“I don’t know,” Stuart said, as usual. Then he added, “But we see him every day, so it’s polite to say hey.”
Ted giggled at the rhyme, and Stuart felt his dour mood lighten. Ted was a quiet boy who hadn’t made any close friends yet, but he was a good kid, a really good kid.
Stuart picked up Ted’s skateboard and followed him inside the school entrance. The skinny, dark-haired boy headed up the school stairs to his classroom on the fourth floor, his army-green Herschel backpack banging against his butt.
“See you later, skater. After a while, chile. Be real cool, fool. Eat your food, dude,” Stuart called after him.
He tucked both of their skateboards under his arm and turned away from the stairs toward the dimly lit cafeteria. The school had been built in the 1950s, a mixture of old-fashioned flourishes and uninspired practicality. A sweeping marble staircase greeted visitors just inside the entrance, but the rest of the schoolrooms were prisonlike and drab, with dingy gray linoleum floors, low ceilings, barred windows, and terrible fluorescent lighting. Mothers and fathers in a variety of costumes—business, exercise, Birkenstocks and pajama bottoms, breast milk– or beer-stained T-shirts—straggled by and out the main door. Inside the cafeteria, a mom was crying into a Styrofoam cup of coffee while Miss Patty, the school’s sinewy, sleep-deprived, overly made-up assistant principal who commuted there from Staten Island, tried to comfort her.
On the far wall of the cafeteria was a closed door marked with a yellow sign that read NURSE. Stuart knocked twice, turned the knob, and opened the door.
* * *
Peaches stiffened at the sound of someone knocking and opening her office door. She’d been totally engrossed with The Brookliner’s morning news. A headless female torso had been found in the water behind Ikea, in Red Hook. The torso had a tattoo of a rose on her upper arm.
“How can I help?” Peaches asked without turning around. Her early-morning visitors were most often pukers, kids whose parents had fed them multivitamins, orange juice, and eggs for breakfast.
“Hey,” a husky male voice greeted her. “Sorry to bother you. I was thinking of buying a lice comb? It’s for my son. Ted Little? He’s in fourth grade. In Mrs. Watson’s class?”
Stuart thought he detected a crimson flush around Nurse Peaches’ ears and jawline when he mentioned his last name, but her blue eyes remained glued to her computer screen. Without even a glance in his direction, she reached down and pulled open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet.
“That’s ten dollars. I can’t give you change, so if you don’t have exact change now, just send the money in an envelope with your child and his teacher will get it to me.”
Her voice sounded stale, canned. Stuart was disappointed. “Sure. Okay.” He ran his hands through his wavy brown hair and then realized that she might think that was pretty gross of him, to go around rubbing his hands all over his lice. He stuffed his hands into his pockets.
Unable to resist any longer, Peaches released the scroll button on the computer mouse and swiveled her chair around. It was really him: Stuart Little, from the Blind Mice.
“Wow. Sorry. That was a bit brusque,” she gushed, her entire person transformed by shining, flirty exuberance. You’re a married woman, she warned herself, and a mother Plus, you’re pushing forty. “I try to maintain a professional veneer around parents, but I’m really just a former English major, college dropout mom. I have no idea how I became a school nurse.”
And now Stuart Little thinks you’re insane and stupid.
“Hey,” Stuart replied, hands still stuffed into his pockets. Whenever he was there, in Ted’s school, he felt like a thirteen-year-old kid again—awkward, confused, self-conscious, worried about his armpits smelling, stray boogers on his face, leaving his fly unzipped. He’d never been too awkward, but he’d never really outgrown what little middle school awkwardness he’d had.
“Sorry. That was way too much information,” Peaches said, trying to recover gracefully from her outburst. She tucked a few stray strands of strawberry blond hair behind her ears, wishing she’d come up with something sexier that morning than a ponytail. “Just the one lice comb then?”
Before he could answer, she stole a glance at Stuart’s left hand, tucked halfway into his pocket. The knuckles on that hand were tattooed with realistically detailed, tiny mouse heads. Oh, the fantasies she’d had in college about Stuart Little’s tattooed hand, caressing her all over. Stuart Little. She used to