Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(14)

Dr. Battista was telling Pyotr that sometimes it seemed to him that women were just more…skinless than men, but he stopped speaking suddenly and looked at Bunny’s plate. “What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s tofu?”

“Tofu!”

“I’ve given up eating meat?”

“Is that wise?” her father asked.

“Is ridiculous,” Pyotr said.

“See there?” Kate told Bunny.

“Where would be her B-twelve?” Pyotr asked Dr. Battista.

“I suppose it could come from her breakfast cereal,” Dr. Battista mused. “Providing the cereal’s fortified, of course.”

“Is still ridiculous,” Pyotr said. “Is so American, subtracting foods! Other countries, when they want healthiness they add foods in. Americans subtract them.”

Bunny said, “How about, like, canned tuna? That doesn’t have a face per se. Could I get B-twelve from canned tuna?”

Kate was so surprised at Bunny’s tossing off that “per se” that it took her a moment to realize their father was way, way overreacting to the suggestion of tuna. He was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no!” he groaned.

They all stared at him.

He raised his head and said, “Mercury.”

“Ah,” Pyotr said.

Bunny said, “Well, I don’t care; I refuse to eat little baby calves that are kept in cages all their lives and never touch their feet to the ground.”

“You are so far off topic,” Kate told her. “That’s veal you’re talking about! I never put veal in meat mash!”

“Veal, beef, soft woolly lambs…” Bunny said. “I don’t want any of them. It’s wicked. Tell me, Pyoder,” she said, wheeling on him, “how can you live with yourself, making little mousies suffer?”

“Mousies?”

“Or whatever animals you’re torturing over there in that lab.”

“Oh, Bun-Buns,” Dr. Battista said sorrowfully.

“I do not torture mice,” Pyotr said with dignity. “They live very good lives in your father’s lab. Recreation! Companionship! Some of them have names. They live better than in outdoors.”

“Except that you stick them with needles,” Bunny said.

“Yes, but—”

“And those needles make them sick.”

“No, at current time they do not make them sick, which is interesting, you see, because—”

The telephone rang. Bunny said, “I’ll get it!”

She scraped back her chair and jumped up and ran to the kitchen, leaving Pyotr sitting there with his mouth open.

“Hello?” Bunny said. “Oh, hi-yee! Hi, there!”

Kate could tell it was a boy she was talking to because of the breathy, shallow voice she put on. Amazingly, their father seemed able to sense it too. He frowned and said, “Who is that?” Then he turned and called, “Bunny? Who is that?”

Bunny ignored him. “Aww,” they heard her say. “Aww, that’s so sweet! Aren’t you sweet to say so!”

“Who is she talking to?” Dr. Battista asked Kate.

She shrugged.

“It’s bad enough when she gets those…textings all meal long,” he said. “Now they’re calling her on the phone?”

“Don’t look at me,” Kate told him.

Kate would have choked on her own words, talking like that on the phone. She would have lost all self-respect. She tried to imagine it for a moment: getting a call from, oh, maybe Adam Barnes and telling him he was so sweet to say whatever he said to her. The very thought of it made her toes curl.

“Did you speak to her about the Mintz boy?” she asked her father.

“What Mintz boy?”

“Her tutor, Father.”

“Oh. Not yet.”

She sighed and offered Pyotr another helping of meat mash.

—

Pyotr and Dr. Battista fell into a discussion involving lymphoproliferation. Bunny returned from her phone call and sat pouting between them and cutting her block of tofu into infinitesimal cubes. (She wasn’t used to being ignored.) At the end of the meal Kate rose and brought in the chocolate bars from the kitchen, but she didn’t bother clearing the plates and so everyone just dropped the wrappers on top of the remains of dinner.

After Kate’s first bite of chocolate she grimaced; ninety percent cacao was about thirty percent too much, she decided. Pyotr looked amused. “In my country, is a proverb,” he told her. “?‘If the medication does not taste bitter, then it will fail to cause effective cure.’?”

“I’m not used to expecting a cure from my desserts,” she said.

“Well, I think it tastes excellent,” Dr. Battista said. He probably didn’t realize that his lips were pulled down at the corners like a Room 4 drawing of a frowny face. Bunny didn’t seem too pleased with the chocolate either, but then she jumped up and went out to the kitchen and returned with a jar of honey.

“Put some of this on,” she told Kate.

Kate waved it away and reached for the apple at the head of her plate.

“Poppy? Put some of this on.”

“Why, thank you, Bunnikins,” her father said. He dipped a corner of his chocolate bar into the jar. “Honey from Bunny.”