Of Mice and Nutcrackers: A Peeler Christmas Read Free

table and onto the floor; and then, if you didn’t pick it up,your poor meatball would, as the song says, roll right out the door.
    Apple juice is flowing toward me like a river. It’s usually better to sit uphill from Bernie.
    Bill wanders in. I can hear his bare feet slapping against the kitchen linoleum. “Where are my striped socks?” he asks Dad.
    “I think I saw them last night in the bathroom,” he says.
    “You didn’t wash them, did you?”
    Dad shakes his head. He’s mopping up Bernie’s spill. Bill heads back out the door.
    “Your tack is getting cold,” Bernie calls after him.
    “It won’t be soft anymore.”
    “Hard tack is good too.” Bill heads upstairs.
    Dad coughs. A bad cough. He sounds like the ugly baby in the doctor’s office.
Ack ack ack ack ack.
    “There, there, sweet pea,” I say.
    “Yeah, yeah,” says Dad.
    A snowy day means that the school hallways are wet and slippery. I almost fall, getting into my school shoes. I have to grab onto Patti to steady myself. Her locker is beside mine.
    “Careful!” she says.
    Patti is a bit of a worrier. Perfect for the part of Maria in the play, the girl who cares for the poor nutcracker doll that her brother Fritz has broken so carelessly.
    I’m hopping on one foot. My other one is wet. I hate wet feet. The bell rings.
    “If you aren’t careful, you’ll knock us both over!” Patti spits when she talks because of her braces. They’re new, and she’s not used to them yet. Her dark eyebrows curve down. “Come on, clumsy, we’re going to be late!”
    “Now, now, you girls!” Mr. March has a smile on his face and a mop in his hands. He works harder than anyone else in the school, I think. He makes the hallway clean around us while I struggle into my shoes.
    “Sorry, Mr. March,” I say. Funny, it didn’t occur to me to say sorry to Patti. Maybe because I’m not marking up her nice clean floor. Maybe because she isn’t smiling.
    There’s a series of black boot marks going down the middle of the hall. Mr. March wipes them with his mop, but they don’t come away.
    Language arts is right after lunch recess. Today we’re trying to run through the whole play, so we can be ready for our rehearsal in the gym this afternoon. We’re in the middle of the second scene when I notice something important.
    “Stop!” I call. “Patti, I think you’ve fallen off the stage!”
    Our classroom is in the old part of the school. The wooden desks are planted in rows, like the crosses inFlanders fields, and cannot be moved. No matter how we lay it out, there are always a few desks in the middle of the stage area. In trying to step around a desk, Patti has fallen into the audience. “Sorry,” she says.
    “Remember to keep upstage, so that you don’t have to turn away from the audience to look at Michael.” Michael is Herr Stahlbaum, Fritz and Maria’s godfather. He’s the one who brings the nutcracker. Michael’s a strange guy – he laughs a lot, but he’s angry too. His voice is deep and raspy. A big, funny bully is what he is.
    Do I mean that? Bully? I think so. He laughs when people fall down, and he punches a lot. That’s a bully, I guess.
    “Upstage? You mean back,” says Patti. “You want me to keep back.” “Yes,” I say.
    Michael snorts and rolls his eyes – sorry, his one eye. The other one has a patch on it.
    Miss Gonsalves turns to me. We’re the only ones on chairs. The rest of the class is either onstage, or waiting to go on.
    “What do you think, Jane? Should they do it one more time?”
    I frown at my notebook. “There’s a lot to go through,” I say. “I’ll make a note about Patti staying upstage, and Michael speaking a bit more slowly.”
    “Hey!” says Michael.
    “Good idea, Jane.” Miss Gonsalves smiles at Michael. She’s almost the only one who can. She and Jiri.
    “It’s this stupid classroom,” says Patti. “I’ll do better when we get on a real stage.”
    “Of course you will,” says Miss