Vinegar Girl Read Free Page B

was a picky eater. She tore off a piece with her teeth and started chewing it. Luckily, none of the children liked beef jerky except for Emma W., who was plowing ahead with her pasta, so Kate didn’t have to share.
    “Happy Monday, boys and girls!” Mrs. Darling said, pegging up to their table on her aluminum cane. She made a point of stepping into the lunchroom at some point during each group’s mealtime, and she always managed to work the day of the week into her greeting.
    “Happy Monday, Mrs. Darling,” the children murmured, while Kate surreptitiously shifted her mouthful of beef jerky into the pocket of her left cheek.
    “Why are so few people eating?” Mrs. Darling asked. (Nothing escaped her.)
    “The noodles smell like wet dog,” Chloe said.
    “Like what? My goodness!” Mrs. Darling pressed one wrinkled, speckled hand to her pouchy bosom. “It sounds to
me
as if you’re forgetting the Something Nice rule,” she said. “Children? Who can tell me what the Something Nice rule is?”
    Nobody spoke.
    “Jason?”
    “ ‘If you can’t say something nice,’ ” Jason mumbled, “ ‘don’t say nothing at all.’ ”
    “ ‘Don’t say anything at all.’ That’s right. Can somebody say something nice about our lunch today?”
    Silence.
    “Miss Kate? Can
you
say something nice?”
    “Well, it’s certainly…shiny,” Kate said.
    Mrs. Darling gave her a long, level look, but all she said was “All right, children. Have a good lunch.” And she clomped off toward Mrs. Chauncey’s table.
    “It’s as shiny as a shiny wet dog,” Kate whispered to the children.
    They went into shrieks of laughter. Mrs. Darling paused and then pivoted on her cane.
    “Oh, by the way, Miss Kate,” she said, “could you stop in at my office during Quiet Rest Time today?”
    “Sure,” Kate said.
    She swallowed her mouthful of beef jerky.
    The children turned to her with their eyes very large. Even four-year-olds knew that being called to the office was not a good thing.
    “
We
like you,” Jason told her after a moment.
    “Thanks, Jason.”
    “When me and my brother grow up,” David Samson said, “we’re going to marry you.”
    “Well, thank you.”
    Then she clapped her hands and said, “Know what? Dessert today is cookie dough ice cream.”
    The children made little “Mm” sounds, but their expressions remained worried.
    —
    They had barely finished their ice cream when the five-year-olds arrived in the lunchroom doorway, tumbling all over one another and spilling out of line. Hulking, intimidating giants, they seemed to Kate from the confines of her little world, although only last year they had been her Fours. “Let’s go, children!” Mrs. Chauncey called, heaving herself to her feet. “We’re holding people up here. Say thank you to Mrs Washington.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Washington,” the children chorused. Mrs. Washington, standing by the door to the kitchen, smiled and nodded regally and wrapped her hands in her apron. (The Little People’s School was very big on manners.) The Fours fell into a line of sorts and threaded out past the Fives in a shrinking, deferential way, with Kate bringing up the rear. As she passed Georgina, Room 5’s assistant, she murmured, “I have to go to the office.”
    “Eek!” Georgina said. “Well, good luck with that.” She was a pleasant-faced, rosy-cheeked young woman, hugely pregnant with her first child.
She
had never had to go to the office, Kate would bet.
    In Room 4, she unlocked the supply closet to haul out the stacks of aluminum cots that the children took their naps on. She spaced them out around the room and distributed the blankets and the miniature pillows the children kept in their cubbies, as usual thwarting a plan among the four most talkative little girls to sleep all together in one corner. Ordinarily Mrs. Chauncey spent Quiet Rest Time in the faculty lounge, but today she’d returned to Room 4 after lunch, and now she settled