling it,” so she’d always just listened for the rhythm in a song and felt her way, trying out different things until she got it. For the last month she’d been working on the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House.” She played the song quietly on her phone, on repeat, and played along, getting louder as she gained confidence. She could keep up the pace now that she’d been practicing. It was faster than she’d first thought.
A guy on a bike arrived with her pad thai. She sat at the empty bar and ate it as the big, round, rose-gold sun dipped behind the old hospital buildings across the street, falling into New York Harbor only to be run over by the determinedly orange Staten Island ferry. That was the best thing about Cobble Hill. With its proximity to the water, its low buildings, and gradual, gently rising streets, the sunset was clearly visible and always startlingly beautiful.
The high, whiny vibration of an electric tool resounded from below. Elizabeth was either cutting tile or mixing cake batter.
A shadow darkened the window. Then it brightened again. A woman wearing gigantic sunglasses, her body and head shrouded in an enormous black rain poncho with the hood pulled up, darted behind a nearby tree and then slunk away again. Probably an actress, Peaches thought, paranoid about the paparazzi. There were quite a few of them in the neighborhood, but none so famous that they needed to hide behind trees. The bar door swung open and the rain poncho woman stepped inside. Her black hood fell away, revealing white-blond hair pulled back in a severe braid, a severe jawline, and a severely downturned mouth. It was Elizabeth.
“I need your help in the basement,” she announced. “We’ll enter from the street. The stairs in here need to stay clean.”
* * *
The Sublime drop began at eight. Liam and Ryan arrived at six thirty. They’d gone out for pizza after cleaning the toilets and felt sort of gross, but they knew they’d feel less gross outside than they did inside, so they decided to go into Manhattan and stand on the sidewalk outside the store with all the other losers and wait.
The popularity of Sublime amongst boys between the ages of eleven and seventeen was not something any of the boys could explain. It was all about the logo, which was big and basic and just plain cool—the word SUBLIME in Futura Bold Oblique font, white text on a purple background. The clothes and accessories were hideously ugly, or weirdly complicated, or so simple they were simply not at all special, but that was part of their appeal. A black T-shirt with a bloody squirrel printed on it. A hat with tusks. A brown hoodie with eight rows of felt shark teeth around the hood. A red leather wallet with eleven zippers. Gold velvet boxer jock underwear. A plain white T-shirt. A plain gray T-shirt. White tube socks. An itchy black wool ski hat. Joggers with purple camouflage print on one leg and red and white stripes on the other leg. A black sleeveless T-shirt. A light pink skateboard.
Liam examined the shop’s website infrequently but somewhat eagerly, not because he wanted or needed anything that could be found there, but because all the other boys at school were always wearing Sublime or talking about what they were going to get at Sublime. He t
hought he should be able talk about it too, and maybe even wear something he’d bought there, if it wasn’t too expensive or ugly. Some of the kids at school had bots that bought the stuff for them and when they got it they sold it through their social media for way more than it was worth. That was too time-consuming and involved for Liam. And thus the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
From what Liam had garnered from the talk in school, attending the drop was more about standing in line and being seen in the line than about actually buying anything. This particular drop was a collaboration with Silenciaga, with prices starting at ninety-five dollars for an iron-on patch. A T-shirt cost three hundred dollars and a hoodie cost seven hundred dollars. There was no way anyone could be buying much, except maybe Bruce, who had a black AmEx card. Another reason to hate him.
Liam and Ryan got off the F train at Broadway-Lafayette and wandered east on Houston, looking for the line of bored-looking guys staring at their phones. They didn’t have to look far. It was getting dark. Illuminated by the Bowery streetlights stood a hushed and orderly throng that spanned the four blocks to the store. They walked alongside the line of boys, compelled to check out the store itself before heading back to wait.
“Hey, assholes.”
It was Bruce, a third of the way down the line. He’d left school early, claiming he felt sick. Now they knew why.
“Hey,” Liam said sourly. It was a little difficult to stomach the notion that he and Ryan had been scraping poo and bubble gum off a bathroom floor while Bruce posed on a street corner, playing Fortnite on his phone.
“Thought you were sick,” Ryan grumbled.
“Black Ryan, my man.” Bruce held up his hand to high-five Ryan.
Ryan did not hold up his hand in return. “Come on,” he told Liam. “Let’s go see if we can cut this line.”
“Good luck with that!” Bruce shouted after them.
The line was so long. Liam wondered if they shouldn’t just turn around and go home. “Why are we here again?” he asked.
“Because your parents have plans tonight and you’ve always wanted to witness a drop,” Ryan said. “Plus, your ‘not my girlfriend’ will be impressed if you actually managed to score anything. We ate like a whole pizza before we came here. We can stand up for a couple of hours.”
* * *
Roy Clarke was the first to turn up at the bar. “So what’s with the invisible barkeep then?” he asked. “Is he, like, disfigured or something? Does he wear a mask?”
Peaches poured him a pint of Brooklyn Lager. “He’s not a he.”
“She then. Is she you?”
“No. I just work here. For free. I keep it clean and meet the deliveries and play the drums and offer people drinks if they’re brave enough to come inside. Usually they just open the door and look around and then walk out again. You were the exception. It’s not really a full-fledged bar. More of a ‘space.’ She put up the sign for karaoke tonight though, not me. She’s an artist and she travels a lot. I’m sure you’ll meet her later.”
“I see.” Roy took a sip of his drink. “What’s her name?”
“Elizabeth Paulsen.”
“Aha,” Roy replied. It figured. How could someone so mysterious be so ubiquitous? “Does it smell like formaldehyde in here to you?” he asked, sniffing the bar top.
Peaches pressed her lips together and nodded. Elizabeth had amassed a fuckload of weird shit in the basement. It was all part of her Birth.
“Maybe,” she replied coyly. “I didn’t smell it ’til you said it.”
* * *
Liam flipped up his hood. It was colder than he thought it would be. Ryan was still marching toward the store, ignoring the annoyed glares of the lined-up, waiting boys.
“If we’re waiting on line, don’t we have to go to the end?” Liam asked when he caught up.
“I hope not. I have an idea,” Ryan said determinedly. “I did it once before, at the North Face store when they released a new line of limited-edition parkas.”
Liam glanced at his friend. “Did what?”
“Well, it might be different this time. My mom knows the CEO of North Face. Anyway, we’re going to pretend to be models.”
“Models?” Liam stopped walking. He was tall and skinny and had pimples and a sort of perpetual half-asleep expression. His childhood barber still cut his hair, so he looked kind of like a Roman emperor. “Yeah, right.”
Ryan kept walking and Liam hurried to keep up with him.
“They like real-looking models. We just go up to the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re the models.’ Just let me do the talking, okay?”
“Okay.” Liam was pretty sure this wasn’t going to work, but the worst thing that could happen was they’d get sent to the back of the line, which was where they’d wind up anyway.
The Sublime storefront was totally nondescript aside from the distinct purple logo in the window. The windows themselves were papered over to keep bystanders from peeking inside and taking pictures of the drop. Two enormous bouncer guys in navy-blue bomber jackets stood at the door.
Ryan went right up to them. “We’re the models,” he said.
Liam couldn’t believe it. His face felt hot. Good thing it was dark.
“What models?” one of the bouncers asked. His thick mustache turned up at the corners. He looked like an inflated bullfighter.
“We’re modeling the drop,” Ryan explained patiently, like the bouncer was stupid for asking.
“Oh,” the bouncer with the mustache said.
“Let them in, Jimmy,” the other bouncer said impatiently. He was young and had a very thick neck. “They’re late.”
* * *
Two pints later, dark had set in. Peaches and Roy were still the only ones in the bar. Then Stuart pushed open the door and held it open for his wife.
Peaches had never officially met Mandy, except for that one time when Mandy was passed out on Stuart’s shoulder on their stoop. She’d expected her to look sick. She’d expected a wheelchair or a walker or a cane. She certainly hadn’t expected Mandy to be flawless and rosy-cheeked with a curvy ass and incredible boobs. She hadn’t expected Mandy to be beautiful, with gleaming black hair, milky pale skin, luminous green eyes, a red bow of a mouth, and super-white straight teeth. She looked like Snow White on steroids.
“Hey,” Stuart greeted Peaches a little nervously. He was worried she’d act overly familiar with him. What if she mentioned all the times she’d checked his hair for lice? Or selling him pot? What if she hugged him? He realized a split second too late that it was he who was being overly familiar. What made things even more confusing and awkward was that Peaches was sitting and talking and drinking with Roy Clarke, whose daughter happened to be babysitting Teddy that night, yet he and Mr. Clarke had never actually met.
“Stuart Little.” Stuart held out his hand.
“Roy. Roy Clarke,” the man said with a charming sort of sputtering English embarrassment.
Stuart glanced at Peaches and touched Mandy’s elbow. “And this is Mandy, my wife.”
Peaches hopped off her barstool and kissed Mandy once on each cheek. She couldn’t help herself. She just had to feel the powdery white softness of Mandy’s cheeks. She had to know firsthand what Mandy smelled like.
“It’s so great that you’re here.”
She smelled like a forest. Not floral, more musky. Like the woody, barky smell of mulch in people’s gardens at night after a summer rain. Or maybe she just smelled like pot.
Mandy kept smiling brightly even though she had no idea who this cute, dimply, friendly, cool-as-fuck woman with the drumsticks in the back pocket of her ripped jeans was. She turned to Stuart for help.
“Peaches Park, the school nurse. You met before on the stoop,” Stuart explained. “Ted’s school nurse.”
“And bartender. And drummer. And DJ or master of ceremonies, or whatever you call the person who womans the karaoke machine,” Peaches elaborated. Whenever anyone introduced her as the school nurse, she
felt like she had to elaborate. “Sorry about the smell. Some new cleaning product.”
She was stalling. Elizabeth had told her not to get things started until the bar was full of people.
Roy wished Wendy would arrive. She was so much better at meeting and greeting. He held onto his beer and shook the man’s hand and nodded at his attractive, curvy wife, who looked like she still thought she was seventeen and had never done much besides drink lager and put on mascara, although apparently she had a child. He recognized Stuart Little not by name but by sight. He saw him every morning with his small son. And he was vaguely aware that it was Stuart and Mandy’s small son Shy was babysitting for tonight. Cobble Hill certainly was an odd and tiny place.
“You’re the author,” Mandy said, because she knew. Everybody knew.
“Yes.”
The door swung open and Roy was heartened to see Tupper, wearing his signature navy-blue suit and tie, his auburn hair freshly combed, his femininely handsome face freshly shaved.
Mandy recognized the well-dressed man whose dinner she’d almost stolen the other day.
“Is she here?” Tupper asked Roy anxiously, ignoring the others.
“Not that we’ve been able to detect,” Roy responded honestly. It was possible that Elizabeth was hiding in a closet or under the floorboards, although from what he’d garnered from Google images, Elizabeth was an extremely tall woman. She’d be easy to spot.
“Actually,” Peaches interrupted. Tupper had been by the bar a few times in the last month or so, asking after his wife. He never hung around long, insisting that they “respected each other’s work.” “Elizabeth was here… recently. Hasn’t she been home?”
Tupper’s home Macaw footage had revealed a meowing display of feline excitement—Catsy adored Elizabeth. His work Macaw footage had shown Elizabeth raiding his studio. At home, he’d found a “body” in the bath, which was full of red paint. Elizabeth had staged her own death, her jokey way of announcing that she’d finally come home.
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