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 Marzulli 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