Liar & Spy (6 page)

Table Six is just me and Bob English Who Draws. There is no sixth taste on the board. We look at each other. I know he won’t raise his hand, because he never does, and he knows I won’t raise mine, because I never do either. We sort of shrug at each other.

“I almost forgot,” Mr. Landau says. He goes up to the whiteboard, writes the word
bittersweet
, and puts a 6 next to it. “Twenty minutes.”

My bittersweet memory: Jason and I are six or seven, grocery shopping with my mom. We’re outside the Met Foods on Flatbush, and it’s a sunny fall day. Jason and I are looking at some big plastic balls in a wire bin on the sidewalk by the front doors. Mom is waiting for us.

We’re about to go inside the store when we hear this thump, like someone has bounced a Super Ball against the store window, only there’s no one there, and no ball.

Then we see the bird lying on the sidewalk. It’s tiny and brown and in a bad position, and Jason begins to freak out. I want to cry because I think maybe we did something that killed the bird.

The first thing Mom does is pull us into a huddle and tell us that it isn’t our fault. What happened was that the sun was shining so hard against the store window that the glass reflected the trees on the other side of the street and the bird didn’t even know the window was there. The bird thought it was flying into the air and the trees, just like on any other day.

She has us breathe. Then she turns to the bird, and says, “Look.”

We look. The bird is pulsing—its neck is sort of vibrating. Jason gets scared, thinking that it’s having an attack or something, but Mom explains that it’s just the bird’s heart beating. Bird hearts beat very fast.

“The bird is alive,” she tells us. “It must have been stunned when it hit the window.”

And just then the bird’s head snaps back to a right-looking position on its neck, and it hops up and shakes itself. We start laughing and slapping each other five.

Mom says this calls for a celebration. She lets us each choose a plastic ball out of the wire bin, and she buys them for us.

I have no idea where that ball is now, and I’m pretty sure Jason didn’t keep his either.

I don’t write any of this down on my paper, of course. In fact, I don’t write anything down.

I glance at Bob English Who Draws and see that he isn’t writing either. He’s drawing a supervillain with pointy ears and a billowing black cape. He must feel me watching, because he looks over, then jots something down and shoves his notebook over to me.

On one corner of the page, he’s written:

So dum!

I lean over and say, “You do know
dumb
has a
b
on the end of it, right?”

“Haven’t you heard of spelling reform?” he asks in a low voice.

“No.”

“I spell it like it sounds. Benjamin Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt both believed in it,” he says. “Look it up.”

“Okay.”

“Ask yourself: Does that
b
serve a purpose? Why is it even there?”

“Mr. English!” Mr. Landau snaps. “Shall I presume that you have finished your work and are ready to share it with the class?”

Bob English hunches over his drawing and says nothing. I don’t say anything either. But what I’m thinking is that
dum
just looks—kind of dumb.

Chicken IS Chickens

Lunch. The hot lunch is pasta with meat sauce. It’s actually delicious. Maybe not
umami
delicious, but pretty darn tasty. Hardly any of the other kids will eat it, because if you eat anything other than a dry, crumbly bagel for lunch at this school you are basically announcing yourself as a freak. You might as well be walking around without pants.

But I eat the hot lunch. I figure that life will have its share of dry bread, and that when there is meat sauce on the table, I should eat it. And I do.

I’m finishing my garlic knot when Jason walks over to me with his tray. He is not coming to sit. He is on his way from the cool table to the garbage cans. I am a point on that line.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

“My mom says you guys sold your house.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“You moved into an apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you bring the fire escape?”

“No. We had to leave it.”

“Oh. Dude—sorry. About that.”

I raise my shoulders and drop them. “Stuff happens.”

“Yeah. Your parents are still cool, though, right? So I bet it’ll be, you know, okay.”

“You’re right,” I tell Jason. “It will be okay. It already is.”

He nods and walks away.

It’s hard to hate him, even though he kind of shrugged off our friendship like it was nothing, because I’ve been watching him all year, and underneath that skateboarder outfit, he’s the same person he always was. I don’t know whether that makes it harder or easier. I watch Jason tip his tray into the garbage. His bagel wrapper sticks, and he takes the time to peel it off before he adds his tray to the stack.

After school, Bennie counts back my change and tells me, “I saw your friend today.”

“Who?”

“Candy.”

“Oh,” I say, stuffing coins into my pocket. “She’s not my friend. She lives in my new building.”

“One of my best customers!” Bennie calls after me.

My key is somehow getting worse. To get the door open, I have to jiggle it in the lock and simultaneously pull the knob toward me as hard as I can. And the whole time I’m struggling, I can hear the phone ringing on the other side of the door.

“Hello?”

“Come up,” Safer says.

Candy lets me in, and I follow her down the hallway, trying to memorize everything she’s wearing for when Safer quizzes me.

She points at the living room, says, “He’s in there,” and then takes a left through the swinging door that leads to the kitchen. I hear her mom’s voice behind the door, and then Candy’s high one answering “Just Georges.” I notice there’s a pretty good smell in the apartment.

Safer is on his knees with a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes, looking through one of the four big windows.

“Overalls,” I tell him. “Purple T-shirt, blue socks.”

“Sit.” He points an elbow at a green beanbag chair.

“Three hair-clip thingies,” I say, plunking into the beanbag. “And some of those rubber-band bracelets.”

“Okay, great. You can stop now.”

“Who are you spying on?” I ask him. “Someone across the street?”

He lowers the binoculars and stares at me. “You’re joking, right? If I were spying, I wouldn’t want to be seen, would I? And so pressing up against the window like this would be a pretty dumb idea, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m watching the birds.”

“What birds?”

He puts the binoculars on the windowsill, picks up his spiral notebook, and writes in it. When he’s done, he flips the notebook closed and looks at me. “You know about the parrots, right?”

“What parrots?”

“The wild parrots. Nesting over there.” He points to a building across the street. “See that air conditioner? With all the twigs stuffed underneath it? That’s the nest.”

I squint at it. “They’re, like, real parrots? Where did they come from?”

“Runaway pets, maybe. Or some people think they escaped from a crate at Kennedy Airport in the 1960s.”

“Wow. I didn’t know parrots lived that long.”

“
These
birds didn’t escape—their grandparents or something, probably. They’ve been living over there for years. Pigeon used to watch them. He had this book where he wrote down all this stuff about them, like when they laid their eggs and when the babies hatched.” He looks down at his notebook. “I’m taking notes now, in case he wants them later. My mom says he went teen-crazy but it won’t last forever.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“No it isn’t. It’s probably just stupid.”

Candy appears in the doorway. “Mom’s cooking and her hands are full of guck, but she says can Georges stay for dinner?” She looks at me. “Dad has to teach a last-minute lesson, so you might as well eat his food.”

“Candy!” her mom’s voice calls out. “What kind of an invitation is that?”

“Guck” doesn’t actually sound all that great, but I say, “Sure, maybe, let me call my dad.”

Candy smiles and retreats to the kitchen.

“Your dad’s a teacher?” I ask Safer.

“Kind of. He owns a driving school.”

“Is it Sixth Sense?”

“Yeah. You know it?”

“I used to walk past it every day on my way home from school.”

I call Dad on his cell and ask if I can stay. He says yes, but I feel kind of bad, picturing Dad eating alone, until he tells me he’s over at the hospital, saying hi to Mom, so maybe he’ll just stay and have something with her.

“Want to talk to her?” he asks. “I’m down in the cafeteria, grabbing a cup of tea, but you could call back in five minutes.”

I tell him Safer and I are busy right now, but that I’ll get my homework done early so we can watch some baseball when he gets home. Dad sounds happy about that. The truth is that I did all my homework at school, during lunch, when other kids were talking and stuff.

When I get off the phone, Safer says, “Ready to get down to business?”

“Sure.”

“We need to keep track of when Mr. X comes and goes. We’re going to try out a new piece of equipment.”

Phew. No lobbycam.

He holds up a gum wrapper and says, “Ta-da!”

“That’s equipment?”

“The best spy equipment doesn’t
look
like equipment, Georges. Here’s how it works: Right before you go to bed tonight, you zip upstairs to Mr. X’s and stick this gum wrapper between the door and the frame, at about knee height. When he opens the door to leave in the morning, it’ll drop onto the doormat. I’ll start checking really early, so I’ll know when he goes out.”

We’re sitting in the beanbags, facing each other, so it’s
hard to avoid his eyes. But I’m not sure I want to be a part of this. I mean, what if the guy opens his front door at the very moment I’m standing on his doormat fiddling with a gum wrapper?

Safer is still talking. “And then I’ll put the wrapper
back
between the door and the frame, so that we’ll know if he’s come back. If the wrapper is still in the door when you get home from school, he hasn’t come home yet. That means we have a window of opportunity.”

“Opportunity for what?”

“We’re not up to that part yet.”

“So I have to put the gum wrapper in at night and then check it after school?”

“Exactly.”

Great. So that’s
twice
a day I’ll be standing on the doormat of doom.

“Why a gum wrapper?”

Safer smiles. “Think about it, Georges. A piece of paper on the floor is suspicious. But a gum wrapper provides its own story—someone unwrapped a piece of gum and dropped the wrapper on the floor. People are slobs! End of story. No suspicions.”

“Huh.”

“Besides, we need a cover story in case one of us actually runs into Mr. X. I mean, what are we doing squatting on his doormat, right? So if you see him, all you have to do is straighten up, hold out the gum wrapper, shake your head, and say ‘People are slobs!’ Then walk away, nice and slow.”

Safer thinks of everything. It makes it hard to turn him down.

We hang out and watch the parrots until dinner. Safer doesn’t mention anything else about Mr. X, so I don’t either. I learn to focus the binoculars and actually see one of the parrots fly out of the nest. Safer tells me that even though it looks like a messy bunch of sticks, the nest has three different areas, almost like little rooms.

Candy announces that dinner is ready, and then Safer’s mom comes out of the kitchen. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen her since that first night in the lobby when I had to pretend I didn’t know Candy. She smiles at me and shakes my hand and tells me I’m very welcome in their home. Which is nice.

Right before we sit down to eat, the door bangs open and a thicker, much taller version of Safer walks in. He’s got dark wavy hair. A pair of sneakers with the laces tied together hangs over one shoulder, and he’s wearing black jeans and a faded T-shirt.