Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  Also by Rebecca Stead

  When You Reach Me

  First Light

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Stead

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Yan Nascimbene

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stead, Rebecca.

  Liar & spy / by Rebecca Stead. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Seventh-grader Georges adjusts to moving from a house to an apartment, his father’s efforts to start a new business, his mother’s extra shifts as a nurse, being picked on at school, and Safer, a boy who wants his help spying on another resident of their building.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89953-9

  [1. Spies—Fiction. 2. Apartment houses—Fiction. 3. Family life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 4. Middle schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.]

  I. Title. II. Title: Liar and spy.

  PZ7.S80857Li 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011042674

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Randi

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Science Unit of Destiny

  People, People

  A Boy Your Age

  Sir Ott

  Spy Club

  Safer

  Fortunes

  Salty

  Uncle

  Bittersweet

  Chicken IS Chickens

  The Soft G

  Bounce and Yank

  Fieldwork

  Big Picture

  Umami

  Break and Enter (#1)

  Blue

  Break and Enter (#2)

  Heat

  A Message from the Chef

  Break and Enter (#3)

  Mr. X

  Rules of the Game

  Blu Teem

  Taste Test

  Knock, Knock

  How to Land a Plane

  Little of Both

  The Scout

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Science Unit of Destiny

  There’s this totally false map of the human tongue. It’s supposed to show where we taste different things, like salty on the side of the tongue, sweet in the front, bitter in the back. Some guy drew it a hundred years ago, and people have been forcing kids to memorize it ever since.

  But it’s wrong—all wrong. As in, not even the slightest bit right. It turns out that our taste buds are all alike, they can taste everything, and they’re all over the place. Mr. Landau, seventh-grade science teacher, has unrolled a beaten-up poster of the ignorant tongue map, and he’s explaining about how people have misunderstood the science of taste since the beginning of time.

  Everyone in my class, even Bob English Who Draws, is paying attention today, because this is the first day of “How We Taste,” also known as The Science Unit of Destiny. They all believe that sometime in the next ten school days, at least one person in the room is going to discover his or her own personal fate: true love or tragic death.

  Yes, those are the only two choices.

  Bob English Who Draws is really named Robert English. Back in fourth grade, our teacher, Ms. Diamatis, started calling him Bob English Who Draws because he was always zoning out and doodling with a superfine Sharpie. Ms. Diamatis would say, “Bob English Who Draws, can you please take us through the eights?” It was her job to make sure no one got out of fourth grade without lightning-fast multiplication skills. And everyone has called him that ever since.

  While the rest of the class is hanging on every syllable that comes out of Mr. Landau’s mouth, I’m looking at the false tongue poster and I’m kind of wishing it wasn’t wrong. There’s something nice about those thick black arrows: sour here, salty there, like there’s a right place for everything. Instead of the total confusion the human tongue actually turns out to be.

  People, People

  It’s Friday afternoon, last period. Gym. Ms. Warner and I have done our Friday high five. We do it every week, because I hate school and she hates work, and we both live for Friday.

  We’re playing volleyball, with an exclamation point. Ms. Warner has written it on the whiteboard outside the gym doors: Volleyball!

  The combination of seeing that word and breathing the smell of the first floor, which is the smell of the cafeteria after lunch, creates some kind of echo in my head, like a faraway shout.

  In the morning, the cafeteria smells fried and sweet, like fish sticks and cookies. But after lunch, it’s different. There’s more kid sweat and garbage mixed in, I guess. Or maybe it’s just that, after lunch, the cafeteria doesn’t have the smell of things to come. It’s the smell of what has been.

  Volleyball!

  Ms. Warner is at the net with her hands on her knees, calling stuff out to kids and smiling like crazy. “Shazam!” she yells when Eliza Donan gives the ball a halfhearted bump with her forearm. “Sweet shot!”

  If you didn’t know Ms. Warner, you’d think there’s no place she’d rather be. Maybe she’s trying out my mom’s famous theory that if you smile for no reason at all you will actually start to feel happy. Mom’s always telling me to smile and hoping I’ll turn into a smiley person, which, to be honest, is kind of annoying. But I know she’s extra-sensitive about me ever since she and Dad made their big announcement that we had to sell our house. She even recorded a bunch of America’s Funniest Home Videos for me to watch: my smile therapy.

  I tell Mom to please save her miracle cures for the hospital. She’s a nurse in the intensive-care ward, where she has to check on her patients every fifteen minutes. It’s a hard habit to break, I guess, all that checking. I’ve been watching the shows, though, and they do make me laugh. How can you not laugh at America’s Funniest Home Videos? All those wacky animals. All that falling down.

  I count the number of rotations we have left in “Volleyball!” before it’s my serve and then glance at the huge clock in its protective cage on the wall. I calculate a fifty-fifty chance that the dismissal bell will save me, but the next thing I know I’m in that back corner, balancing the ball on one palm and getting ready to slap it with the other.

  Don’t look at the ball.

  Point your eyes where you want the ball to go.

  But the advice in my head is useless, because time slows down until everyone’s voices transform into something that sounds like underwater whale-singing.

  Well, obviously “underwater,” I tell myself. Where else are you going to find whales?

  I should be paying attention to the ball.

  Just as I’m about to smack it, I get this feeling, this premonition, that I’m going to land the ball at least somewhere on the other side of the net, maybe even in that big hole in the second row where Mandy and Gabe are being careful not to stand too close because they secretly like each other.

  I’m wrong, though. The ball goes high, falls short, and hits the floor between the feet of Dallas Ll
ewellyn, who is standing right in front of me. My serve is what is called an epic fail, and some of the girls start doing the slow clap.

  Clap.

  Pause.

  Clap.

  Pause.

  Clap.

  It’s sarcastic clapping. You know that famous philosophical question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Well, I have no idea, but it has to be better than the slow clap.

  Ms. Warner is yelling “People! People!” like she always does when kids are mean and she has no idea what to do about it.

  Dallas hands me the ball for my second try and I hit it right away, just to get it over with. This time it goes way left, out of bounds. Then the bell rings, kids fly in all directions, and the week is over.

  I stroll over to Ms. Warner, who’s sitting on a stack of folded-up mats against the wall, making notes on her clipboard.

  “Happy weekend, G!” she says. “We made it. Forty-eight hours of freedom and beauty, looking right at us.”

  Ms. Warner is trying to make the name G stick to me. My name is Georges, which is pronounced just like “George” because the S is silent, but of course some kids call me “Jor-Jess,” or “Gorgeous.” I don’t much care. There are worse things to be called than Gorgeous, even for a boy.

  “G? You in there?” Ms. Warner is waving one hand in front of my face. “I said happy weekend.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but for once I don’t want to think about the weekend, because we’re moving out of our house on Sunday. Mom will be at the hospital, so I’m Dad’s designated helper.

  Ms. Warner is smiling at me. “Pop a squat,” she says, patting the pile of gym mats. I lie down on the floor instead.

  A few of the kids have decided to kick off their weekends by hurling volleyballs at the giant clock. They can’t hurt it, because of the wire cage, but Ms. Warner still feels duty-bound to stop them. “Be right back,” she tells me, and then she rushes off yelling “People! People!”

  Lying down on the floor was a mistake. Lying down suggests I’m dying, and attracts vultures. Or if not dying, defeated. And if not vultures, Dallas Llewellyn.

  Dallas is standing over me. Before I can blink, he’s got one foot on my stomach. Just resting it there.

  “Nice serve, Gorgeous.”

  This is classic bully crap. That’s what Mom called it when she saw the things someone wrote on one of the dividers in my notebook a few weeks ago. I would never have showed them to her, but she goes through my stuff sometimes. “Catching up,” she calls it.

  Dallas’s sneaker is resting on the soft spot right below my solar plexus. It hurts. I do some shallow breathing, because I don’t want his heel to puncture any of my internal organs.

  “We were losing anyway,” I tell him, though I have no idea whether that’s true.

  “It was tied,” he snarls, and I try to shrug, which is hard to do when you’re lying on your back with someone’s foot in your gut. I want to tell him what I know, which is that the fate of the world doesn’t hang on whether a bunch of seventh graders win a game of volleyball in some really old school in Brooklyn that smells like a hundred years of lunch.

  Instead, I wrap my hands around his ankle, and lift. I’ve been doing morning weights with Dad for about a year—just these little blue plastic ones that tuck under my parents’ bed, but there’s a cumulative effect. Dallas circles his arms uselessly and then hits the floor.

  It’s a harmless bounce. I would never want to hurt him. I know that soon all of this will be a distant memory for both of us. But pain is pain, and I would rather avoid it.

  A Boy Your Age

  On Sunday morning I stand in the lobby of our apartment building, watching the movers come in and out. Dad says I’m holding the door, but the door is actually propped open with a scratched-up wooden triangle that reminds me of the blocks area in pre-K. What I’m really doing is looking down at that wedge of wood and thinking about how I used to make these super-long car ramps with Jason, and how Jason dresses like a skateboarder now, which he isn’t, and how whenever Carter Dixon or Dallas Llewellyn calls me Gorgeous, Jason just stands there.

  I lean past the lobby door so I can see up and down the empty sidewalk. It’s super-bright out, and the trees make cool shadows on the pavement.

  Dad’s in the moving truck, making sure the furniture comes out in a certain order. I’m guessing he’s being about as helpful as I am, standing guard over my wooden wedge.

  I’m hearing a sound. It’s a funny, high-pitched buzzing that I think maybe I’ve been hearing for a while, without noticing. There should be a word for that, when you hear something and simultaneously realize that it’s been swimming around in your brain for five minutes without your permission.

  I glance around to see what’s buzzing, first at the ancient yellow chandelier above my head, then at the shiny silver intercom on the wall. It’s the kind with a keypad and a little camera that lets the people in their apartments see who’s in the lobby before deciding whether to let them in. Dad has already shown me how the whole thing works.

  I take a step toward the intercom, and the buzzing stops.

  I go back to thinking about Jason, who was my every-day-after-school friend until the end of sixth grade, when he went to sleepaway camp for seven weeks and then started sitting at the cool table in September like he’d been there all along.

  All of a sudden there’s a whole lot of noise coming from somewhere right above me, a weird mix of rattling, clicking, and pounding that echoes around the tiled lobby, and then two dogs appear on the landing at the top of the stairs, a giant yellow one and a small dark one. There’s a boy about my size behind the dogs, holding the twisted leashes in one hand and trying to keep a grip on the banister with the other.

  I flatten myself against the open door, thinking the dogs will pull the boy past me and out the front, but they don’t. Instead, they drag him almost in a circle, to a door underneath the stairs. They make the turn so fast that he actually hops on one leg for a few seconds, almost tipping over sideways, like in a cartoon.

  The door under the stairs is closed. The dogs wait in front of it, wiggling and wagging, while the boy, not once looking at me, struggles to get a huge ring of keys out of his front jeans pocket. He picks a key, unlocks the door, and pushes it open. I can see another set of stairs, going down.

  The dogs surge, pulling the boy down the stairs, and the door slams shut behind them. Loudly. And then everything is quiet again.

  I know exactly what Dad would say if he were here. He wouldn’t mention the weird stuff—how the dogs ran straight to a mystery door under the stairs, or the kid’s enormous key ring.

  Dad would only say, “Look, Georges! A boy your age.”

  Sir Ott

  The first thing Dad does is hang the Seurat in our new living room. It’s not a real Seurat, because that would make us millionaires. It’s a poster from a museum. I feel a little better as soon as I see it on the wall above the couch, exactly where it always was at home. I think we both do.

  Two summers ago we went to Chicago, where the real painting takes up one entire wall of the Art Institute. What you can’t tell from our poster is that the picture is painted entirely with dots. Tiny little dots. Close up, they just look like blobs of paint. But if you stand back, you see that they make this whole nice park scene, with people walking around in old-fashioned clothes. There’s even a monkey on a leash. Mom says that our Seurat poster reminds her to look at the big picture. Like when it hurts to think about selling the house, she tells herself how that bad feeling is just one dot in the giant Seurat painting of our lives.

  When I was little, I thought my parents were calling our poster the “Sir Ott,” which is how you pronounce Seurat, the name of the artist from France who painted the picture. And I still think of the poster that way—like it’s this guy, Sir Ott, who has always lived with us.

  In my head, Sir Ott has a kind of personality. Very polite. Very quiet. He watches a lot of television.

 
Seurat’s first name? It was Georges.

  Here’s a piece of advice you will probably never use: If you want to name your son after Georges Seurat, you could call him George, without the S. Just to make his life easier.

  After Sir Ott is up on the wall (and perfectly level), Dad and I start with the kitchen stuff, unwrapping dishes and glasses. It’s amazing how much work it is to move just twelve blocks.

  I’m tossing all the silverware into a drawer until I remember that Dad will probably have a heart attack because he can’t stand to see things all jumbled up like that, and so I stop and do it right—forks with forks, tablespoons separate from teaspoons.

  We make a good team, and soon we have about ten giant plastic bags stuffed with the crumpled-up newspaper everything was wrapped in.

  “Let me show you the basement,” Dad says. “That’s where the garbage and recycling go.” Because the garbage is my job.

  At our house, doing the garbage meant wheeling two big plastic bins out to the curb. I could take both at once, steering them in two directions around the crack on the broken concrete path and bringing them back together again on the other side. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s a big crack: I tripped over it when I was five and chipped my front tooth. I imagine the new owners of our house hitting that crack on trash day, their cans tipping and their garbage going everywhere.

  Dad and I toss the bags of newspaper into the hall, making a small mountain. When the elevator opens, there’s a guy in it, standing next to two big suitcases. He’s wearing a baseball cap with a fish on it.

  Dad tells him we’ll take the next one. “Don’t want to drown you,” he says, pointing at our massive pile of recycling.

  “I appreciate it!” the man calls as the door is closing.

  Dad and I watch the beat-up metal arrow on the wall above the elevator move from 3, to 2, then L, for lobby. Dad loves old stuff like that, like the big yellow chandelier downstairs and the tiled hallway floors that will never, ever be clean again. He calls it “faded elegance.” That’s sort of his job now—he’s officially still an architect, but ever since he got laid off last year, he mostly helps people make their new houses look old. Which I think is a little crazy, considering that there are plenty of old houses they could just buy in the first place.