afternoon.”
“Only two cookies.”
“And you’re famished already? You don’t have a stomach; what you have
is a bottomless pit!”
“Well, I hardly had any lunch,” Davey said. “Mrs. Shepherd-she’s my
teacher-she shared some of her lunch with me, but it was really
dumb-awful stuff. All she had was yogurt and tuna fish, and I hate both
of ’em. So what I did, after she gave me a little of each, I nibbled at
it, just to make her feel good, and then when she wasn’t looking, I
threw most of it away.”
“But doesn’t your father pack a lunch for you?”
Faye asked, her voice suddenly sharper than it had been.
“Oh, sure. Or when he doesn’t have time, Penny packs it. But-”
Faye turned to Penny. “Did he have a lunch to take to school today?
Surely he doesn’t have to beg for food! ”
Penny looked up from her magazine. “I made his lunch myself, this
morning. He had an apple, a ham sandwich, and two big oatmeal cookies.”
“That sounds like a fine lunch to me,” Faye said “Why didn’t you eat it,
Davey?”
“Well, because of the rats, of course,” he said.
Penny twitched in surprise, sat up straight in her chair, and stared
intently at Davey.
Faye said, “Rats? What rats?”
“Holy-moly, I forgot to tell you!” Davey said. “Rats must’ve got in my
lunchbox during morning classes. Big old ugly rats with yellow teeth,
come right up out of the sewers or somewhere. The food was all messed
up, torn to pieces, and chewed on. Crooooooooss,” he said, drawing the
word out with evident pleasure, not disgusted by the fact that rats had
been at his lunch, actually excited about it, thrilled by it, as only a
young boy could be. At his age, an incident like this was a real
adventure.
Penny’s mouth had gone as dry as ashes. “Davey? Uh . . . did you
see the rats?”
“Nab,” he said, clearly disappointed. “They were gone by the time I
went to get my lunchbox.”
“Where’d you have your lunchbox?” Penny asked.
“In my locker.”
“Did the rats chew on anything else in your locker?”
“Like what?”
“Like books or anything.”
“Why would they want to chew on books?”
“Then it was just the food?”
“Sure. What else?”
“Did you have your locker door shut?”
“I thought I did,” he said.
“Didn’t you have it locked, too?”
“I thought I did.”
“And wasn’t your lunchbox shut tight?”
“It should have been,” he said, scratching his head, trying to remember.
Faye said, “Well, obviously, it wasn’t. Rats can’t open a lock, open a
door, and pry the lid off a lunchbox. You must have been very careless,
Davey. I’m surprised at you. I’ll bet you ate one of those oatmeal
cookies first thing when you got to school, just couldn’t wait, and then
forgot to put the lid back on the box.”
“But I didn’t,” Davey protested.
“Your father’s not teaching you to pick up after yourself,” Faye said.
“That’s the kind of thing a mother teaches, and your father’s just
neglecting it.”
Penny was going to tell them about how her own locker had been trashed
when she’d gone to school this morning. She was even going to tell them
about the things in the basement because it seemed to her that what had
happened to Davey’s lunch would somehow substantiate her story.
But before Penny could speak, Aunt Faye spoke up in her most morally
indignant tone of voice: “What I want to know is what kind of school
this is your father’s sent to you. What kind of dirty hole is this
place, this Wellton? ”
“It’s a good school,” Penny said defensively.
“With rats?” Faye said. “No good school would have rats. No halfway
decent school would have rats. Why, what if they’d still been in the
locker when Davey went for his lunch? He might’ve been bitten. Rats
are filthy.
They carry all kinds of diseases. They’re disgusting.
I simply can’t imagine any school for young children being allowed to
remain open if it has rats. The Board of Health has got to be told
about this first thing tomorrow. Your father’s going to have to do