Liar & Spy (8 page)

“Really?” I ask her. “More volleyball?” She holds up her hand for a high five, but I leave her hanging because it’s not Friday.

“Just try to have fun, G. Only two days till the weekend.
Remember, we’re in this together.” She looks sympathetic, but I’m beginning to wonder.

Dallas and Carter are right behind me. Again. Three steps past Ms. Warner and they start.

“Yeah, G. Try to have fun.”

Ignore.

One of them squeezes my shoulder. “Big muscle, Gorgeous. I guess that’s where the awesome serve comes from.”

Ignore.

Carter says, “Hey, Gorgeous, I’m talking to you. Answer me. Is the big muscle where the awesome serve comes from?”

Dallas says, “Lay off him, Carter. You know freaks aren’t good at sports.”

Ignore.

After school, I catch Safer’s call on the first ring. I’ve even had time to grab a pudding from the fridge.

“You’re welcome,” Safer says.

“For what?”

“I fixed your lock.”

It hits me—for the first time, I didn’t have to wrestle with my key.

“Hey, thanks.”

“We have a problem. How soon can you get here?”

I eat my pudding on the stairs, glancing down at Mr. X’s doormat on the way.

The gum wrapper is lying there, looking like an innocent piece of garbage. According to what Safer said last night, that means Mr. X is home. At least, I think that’s what it means. I lean down and pick it up, hoping he doesn’t choose that
particular moment to open his door. But as usual, I don’t hear a thing.

On six, Candy answers the bell and says, “You have chocolate on your chin.”

“I forgot a spoon,” I say, rubbing my face.

She walks me down the hall, as usual. When she’s gone, I present the gum wrapper to Safer, who’s on his knees, frowning through the window.

“Oh,” he says. “So I guess you-know-who is home.” But he seems distracted.

“What’s wrong?” I ask him, dropping into my green beanbag.

“The parrots are in trouble. Something is definitely weird over there. The nest looks different. Smaller. And sort of—disrupted.”

“Is that bad? Maybe they’re downsizing. Or redecorating. My dad says knowing what to throw away is the single most important thing about sprucing up your home.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Sorry. I thought it was a little funny. Maybe not
America’s Funniest Home Videos
funny, but, you know, a
modicum
of funny. That’s a vocabulary word. You probably don’t know about those.”

He turns around to stare at me. “What’s with you today?”

I shrug.

“Do me a favor,” Safer says. “Go downstairs and check the sidewalk under the nest. See if there are any sticks down there.”

“Sticks,” I repeat. I’m so comfortable in the beanbag.

“Yeah, sticks. Just go check it out, okay?”

“Why can’t you check it out?”

“I’m watching from up here!”

What I want to say is “Watching what, exactly?” But I say, “Fine, I’ll go,” and pull myself out of my beanbag.

In the elevator I imagine a bird decorator who’s wearing my dad’s glasses—the funky rectangular ones he wears when he has a meeting—and flipping through a bird-size binder full of twig samples.

There actually
are
a bunch of little sticks on the sidewalk across the street, and one green feather. It’s creepy, like I’m looking at a crime scene. I take the feather back to Safer, who holds it thoughtfully.

“I wonder if there was an attack on the nest,” he says. “It happens sometimes.”

“Who would want to attack some parrots? They have nothing worth taking.”

Safer looks at me like I’m nuts. “You’re joking, right? I’m not talking about a robbery. I’m talking about falcons or hawks—don’t they teach you about birds of prey at school?”

Well, no. They don’t.

Safer is staring out the window again, running the feather up and down one arm.

“Whoa!” Candy has crept up on us. Her pig slippers should be standard-issue spyware. They are that quiet. “Please tell me that’s not a real feather.”

“It came from—” I point through the window at the parrots’ nest.

Candy shouts at Safer, “Are you trying to give us all avian
flu? Put that down! Throw it away! And—take a shower, for Pete’s sake!” She stomps away in near silence.

“Her stomping will be a lot more effective when she outgrows those slippers,” I say.

He ignores me. “After an attack, survivors usually flee the nest. I bet they’re gone. All we can do is wait to see if they come back.”

“Maybe we should watch the lobbycam for a while,” I say.

Which perks him right up.

Bounce and Yank

I’m trying to imitate Safer’s infuriating talent for focusing his full attention on a tile floor and a locked glass door, but every time I set my eyes on that little black-and-white screen, my mind starts to wander away and I have to bring it back.

I miss Mom all of a sudden, like the feeling has been there all along and I can’t ignore it anymore. It’s like that buzzing sound I heard in the lobby on the morning we moved, right before Safer came down with the dogs, and how I was hearing that sound before I even knew I was hearing it.

Then I realize that I know what that buzzing sound
was
on the morning we moved, and I turn and look at Safer in surprise. He doesn’t move his eyes from the screen, but he says, “What?”

I’m about to say, “You were watching me that first day when I moved in. You were watching me through the lobbycam. It buzzes, you know. Like static.” But I don’t. I decide I want to think about whether to say this to him.

“Nothing,” I say.

And then I remember to put my brain back on the screen, where it wanders away again, this time to Dad.

The night Dad told us he got laid off, Mom said that if anyone knew how to bounce back it was Dad. They sat together on the couch and talked about all the other stuff he’d always wanted to do with his life, like start his business where he helps people make their houses look old. He got out his leather-covered notepad with the graph paper that Mom bought him for Christmas one year, and he started making a list of potential clients, and Mom rubbed his shoulders. Later, when I was brushing my teeth, I heard them talking in their bedroom.

“Remember those extra shifts they offered me at work?” Mom said.

“The ones with the crazy hours?” Dad said.

“And the excellent pay. I’m going to call them in the morning.”

“You hate the night shift,” Dad said.

“I do not.”

Which was when I realized that Dad’s getting laid off was more serious than they were pretending it was.

Bounce
, I think.

“Bounce?” Safer says.

Oops. Sometimes I say a word out loud without knowing it. Certain kinds of words more than others.

“
Bounce
is a weird word,” I say.

“Weird how?”

“It’s like—it sounds the same as what it is.”

He tries it. “Bounce.”

“Bounce,” I repeat.

“You’re right,” Safer says.

No one talks for a minute. We watch the screen and I do not let my mind wander.

“You know what’s another word like that?” Safer says.

“What?”

“Yank.”

Yank
, I think.
Yank
. I say out it loud: “Yank. Yeah, that works.”

I’m wondering how many people in the world would have understood right away what I meant about the word
bounce
, the way Safer just did.

Absolutely nothing is happening on the intercom screen. It’s a picture of an empty lobby. Safer says he trusts me to keep an eye on it while he gets us some peanut butter crackers.

“The thing about Mr. X,” he says, handing me three cracker sandwiches, “is that he’s careful. So observation will only get us so far.”

“What do you think he’s doing that’s so bad?” I ask. “You never actually said.”

“I have a few working theories.”

“Like?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“But
shouldn’t
I know?”

“I’m afraid you’ll get upset.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay. Ask yourself this question: Why would someone carry suitcases out of his apartment all the time? Heavy ones?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you aren’t thinking. Think: people in, suitcases out.”

“You think he’s chopping people up and putting them in the suitcases?”

He looks at me and raises his eyebrows. “You said it, I didn’t.”

“Okay,
that
is nuts.”

“Is it?”

“Do you even see people going into his apartment? You said, ‘People in, suitcases out.’ But what people are going in?”

“Hard to know—people get buzzed in all the time. Who’s to say where they’re going?”

“Who’s to say they’re being chopped up into little pieces!”

“Exactly,” Safer says. “That’s why we need evidence!”

I’m just sitting there, what they call dumbstruck. “I’ve never even seen the guy,” I manage to say.

Safer nods. “You’re still developing your lobbycam stamina.” He looks at his watch. “I have to walk the dogs. You coming?”

I’m trying to act less freaked out than I feel. I can’t decide if he’s serious.

“I told you you’d be upset,” Safer says. “You didn’t listen.”

Safer’s dog walking is mostly a lunchtime job. That’s when he takes four of them at once. People walk their own dogs after work, he tells me, except for one guy who works late and one lady who just had a baby. Safer walks their dogs, Ty and Lucky, twice a day, and sometimes on the weekend.

Safer knocks on 2A. I hear a baby crying somewhere far away behind the door.

“Who is it?” a voice says.

“It’s me—Safer.”

“Who?”

“Safer!”

“Whoooo?”

“Hey!” I say. “Is that the moo-cow kid?”

Safer just glares at the door. A few seconds later, there’s a knock from inside the apartment.

“Who’s there?” Safer asks.

“Interrupting cow!”

“Interrupting cow wh—”

“Moo! MOOOOOO!”

Safer rolls his eyes at me, but the door is finally being unlocked, and a giant yellow dog comes bounding out, knocking Safer off balance so that he has to grab the wall or fall down. He gives Lucky a hug—a hug like you’d give a person.

Lucky is one of those incredibly slobbery dogs, with slime leaking over black lips at the corners of her mouth. Now Safer is letting her lick his face all over, and I’m thinking that if he doesn’t get a bird disease, he’ll probably get a dog disease.

The moo-cow kid is holding out Lucky’s leash, being helpful for once. “And here’s the poop bag!” he says, shoving a crumpled plastic bag at me.

I put both hands up and say, “No thanks.”

Safer grabs it and stuffs it into his pocket.

“Babies are so stupid,” the moo-cow kid says. “They don’t even know where we hang the leash. And they don’t wear
shoes
.” He slams the door on us.

We collect Ty, which is easy because Safer just lets himself into the guy’s empty apartment with one of the keys on his giant key ring, and then we head down the stairs to the basement, where Safer unwedges a grimy Spalding pinky ball from behind a big pipe that runs along the wall. A metal door leads into the courtyard.

Standing in the courtyard is kind of like being a mouse at the bottom of a concrete garbage can, high walls all around and daylight up there somewhere. Safer starts throwing the ball for the dogs to fetch. They take turns bringing it back, very civilized. Whenever Lucky gets the ball, I let Safer deal with the slobber. I can handle Ty, though, because he’s not a big spitter.

When the dogs do their business and Safer cleans up after them, I don’t watch. He takes the plastic bags I’m not looking at and heads inside to throw them away.

As soon as he disappears into the basement, the dogs sort of deflate. They both stop playing and stare at the door.

“He’s coming right back,” I tell them. “He just went to throw away your—bags.” They give me a quick glance, and then it’s back to staring down the door with these worried-eyebrow looks. I never even noticed before this that dogs
have
eyebrows.

When Safer reappears, Ty and Lucky act like it’s a miracle. They’re leaping all over the place, practically hugging each other, and putting both paws up on Safer’s legs like they need to touch him to know he’s real.

“Geez,” I say. “I
told
them you were coming right back.”

“Come inside,” Safer says. “I have to show you something.”

Fieldwork

“Over here,” Safer says, jerking his head toward the laundry room, where he strolls around, very casual. “Notice anything unusual?”

Besides the washers and dryers, a couple of which are running, there are gray concrete walls, a wobbly table, a big metal sink, and a red plastic laundry basket.

“No.”

“Because you aren’t
looking
,” Safer says.

“I
am
looking!”

“Check out the dryers again.”

“I see—dryers. One has clothes going around and around. Getting dry.”

He looks at the ceiling with an expression that says he is trying to be patient. “But what
about
the clothes?”