Liar & Spy

  Dallas wrinkles his nose like he smells something. “Maybe it is up to me. And maybe I say that you’re not going to marry Gabe after all. Maybe Gabe actually thinks you’re kind of gross. You ever think of that?”

  Mandy walks away saying, “Blah-blah-blah-whatever!” But her face is all red and I almost feel sorry for her.

  Dallas turns to me. “You know what? I bet the taste test is going to prove that you’re the only freak in the class. You can’t even taste stuff. Think about what a colossal freak that makes you.”

  Lunch is macaroni and cheese, crusty on the top the way I like it.

  Last period. Gym. It’s Friday again, so Ms. Warner and I do our high five.

  The whiteboard says Capture the Flag!

  Normally I don’t mind Capture the Flag! because it’s pretty easy to fly under the radar: I run around the edges of the game, I get a little exercise, and I don’t attempt anything stupid.

  But Ms. Warner has decided that today I will be a captain.

  “G is captain of the blue team,” she announces, and everybody groans. She’s just trying to be nice, of course, but I’m disappointed in her. I thought she knew me better than this. Because being a captain is exactly the kind of thing I could never care about.

  She looks at me. “C’mon, G. Blue team. Step up.”

  So I walk up to her, and she smiles.

  “Blue tongue team,” Dallas says, and Mandy laughs. I guess she and Dallas made up.

  “And Mandy is the captain of the red team,” Ms. Warner says. Mandy claps, jumps up and down, and hugs a few of her friends as if she’s just been crowned prom queen in a bad TV movie. She runs up to stand on the other side of Ms. Warner. The rest of the class lines up against the wall.

  Now I will have to “pick my team.” And I have to be careful, because if a kid is picked last, it can absolutely destroy his or her self-confidence. I decide that the best thing to do is to choose the kids who are normally picked last, first. I know exactly who they are. Everyone in the room knows who they are.

  Mandy looks more and more confused as I make my way through the smallest, least athletic, most officially uncool kids in the class. Ms. Warner is giving me knowing looks. If we could talk, I would remind her that I never asked to be captain, and that my goals as captain are probably different from most people’s. And I’m having fun, I realize.

  I let my team members pick code names. Joanna is Spike; Karl and Carl are Smoke and Fire; Bob English Who Draws is Squid; Kevin is Shark Attack; Natasha Khan is Mist; David Rosen is Stingray; Eliza Donan is Laser; Chad, Anita, and Paul are Thing One, Thing Two, and Thing Three; and I am Mask. This eats a couple of minutes. Mandy is complaining to Ms. Warner that we aren’t “taking the game seriously,” but Ms. Warner doesn’t rush us. Everyone on Mandy’s team looks competitive and grouchy.

  We play. Most of us get our flags pulled and land in jail, and the rest of us plot elaborate rescue missions. Whenever we get a jailbreak, Paul, aka Thing Three, streaks around the gym with both arms up yelling “Blue Team! It’s what’s for breakfast!” Anita, aka Thing Two, explains that this means Paul is having a good time.

  We ignore the red team’s flag. We’ve hidden our flag really well. Karl, aka Smoke, had the idea of tucking it around the basketball hoop. Smoke is tall.

  Carter Dixon and Dallas Llewellyn are getting angry. Mandy complains that our flag is nowhere. Ms. Warner assures her that it is somewhere.

  “Well, I’m not going through anyone’s pants or anything,” Mandy says. Ms. Warner tells Mandy that our flag is in plain view.

  I think of my fortune from Yum Li’s: Why don’t you look up once in a while? Is something wrong with your neck? I’m laughing when the bell goes off. Even though most of my team is incarcerated, it’s officially a tie because they never found our flag.

  I’m walking out the door when Ms. Warner calls out, “Happy weekend, G. See you on the dark side of Sunday. Get it? The dark side of Sunday? Monday!”

  “Hi, G,” Carter Dixon says to me at Bennie’s after school. I’ve already made my selection, which is peanut M&M’s, otherwise known as one of the world’s perfect foods, and I’m waiting for Bennie to take my money and count my change back to me.

  “Yeah G, good game today,” Dallas Llewellyn says. He drapes an arm over my shoulders.

  “G as in gorgeous,” Carter says.

  “G as in geek,” Dallas says.

  “D as in definitely,” Carter says.

  “D as in Dallas,” I point out, trying to be helpful. “Soon you guys will know the whole alphabet.”

  Dallas can move pretty quickly. He has me up against Bennie’s potato-chip rack faster than you can say sour cream and onion. I feel the chips against my back, and I’m thinking that a thousand bags of potato chips wouldn’t be the worst way to break a fall.

  “You!” Bennie shouts, pointing two fingers at Carter and Dallas. “Out!” He grabs an open bag of Doritos out of Carter’s hand and shakes it in his face. “Out.”

  Even the high school kids in our neighborhood know better than to mess with Bennie. He learned to fight when he was growing up in Cairo. He says they don’t fool around over there.

  When Dallas and Carter are gone, Bennie whirls on me. “You’re fighting? Since when?”

  I shrug.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Bennie says. “That kid, Dallas …”

  “Yeah?”

  “His real name is David.”

  I laugh. “I know. He changed it in third grade.”

  Bennie shakes his head. “What’s wrong with the name David? Perfectly good name! Seventy-five cents for the M&M’s.” I give him a dollar, and he counts back my change: “A nickel is eighty, a dime is ninety, and another dime makes one dollar!”

  He’ll never just hand you a quarter.

  At home, there’s a note under my door. Yellow paper, folded into fourths:

  Departed with suitcase, 12:45 p.m.

  Report to Uncle ASAP.

  I’ve barely had time to read it when the phone starts ringing. I pick it up and say, “I’m on my way.”

  “Um, on your way where?” a voice asks.

  “Bob?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “About what?” I’m hoping it isn’t more creative spelling.

  “About the taste test.”

  “Oh.”

  “The thing is, no one really knows what you can or can’t taste, right? So even if you don’t taste something, you can still act like you do. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He means I can pretend. I may be a nontaster, but when Mr. Landau hands out those chemical papers and tells us to put them in our mouths, I can run for water like everyone else. I don’t have to be the freak.

  “Just in case,” Bob says.

  Candy answers the door in a dress and her pig slippers.

  “Is Safer home?” I ask.

  “Safer is always home.”

  “Don’t be a pain, Candy!” Safer’s voice, right behind her. “I’m here babysitting. Guess who the baby is? Go away, I need to talk to Georges.”

  “About what?”

  “None of your business. Just go back to whatever you were doing, okay?”

  “What do you mean ‘whatever I was doing’? You left me there watching for the parrots. I fell asleep! And you owe me a dollar. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Time for you to go away.”

  “What about my dollar?”

  “Take the dollar! You know where my dog-walking money is! Geesh.”

  “Geesh yourself!” She walks down the hallway.

  “What took you so long?” Safer asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Mr. X stayed in his apartment all morning. And then he left with one of the big suitcases. I caught him on the lobbycam.”

  I don’t remind him that I still haven’t even seen Mr. X, let alone familiarized myself with his luggage.
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  “You think he went away somewhere? On a trip?”

  “Can’t say for sure. But it’s an opportunity. I’m going back in.”

  “Back in,” I repeat.

  “Only first we have to make a list.”

  “A list,” I repeat.

  “Yes, Georges, a list. Of everything that can possibly be opened with a key.”

  “What about a desk drawer?” I say, when we’re settled in our beanbags. “Or a briefcase?”

  “Desk drawer,” Safer says, writing in his notebook. “Briefcase.”

  “Or maybe a cabinet,” I say. “Some old cabinets have little keys like that—did you see anything old-looking in his apartment? Once my dad showed me this desk at an antiques store that had a secret drawer, behind this panel—”

  Safer looks up and stares at me. “This is an area of strength for you, Georges.”

  “Not really. I’ve just been dragged to a lot of antiques stores.”

  He smiles. “Still. You’re thinking like a spy. It’s progress.”

  Which makes me feel good, actually. Like I’m possibly getting better at something.

  And then, as if he can read my mind, Safer says, “You’re not a novice anymore, Georges. Is novice on your famous vocabulary list?”

  “I know what novice means.”

  “Good. Then you know what it means to be done with novice work.”

  I’m not sure I like where this is going. “So what’s after novice work?”

  Safer gives me his serious look. “Night work.”

  Break and Enter (#2)

  Night work means sleeping with my cell phone stuffed into a tube sock, under my ear. It’s on vibrate, and it goes off at two in the morning, dragging me from what feels like the bottom of the ocean.

  “This is my third call,” Safer says when I fumble it out of the sock. “Now that you aren’t a novice, you have to learn to be a lighter sleeper.”

  “How does a person learn that?”

  “I’ll be outside your door in sixty seconds.”

  “Now what?” I say when we’re standing on my doormat.

  “You’re not dressed.” Safer takes in my T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down oxford, tucked in.

  “What’s the point? You said the whole idea is that we aren’t supposed to see anyone else.”

  He starts up the stairs. “It’s just—spies get dressed. You know?”

  When we get up to Mr. X’s, we both automatically look for the gum wrapper, which is still stuck in the door.

  “Told you,” Safer says.

  “And can you guarantee that he won’t come back in the next twenty minutes?”

  “In the middle of the night?” Safer steps out of his shoes and lines them up on one side of Mr. X’s doormat.

  “I don’t think I can go in there,” I say.

  Safer opens one hand, showing me the little gold key. “I have to know what this opens, Georges. And that isn’t going to happen if we just stand here whispering in the hallway, is it?”

  I shake my head. “I can’t. It’s not right.”

  He looks at the ceiling for a second. “I could use your expertise in there, Georges. But if you aren’t comfortable with it, you can stand guard.”

  “Stand here, you mean? In my pajamas? What if someone walks by?”

  He pulls his credit card out of his back pocket. “The pajamas were your idea.”

  “Like it would make a lot of sense for me to be standing here in a James Bond suit!”

  “Shhh. No one is going to walk by, Georges. It’s two in the morning.”

  “Then why do you need a lookout?”

  He shoves the credit card between the door and the frame, just above the knob. “Look, I need to know. Do I have a lookout or not?”

  “No,” I say. “You don’t.”

  “Fine.” Safer forces the credit card down in one quick motion and turns the doorknob at the same time. The door opens, and he slips inside, closing it silently behind him.

  I pace back and forth in the hall for a minute and then run back downstairs. I get into bed and lie still, but sleep is not happening. I listen for footsteps above me, though the fact is that I have never heard a single sound from Mr. X’s apartment.

  That’s when my cell phone goes off. I’ve left it on my desk, where it buzzes against the wood and makes my heart practically explode.

  “Hello?”

  “If you were a key, what would you open?”

  “Safer,” I whisper, “where are you?”

  “You know exactly where I am, Georges. In fact, you’re the only person who does.”

  “Oh my God—whose phone are you on? Are you calling me from his phone?”

  “It’s not long-distance. He’ll never know.”

  “Safer!”

  “The key, Georges. Think.”

  “Get out of there. You’re freaking me out!”

  “Uh-oh,” Safer says.

  “Uh-oh what?”

  “Shhh—hold on.”

  I hold on. I’m squeezing my phone so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t shoot out of my hand and hit the ceiling. “Safer?” I whisper. “Are you okay?”

  “Wait,” he says, “I—” And then he hangs up.

  Or someone hangs up for him.

  Before I can even think, I’m back on Mr. X’s doormat, staring at Safer’s loafers. I put my ear to the door—nothing. I hold my breath, put my hand on the doorknob, and turn. The door is unlocked.

  Quietly, quietly, I swing it open and step into Mr. X’s apartment.

  It’s pretty dark in there, so I can’t see much—a wicker table piled with mail and magazines, an old-fashioned umbrella stand, and a green plastic watering can on the floor. I can see one corner of the kitchen because the light is on in there. It looks just like ours, with a big white fridge and white counters.

  “Safer?” I whisper.

  Safer saunters out of the kitchen, sipping a bottle of water. “If you were a key,” he says, “what would you open?”

  I’m speechless mad. I grab Safer’s arm and pull him into the hallway. He lets me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I say when the door has closed.

  Safer steps into his loafers. “Nothing is wrong. Well, there is one thing—I couldn’t find anything I could open with this.” He holds the key up between two fingers.

  “You scared me to death. And you—you turned me into a criminal! Do you realize that?”

  “A criminal? You’re a hero!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You came to save me, didn’t you? That’s hero behavior.”

  “I don’t care. I walked into someone’s apartment. In the middle of the night. That’s breaking and entering!”

  “It’s not like you took anything,” Safer says. “Thirsty?” He holds the water bottle out to me.

  “Did you steal that? Did you open his refrigerator?”

  “I was parched.”

  “You’re crazy.” I start down the stairs.

  “I gave you a gift,” Safer calls after me softly. “Now you know exactly what kind of person you are. You’re brave, Georges! Your skills need work, but you’re brave!”

  Heat

  Saturday morning, Dad wants us to go to MoMA, which is the Museum of Modern Art, which is “just across town” from Mom’s hospital, where he says we can “pop in” for lunch.

  I tell him that hospital food is not my idea of lunch, and besides, I have a lot of homework. Dad settles for breakfast together at Everybody’s Favorite Diner and then I walk him to the subway. He’s got Mom’s robe and some of those yogurts she likes in a plastic bag.

  When I get back to our lobby, I don’t feel like going home. I don’t want to chill with Sir Ott, I don’t want to eat string cheese, I don’t want to watch TV, and I definitely don’t want to do homework. So I buzz Safer, even though it’s on the early side and I’m officially still annoyed at him for acting like a lunatic last night. He answers immedi
ately.

  “Did you buy any gum while you were out?” Safer asks through the intercom. “I’m really in the mood for gum.”

  “I’m still mad at you,” I tell him.

  “I’m all out of gum. I had some gum this morning, but now I’m out. So hurry up.”

  Safer must think I’m stupid or something. He buzzes me in, and I head for the stairs. On four, I glance at Mr. X’s door and see the gum wrapper tucked neatly into the doorframe. Safer must have put it back last night after I stomped off.

  But I’m not up to spying today. I pluck the wrapper out with two fingers and run up to Safer’s. I ring the bell and stand there holding the gum wrapper out in front of me, totally forgetting that Safer never answers the door.

  “What’s that for?” Candy says when she sees me holding out the gum wrapper.

  “Nothing,” I say quickly. “People are slobs!”

  “That’s true,” she says, looking at me funny.

  I change the subject. “You never told me how old you are. Is it a big secret or something?”

  She narrows her eyes. “You never asked. I’m ten.”

  “Ten,” I repeat.

  “Almost ten. I’m small for my age.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If I was in school, I’d be in fourth grade. I looked it up.”

  “Yeah, that sounds right.”

  “If I went to your school,” she asks me, “would I be the smallest fourth grader?”

  “I don’t know the fourth grade that well,” I tell her. “But there’s actually one kid in my grade who’s about your size.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Teresa Conchetti. She’s always been super-short.”

  “Oh.”

  That came out wrong. “But she’s really smart, and also funny. She sits at the cool table and everything.” I don’t add that, last I knew, Jason had a crush on Teresa Conchetti, and that he actually stood up for her once in sixth grade when Dallas was calling her Terry Conchesty. But that was before.

  “With you, you mean?”

  “What?”

  “She sits at the cool table—with you?”

  “I don’t sit at the cool table,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t even want to sit there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because half the kids at that table are total jerks.”