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.
“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.