Page 29 of Clever Little Thing

“I’m thinking maybe you should test her thyroid gland. I really think her face is puffy. Her voice seems hoarse, even. Can’t you hear it?”

Fleishman shook her head. “With hypothyroidism we would expect to see reduced growth. She wouldn’t be shooting up like this.”

I persuaded Fleishman to order a blood test for hormone levels nonetheless, even though Stella hated needles. “Could it be”—I mouthed the words—“a brain tumor?”

Fleishman shook her head. “There’s absolutely no reason to think that.”

“Or it could be Prader-Willi syndrome,” I said. The previous night I’d read about a rare disorder that caused abnormal appetite in children.

Fleishman sighed. “I really advise parents not to google their child’s symptoms.” She smiled. “Your kid has puppy fat, but when you google it, it looks like kidney failure.”

“You think it might be kidney failure?” I asked.

Fleishman shook her head. “Of course not. That was an example.”

“You don’t think I need to put a padlock on the fridge?”

Fleishman looked startled. “Absolutely not. At her age, you should not restrict her food intake. We’ll see what the tests say, but really if anything, she seems exceptionally healthy.” She made an extra note in Stella’s file and then showed us out without her usual collegiality.

Stella didn’t even flinch when the nurse inserted the needle at the lab. Maybe Dr. Fleishman was right and there was nothing wrong with her. But I couldn’t help thinking about those birds in the wildlife center, the ones who sat on their perches instead of flying. They weren’t the same birds they had once been: they’d lost their wildness.

18.

Itold Irina that Pete and I would handle school pickup the next day. I made an urgent appointment for Pete and me to meet Mr. McNaughton, Stella’s teacher. If Stella wasn’t sick, maybe something was going on at school.

At three thirty, Stella emerged from the building with Lulu, her grubby socks and trainers contrasting with Lulu’s frilled ankle socks and patent-leather Mary Janes. Lulu whispered something in another girl’s ear, and they giggled. Stella smiled vaguely. My heart squeezed. A couple of months ago, she would have been cross-legged on the picnic table, bent over a thick book, her hair hanging forward and making a private cave.

“Pete, love the beard!” It was Emmy, in bodycon stripes today. I cringed. I’d been doing the morning drop-off as fast as possible, and because Irina did the pickups, I’d managed to avoid Emmy since she banned me from FOMHS. Now she jutted her chin at me in greeting, as if she’d never called me cray-cray.

OK, so that was how we were going to play it: pretend nothinghad happened. I nodded back. Emmy stood closer to Pete than to me. “Lulu would love to do a joint costume with Stella for Halloween,” she told him. She always swooned over Pete, who stood out from the other middle-aged dads, with his chiseled cheekbones and American congeniality, and he was only more adorable because he seemed not to realize it.

“Wow!” said Pete. “Great. Yes! What are they going to be?”

“You wouldn’t have to do anything, Charlotte,” Emmy said quickly, like she was being solicitous. Really, she was saying she didn’t want me there. She turned back to Pete. “Ilovedoing that kind of thing.” As @LittleHiccups, she posted on Instagram about children’s outings, parties, and, of course, the adorable costumes she crafted for Lulu and her baby sister.

“Can Stella come home with us for a few hours? I’ll get her measurements, and then she and Lulu can play.”

“We’ll check with Stella,” I said. I imagined Stella being forced to practice cartwheels and watch Japanese hair videos. Lulu had been acting like a teenager since she was about six. I pulled her out of earshot and murmured, “Do you want to go to Lulu’s for a drop-off playdate?”

Before she answered, I knew what she was going to say.

“Oh yes.”

As Emmy shepherded Stella and Lulu into her minivan, Pete swiped at his eyes. “Are you OK?” I murmured.

“Sorry.” Pete blinked. “I can’t believe she’s going on a playdate, on her own. She’s come so far socially.”

I nodded, feeling hollow.Oh yes.Towards the end, Blanka kept on saying, “Oh yes,” to everything I asked her to do, but she never did it.

Mr. McNaughton greeted us and showed us into the classroom. He was short and rotund with a bushy beard and black-rimmed spectacles and made me think of a Beatrix Potter character. He even wore a brown tweed jacket, and I liked to think that underneath he was covered in grey fur, that his home was a hole under the hedge with a tiny blue door.

We all sat on little chairs around a little table. Mr. McNaughton smiled. “Right up front, I want to put any concerns to rest. Stella is doing very well. I’ve prepared some of her work to show you.” He laid out some long-division problems she could have solved two years ago, an indifferent drawing of a Viking longship, a writing exercise in which she had to put in the commas and then write her own sentence with commas. The writing didn’t look like hers, which was big, loopy, and impatient. This writing was careful and tiny.For dinner, they had roast beef, potatoes, peas, and cake.“Her handwriting is excellent,” he said. “As you know, handwriting is very important—”

“But people type everything nowadays,” I interrupted.Roast beef?Where did that come from? Stella had never had beef for dinner in her life. And that Viking longship, different at each end. Stella knew perfectly well that longships were double-ended, enabling the Vikings to reverse easily if they encountered icebergs.

“Stella is really close to achieving her Pen License,” McNaughton said.

“Great!” said Pete, because most of the kids had got their Pen Certificates in year three. But what did it matter if you had great handwriting if you were only copying out banal sentences?

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