She sat, tilting her head and flashing her dimples gratefully up at him.

The call was from the mother of another second grader with lice.

“Grab a pen. There are four lice ladies you can contact. None of them do house calls and they’re all a hassle to get to, but they’ll get rid of them.”

“Thank you,” Stuart mouthed silently, so as not to interrupt her call.

And without any attempt to curb herself, Peaches winked in reply.

“Pot? Marijuana? Cannabis? Reefer? Herb? Mary Jane?”

Liam blinked up at his mother from the mattress on the floor that served as his bed. He took off his round, wire-rimmed reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put them back on again. Had she really just asked him where she could buy weed?

“It’s okay. I’m not trying to trick you or get you or your friends in trouble,” she said. “It’s for a friend. Or actually, a friend’s wife. She needs it for pain.”

Liam shrugged. He was pretty sure Shy Clarke didn’t smoke weed. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He was going to be her tutor. He’d liked her for over a year and now they were actually going to talk to each other. He liked her so much he could barely look at her. He was going to have to get over that.

“Seriously?” his mom demanded, about to go into one of her “I was semi-edgy in high school and you could be too if you just made the effort” gentle tirades. His mom was a good person, but she hated that he wasn’t a musician who wore holey black jeans and ripped T-shirts. She hated his neatly trimmed hair and that he kept his pants up with a belt. She hated that he liked salad and was home every night. She hated that when he asked her to test him with flash cards he knew all the answers. She still loved him, he knew that. It was his apparent conformity she hated. “You don’t know anyone?”

Liam wasn’t about to rat out Bruce, whom he wasn’t really friends with anyway. Bruce was high seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and he basically supplied the entire high school with weed. He was a brute too. No one messed with Bruce, for fear of pissing him off. He was the El Chapo of their school.

“Omnia… vin-cit!!” Peaches’ husband Greg’s boyish yowl resounded from the basement. He was adapting the Blind Mice song for his Phinney Collegiate music class, alternating between the recorder, harmonica, xylophone, and tambourine. They’d both been enormous Blind Mice fans when they met in college. Greg had seen the Mice button on her jacket and hit on her. It was what had brought them together. His basement studio was loaded with Blind Mice memorabilia.

“Maybe Dad knows someone,” Liam suggested. “He is a musician.”