Stuart and Ted rolled their skateboards down Cheever Place and turned onto Kane Street. As usual, Roy Clarke, the famous author, was pacing slowly up the street ahead of them. Later on, he’d sit at the bar inside the Horn and Duck, the overpriced brasserie on the corner of Kane and Court Streets. Stuart had never spoken to the man, but he’d decided that Roy Clarke paced because, according to Google, he hadn’t published a book in six years. Stuart also knew that one of Roy Clarke’s books had been made into a TV show. Mandy had watched a few episodes and said it was “annoying.” Stuart hadn’t read the books or seen the show, but he’d always been aware that “the Roy Clarke Rainbow” existed. He knew the books were supposed to be good and that they were named after colors—Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple, and Orange. At some point he’d attempt to read one and see for himself.
Roy Clarke’s gray head bobbed as he paced slowly and deliberately away from Stuart and Ted, hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the sidewalk. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about his writing or anything at all. Maybe he was just counting his steps. It seemed like a lot of people in Cobble Hill were very busy doing not a lot.
“Morning,” Mr. Swiss Family Robinson greeted Stuart from his doorway. Mr. Swiss Family Robinson was Stuart’s nickname for the tall, thin, auburn-haired gentleman who every morning stood at the door of the beautiful brick house on Kane Street, directly across from the schoolyard, wearing a crisply ironed shirt and looking nervous, as if he didn’t quite trust the school to take care of his children. Stuart couldn’t even remember where the name Swiss Family Robinson came from, but it seemed to fit. The house had a bright blue door with a brass door knocker, matching blue shutters, and immaculately curated seasonal flower boxes in every window. Even the sidewalk was cleaner in front of the Swiss Family Robinson house. It was possible that Ted had gone to preschool at Little Mushrooms in the basement of the local church with one of the Swiss Family Robinson children, but Stuart had never encountered any children or even a wife on these morning walks to school, and he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Swiss Family Robinson’s real name was.
Still, every morning, Stuart always said, “Hey.”
“Who’s that?” Ted asked, right on cue. He asked the same question every day.
“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 devour everything she could find online about him and study it like it was homework. She was a couple of years older than he was, but so what? She’d taken Intro to Latin in college because of his song “Omnia Vincit!” She’d stopped wearing makeup because of his song “My Girlfriend Wakes Up Pretty.” She’d decided it’d be okay to drop out of college because of his song “Fuck College.” They’d both had their kids before they’d gotten married. Who’d have thought he’d send his kid to the very Brooklyn public school where she now worked as a nurse? Thank goodness her husband and parents had encouraged/forced her to stop pretending to write a short-story collection or play, take the required courses at Adelphi University, get her nursing degree, and seek out this fulfilling, practical job.