It occurred to Stuart that the son had inherited none of his mother’s cuteness. He was awkward and gawky like his dad.
“So, me and my friends—” Liam glanced at the other three boys, who looked away. “We were hanging out in the schoolyard. At night, when it was dark outside. And we found a bottle of vodka that someone had left under the slide. And vodka is mostly alcohol, which is flammable, so that gave us an idea.”
He hadn’t gone into such detail in the other classrooms, but the morning had worn him thin. He hesitated. Was he teaching these kids bad things? Oh God, what an idiot.
“Um, one of you guys want to take it from here?”
Black Ryan cleared his throat. “We weren’t doing anything bad at first, just hanging out. But then we decided it’d be cool to make a video of flames pouring down the slide. So we—”
“I did it. It was all my idea.” Bruce stepped forward with his hands in his jeans pockets, his weird eyes bulging. It sounded like he was bragging. “I poured the vodka down the slide and lit it on fire.”
Ryan kicked at the rug with the toe of his Converse sneaker. “And I took a video. We were going to put it on YouTube. But then the leaves started to burn, and the rubber mats on the ground melted, and the little tree caught fire, and—”
“And we’re sorry,” Bruce interrupted him impatiently.
“We’re so sorry,” Black Ryan said.
“Yeah, we are,” Ryan said.
“I’m really, really sorry,” Liam muttered, glad that it was almost over.
“Thanks, guys,” Peaches interrupted them. “It’s always hard to admit when you did something wrong.” She turned to the class again. “These guys will be helping out in school a few days a week until the holidays, so you’ll be seeing them around.”
The class applauded for no apparent reason—almost every class had applauded—and then everyone began talking at once. Except for Ted, who raised his hand.
“Ticktock!” Mrs. Watson shouted.
“Applesauce!” the class shouted back and then sat silently in their chairs.
“Ted has a question,” the teacher said. “Go ahead, Ted.”
Stuart stared at his son. This hadn’t happened in any of the other classes.
Liam glanced at his mom for assistance, but she was smiling at the boy who’d raised his hand. The boy’s name was Ted. He was a nice little kid. Liam was teaching him to play Settlers of Catan at the Strategizer.
Ted put his hand down. He sat very straight and didn’t seem nervous about talking in front of his whole class and a bunch of adults and big boys.
“Did you guys have fun?” he asked.
Liam shook his head. That night had not been fun. It was a total nightmare. But the other boys chuckled.
“Yeah,” Black Ryan spoke up with a slow smile. “It was pretty fun.” Peaches glared at him and he cleared his throat. “For a few seconds anyway. We didn’t mean to ruin the whole playground.”
“The fire was awesome,” Bruce said. “I can’t deny it.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “It was pretty cool.”
Peaches scowled. This was not how this was supposed to go. There was nothing cool about it.
“Well, thanks to their fun, cool time, you will all have to put up with recess and after-school playtime in a much smaller area until we get the playground fixed up, which could take until spring or even next fall. How cool is that?” she said.
“Not cool at all,” Stuart remarked. It was the first thing he’d said.
All eyes shifted to Stuart.
Burn our shit and you’re in stitches
Your cool trick pissed off my bitches!
“Fire is bad,” he continued recklessly, already disagreeing with himself. There was nothing wrong with fire; fire was fucking awesome. “Fire is bad when you destroy other people’s property with it.”
“My dad got mad when the landscaper burned leaves in our backyard,” Lily van Dusen spoke up. Her family lived in the corner house on Tompkins and Degraw. It was one of the envies of the neighborhood.
“We have a firepit. For s’mores,” another girl said.
“I set my cat’s tail on fire by an accident,” a boy named Loden said. “With a blowtorch.”
Peaches was pretty sure it wasn’t an accident. Loden was a psychopath. He had once ground his own forehead into the bricks of the school building because he wanted to look like he was built out of Minecraft bricks.
“Anyway, we still have part of the schoolyard,” Ted announced, breaking the tension. He hugged Stuart’s side. “Bye, Dad. We have to go to art now.”
“Later, skater,” Stuart said. Ted was such a good kid.
“It is what it is,” Mrs. Watson announced sagely to the room. She clapped her hands and shouted, “Onward!” The children hurriedly lined up in ordered pairs in front of the door. “Leaders, lead us to art!” she cried, and the children filed out of the room.
“Amen.” Peaches sighed. “Come on, boys. Just the fifth grade and then you’re done.”
* * *
Mandy had just finished roasting the duck from 4 Cheever Place apartment 2A’s Farm to Front Door box. It was a little burned on the bottom and the kitchen smelled like sizzling hair because she’d singed her arm hair removing the duck from the oven, but still. Who would have thought she’d ever manage to cook a whole duck?
Now it was time to toss the shaved beets and Jerusalem artichokes in their sesame oil and ginger vinaigrette dressing and add a sprinkling of chopped peanuts and scallions for garnish. There was a single duck egg in the box that Mandy wasn’t sure what to do with. The little illustrated instruction card for the egg seemed to have slipped out the seam of the box and gotten lost.
Her cell phone rang on the kitchen counter. It was a Brooklyn number, possibly Ted’s school. Mandy took the call.
“Mrs. Little? This is Billy from the Brooklyn Strategizer.”
“Oh, hi.” Mandy broke off another morsel of pot cookie and tucked it into her cheek so she could chew while he was talking. Usually she hated it when people called her “Mrs. Little.” That was Stu’s mom’s name, and Stu’s mom was a total c-u-n-t. Mandy’s name was Mandy Marzulli. But she didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, we’ve been having some issues with Ted today. Uh, sometimes we burn scented candles in the bathroom, like for when someone makes a huge stinky doogie?”
Mandy giggled. The guys at the Brooklyn Strategizer were all man-children. They wore sticky-looking T-shirts and never tied their shoelaces and stayed in the store playing Dungeons & Dragons and Settlers of Catan until two in the morning, drinking homemade root beer and eating caramel popcorn. She and Stu had seen them through the Strategizer window walking home from restaurants in her better days.
“Anyway, today Ted took the burning candle out of the bathroom and brought it to a table in back without anyone seeing. He had one of our Jenga sets, which are made of wood, and he was like, torching the pieces, one by one.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup.”
“All by himself? Or was it, like, a group of boys?”
“No, just him.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay, we caught him before he burned the building down or injured himself. But I’d like for someone to pick him up now. And I told him he can’t come back.”
“What? Like, ever?” Mandy spat the last bit of cookie into the sink, preparing for a fight.
“Mrs. Little, we have strict rules to avoid chaos. Your son was inciting chaos. This is our protocol.” He sounded like he was quoting a video game.
“I’m sorry,” Mandy snapped, annoyed. “Let me call his dad.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stuart said when she told him the news. “I know what this is about. He was so into the whole playground fire apology story this morning. Fucking pyromaniac assholes.”
“Stu, you’re talking about our kid.”
“No, the boys who burned the schoolyard down. They came to talk to the classroo
ms this morning. To apologize. And Ted thought what they did sounded fun.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Fucking monsters. All right. I’ll go get him. It’ll only be an hour earlier than normal by the time I get there.”
Mandy pulled a piece of crispy duck fat off the sizzling duck body and stuck it in her mouth. It was salty and delicious.
“It’s actually good you guys are coming home, because I made a duck.”
“Whoa. A duck? You’re amazing.”
“Thanks,” Mandy said. “I don’t know why, but I’m really into cooking now. Except there’s this funky little duck egg in the box, but I think the directions for it slipped out, because there’s no mention of it in the instructions.”
“The duck came in a box with instructions?”
Mandy clapped her hand over her mouth. Fucking weed. “You know, the recipe.” Time to change the subject. “Anyway, go get Teddy. The sooner you go, the sooner we can eat!”
* * *
“You want to keep your development options open, right?” Liam asked Ted.
“Yes,” Ted answered, hovering over the board with earnest concentration.
Liam felt bad that Ted was getting kicked out. He was a good kid, and of particular interest to Liam now that he knew Ted’s father was that semi-famous weed-smoking dude from the stoop the other night. So what if Ted had set something on fire? Stop putting candles and matches in a bathroom where there are little kids if you don’t want them to set stuff on fire. Stop smoking weed on your stoop in front of your kid.
Because his dad taught music to the younger grades, Liam got to attend private school for free. But his mom said if he wanted “a private school wardrobe and fancy private school tossed salads and wraps for lunch,” Liam had to get an after-school job. He’d been working at the Brooklyn Strategizer twice a week for the past year, picking up kids from the PS 919 schoolyard, walking them the five blocks to the store, and teaching them role-play and board games. He made them homemade sodas and popcorn and swept up and Lysoled the bathroom before the adult evening sessions. At first the place made him feel uncomfortable and unclean. The tables and chairs and floor and doorknobs were sticky, and the other guys who worked there were much older than he was and pretty weird. Danner wore black leather chaps with metal skulls dangling off them and had a tattoo of a frog on his nose. Billy identified as “a wizard” and had stringy purple-and-green hair that hung down to his kneecaps. But they were really nice. Liam made sixteen dollars an hour. It was a good job.
He leaned over the game. “Then don’t start so close to the corners. Start toward the middle. Okay, I’m going to trade you my bricks for your three sheep.”
“No way.”
Settlers of Catan was Liam’s favorite game. You got to build settlements and trade resources, and it was a sort of race to see who could take up the most geographic space on the board. He liked how simple the game was; it was easy to teach. Ted was pretty dumb at Catan though. He became too attached to the materials.
“I like my farm how it is,” he insisted. “I’m keeping my sheep.”
“That’s not how the game works. You have to build and expand. It’s progress, dude.”
Ted sat back, suddenly losing interest. “You know when you started the fire in the schoolyard? Were you guys smoking weed?”
Liam felt his face turn bright red. This kid, holy shit. Still, he didn’t want to lie.
“Actually yeah, some of the other guys were before we got there. I wasn’t though. I’m not really into that.” Unlike my mom and both of your parents, he added silently. Except for that one time with Shy.
“Have you ever smoked weed?” Ted persisted.
Stuart pushed open the glass door. The Brooklyn Strategizer was so nerdy it almost gave him hives, but he knew he would have dug it as a kid. “Let’s go, buddy. I heard you did something bad.”
Ted looked down at the floor and shrugged his shoulders.
Liam stood up while Ted collected the game pieces and put them in the box with the game board. Strategizer protocol dictated that each player had to clean up and put away his game neatly. “Yeah, Billy had to take off, but he said he called you. Ted can’t come back. At least, not this year.”
Stuart glared at him. “Pretty harsh, but I get it.”
“It’s stupid,” Liam said. His lower lip trembled, and for a moment he thought he might cry. Ted’s dad so obviously hated him. And Liam hated that he was now part of the asshole group who’d set fire to the little kids’ schoolyard.
Stuart continued to glare at him while Ted found his backpack and coat.
Liam held out his fist for Ted to bump.
Stuart felt like a dick. Peaches’ kid seemed pretty decent.
“Your mom is cool,” he said before they left, because he wanted to be nice.
Chapter 12
“What would happen if I drank all the vanilla extract?”
“You’d feel ill. And probably a little drunk,” her mother said. “Remember when you used to call it vanilla ‘abstract’?”
Shy was making Toll House cookies. Wendy had taught her and her sisters when they were little. No one in England knew what a Toll House cookie was. They had to go to Tesco in Kensington to get the right chips.
Shy stuck her tongue into the hole at the top of the tiny bottle and puckered her lips. “Wine is better.”
Wendy took it away from her. “This restaurant is getting an F rating.” She poured a bunch of vanilla into the bowl of butter and brown sugar without measuring it.
“Dad, do you want me to put nuts in some of them? I think we have pecans,” Shy called out.
There was no answer from the library.
“Don’t bother him. I think he’s writing—like, actually writing. It’s been a while since he’s been this productive.”
Wendy had just returned from her own chair in the library where, instead of getting up the courage to tell Roy she’d been fired from Fleurt and was now filling in for someone on maternity leave at Enjoy!, a lifestyle magazine full of beautiful bathtubs and decadent desserts, she’d attempted to paraphrase a Malcolm Gladwell piece from The New Yorker that questioned the whole movement to legalize marijuana. Wendy hated pot—the odor, how slow everyone got when they smoked it, the need to eat afterward.
“Finally, someone with some sense,” she’d said to Roy’s profile as he stared fixedly at the blank screen of his laptop. “Not nearly enough research has been done. There haven’t been enough studies. It’s simply a disaster waiting to happen. How will planes and trains run on time? How will UPS deliver anything to the right location if everyone is high? It causes impotence, too.”
Roy did not respond.
A disaster waiting to happen, he repeated silently, still staring at his screen. Impotence. He hit return.
Wendy left him alone.
Shy stuck both hands into the bowl and squeezed the raw egg yolks until they popped and oozed between her fingers. She preferred not to use an electric mixer or utensils of any kind.
“Mr. Streko got a new tattoo,” she told her mother as she churned and kneaded the bowl of sweet goo. “On his neck.”
He already had so many tattoos, half of which she hadn’t seen. There were some on his back—he’d told the class—and some on his legs. Monday he’d come to school with a bandage on his neck and a few days later had revealed an orange-and-blue baseball with legs and a toothy face. He said he’d made a bet with a friend at a baseball game in college. “If the Mets don’t win the World Series in the next ten years, I’ll get an ugly tattoo that everyone can see.” It was pretty crazy of him. Shy hated it, but she also sort of loved it. Mr. Streko’s skin was very tan and his body was so covered in black hair that his tattoos were like faint background patterns that you didn’t notice until you stared really hard at them.
“I remember he had a lot of tattoos.” Another thing Wendy hated. Why would one want to deface one’s body? She wondered if she should tell Shy about her new job before she tol
d Roy. “It’s completely inappropriate for a teacher,” she added, chickening out.
“I don’t mind.” Shy was used to her mother’s declarations about what was appropriate or inappropriate. She ripped open the package of Nestlé chocolate chips and poured them over the batter. They resounded against the metal bowl like beach pebbles.
Wendy grabbed a chip and popped it into her mouth. “But how can you pay attention when your teacher’s body is scrawled all over with ink?”
Shy refused to take her mother’s bait and begin an argument. “Oh, did Daddy tell you? I joined the table tennis team. Mr. Streko is the coach. Practice is every afternoon starting Monday, and we have our first match next Thursday. You told me I needed extracurriculars for college.”
Wendy opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of white wine. She didn’t like how obsessed Shy was with her teacher.
“What about that nice boy? How will you have time for a boyfriend if you’re playing table tennis all the time?” She put her glass down and lined up the baking trays next to the mixing bowl.
“Liam?” Shy scraped her hands against the rim of the bowl to remove the excess dough. Her mother had no idea that Liam had been involved with the schoolyard fire, she realized. That he stole pot from his mom. He was not a “nice boy.” She was pretty sure her mother wouldn’t think so, anyway. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“He’s not her boyfriend,” Roy repeated from the doorway, holding his laptop against his chest. He’d gotten in the habit of carrying it around with him from room to room. They made them so small and light these days it was no trouble. “I made the same mistake. Apparently if he hasn’t officially asked her to be his girlfriend, it’s not official. Therefore they’re ‘just talking,’ which means they actually talk and probably kiss, but he’s still not her boyfriend.”
“You’ve kissed him?” Wendy demanded. Of course she was the last to know. When it came to Shy, she was always the last to know.
“Dad,” Shy protested.
“I’m just guessing from the look on your face,” Roy said. “I’m not a writer for nothing. I notice things.”
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