Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “You know what Uncle means, right? It’s spy slang for the headquarters of an espionage organization.”

  “Oh. But I thought your office was in the basement.”

  He makes a face. “It’s nicer up here, don’t you think?”

  I look around at the couches, the rugs, and the beanbag chairs. “It’s definitely nicer up here,” I say.

  “So. Have you been practicing?”

  “Yeah. At school, a little.”

  “What was Candy wearing? Start with the feet.”

  “Um, shoes?”

  “Bare feet,” he says. “What else?”

  “Jeans?”

  “Carpenter pants.”

  “What are carpenter pants?”

  “Let’s switch subjects. I’m going to train you on the lobbycam.”

  He walks over to the intercom, which is attached to the wall near the kitchen. It matches the one in our apartment: a white plastic square with what looks like a tiny little television screen set into it, and three buttons underneath, labeled VIEW, TALK, and DOOR.

  “I already know how to use it,” I say. “My dad showed me. You push View to get the picture on the screen. You push Talk to talk to whoever is down in the lobby. You push Door to buzz them in.”

  “You know how to use it as an intercom. But do you know how to use it as an observation tool?”

  He pushes the View button. The screen flickers, and then the lobby comes into focus. “What do you see?”

  “The door in the lobby.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. The floor.”

  “Very good.” He nods and continues to gaze at the screen. “Now what?” I say.

  He takes a spiral notebook from his back pocket, flips it open, and pulls a pen from behind his ear. “Now we wait.”

  “Just standing here, you mean?”

  “Of course not. We can bring stools from the kitchen.”

  “Ewwww! There’s stool in the kitchen? Gross!” Candy runs into the hallway from her bedroom. I make a mental note that she is now wearing a sundress and her fuzzy pig slippers.

  She stops in front of me. “Do you know what stool means? What it really means?”

  “Cut it out, Candy!” Safer tells her.

  “Stool means ‘poop,’ ” Candy tells me. “It’s the real word for it, the one that doctors use.”

  “CANDY!” a woman’s voice says from somewhere. “Enough!”

  Candy rolls her eyes and disappears into her room.

  “Is that true?” I ask Safer while we carry two wooden stools from the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” he says, “it is, actually.” We push the stools together in front of the little intercom screen. Safer goes back into the kitchen and reappears thirty seconds later with his flask.

  “Coffee?” he asks, holding it out.

  I tell him no thanks. We watch the lobby door.

  We watch the lobby door some more.

  Then we watch the lobby door a little more.

  “Does this ever get boring?” I ask.

  He looks like he can’t believe me. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t get boring. Boredom is what happens to people who have no control over their minds.”

  “Oh.”

  I tell myself that no matter what, I will not speak for the next ten minutes. I will not take my eyes off the lobbycam. I will not even look at my watch.

  We stare at the screen. Every once in a while it goes dark because there’s an automatic timer that shuts it off, and Safer has to push the button to make the picture come back. When I am positively, absolutely, one hundred percent sure ten minutes have passed, I check my watch.

  Six minutes.

  Safer is completely intent upon the screen, his pen hovering over his spiral notebook.

  At first I try to stifle my yawns, but it’s hopeless. I’m yawning and yawning. Safer doesn’t catch a single yawn. Maybe the coffee helps.

  I think I’m falling asleep when Safer says “Look!” He elbows me in the ribs and I almost fall off my stool, knocking his pen on the floor. I bend over to pick it up and smack my head against the wall. I stand up with one hand on my forehead.

  “You missed it!” Safer says. He snatches his pen from my hand and scribbles in his notebook. He grabs my wrist, looks at my watch and mumbles, “Four-fifty-one.”

  “What?” I say. “What happened? Four-fifty-one what?”

  “It was him. Mr. X.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Coming into the building. With his key.”

  “Oh. Right. What was he wearing? Was he wearing black? Did he have any suitcases?”

  “Of course he was wearing black. I told you, he only wears black. No suitcases this time. But he looked …”

  I wait. “He looked like what?”

  Safer clicks his pen a few times. “He looked furtive.”

  “Furtive,” I repeat.

  “It means ‘secretive.’ ”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Safer says. “You’re still in training, remember?”

  I think about what Candy said, that it took me and Dad forty-three minutes to get pizza. A tiny little kid can sit still in front of this thing without falling asleep, but I can’t.

  Something occurs to me: “How did Candy know we went for pizza yesterday?” I ask Safer. “We didn’t bring it home. We ate at DeMarco’s.”

  He looks at me thoughtfully. “Good question. Let’s ask her.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, I don’t need to—”

  “Candy!”

  In two seconds, Candy is in front of us. In case Safer decides to quiz me, I take note that she’s changed again, into overalls (denim, with front and back pockets) and a long-sleeved green T-shirt. She’s still wearing the pig slippers.

  “How did you know that Georges and his dad went for pizza yesterday?” Safer asks her.

  “Cup,” she answers.

  He nods.

  “What?” I say.

  “It was a cup,” Safer says. “Were you or your dad carrying one?”

  Then I remember that Dad had a lemonade from the fountain at DeMarco’s, and he finished it on the way home. The cup must have been in his hand when we came in.

  “You memorized what the cups look like at DeMarco’s?”

  She shrugs. “Everyone goes to DeMarco’s. I’ve been going there my whole life.”

  “Well, so have I,” I tell her.

  “Then close your eyes,” Safer says. “Don’t you know what their cups look like?”

  I close my eyes. “White,” I say, “and there’s writing … Have a Nice Day or something like that.…”

  “Thank You for Coming,” Candy says.

  “Yeah—Thank You for Coming! Written over and over, in a spiral. And the letters are green and red?”

  Candy claps for me and then heads back to her room. To change clothes again, I’m guessing.

  Safer nods at me. “Now you’re beginning to think like one of us.”

  I guess I am.

  I have to go downstairs to start homework. Safer walks me down the hallway toward his front door.

  “Safer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Who’s Pigeon?”

  “My brother.”

  “Is he here?”

  “No. He’s never here. See you at the next meeting.”

  “When’s that?”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Which reminds me. “Safer?”

  “Yes?”

  “How did you get into my room yesterday?”

  “Oh, I come and go,” he says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Wait—did it bother you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Say no more. It won’t happen again.”

  I smile. “Thanks.”

  Downstairs, I can’t find my protractor, which I need for geometry. I go into Dad’s
bedroom closet, where he crammed all the drawing supplies that used to be in his home office, behind our old kitchen. As soon as I pull the light cord, I see a stack of Mom’s nursing uniforms on a shelf, perfectly folded into neat Dad-squares, with one of her plastic name-tag pins resting on top. I decide to forget about homework. I chill out with Sir Ott on the couch and watch some America’s Funniest Home Videos instead. When Dad gets home, he looks worn out. We order from the bad pizza place with the yellowy cheese. I tell him I met a kid in the building, because I know it will make his day, and it does.

  The phone rings a few times, and Dad goes into his room to talk with the door closed. Maybe it’s another potential client.

  I leave Mom a note with the Scrabble tiles:

  WISH DEMARCOS DELIVERED

  LOVE ME

  Bittersweet

  Mom’s morning Scrabble note says:

  BEATS HOSPITAL FOOD

  The only good thing about when Mom works a double is that, along with the extra pay, she gets a two-hour card. A two-hour card is worth two hours of work—mostly she uses it to sleep in and start her morning shift two hours late, but sometimes she uses a two-hour card to leave work early and surprise me after school. She’ll be waiting right by the front doors, smiling away, and we’ll head over to Bennie’s before walking home. Bennie always makes a big deal out of Mom, pretending he’s in love with her. She reminds him of someone back in Egypt, he says, but he never tells who.

  First period. Science.

  We file in, Dallas and Carter walking close behind me.

  “Beep, beep, beep, beep,” Dallas says. “Beep-beep-beep-beep.”

  “What’s that noise?” Carter asks. “Dallas, is your freak alarm going off?”

  “Yeah, it’s going crazy. I wonder why. Oh, look, it’s just Georges.”

  They shove past me, laughing.

  Mr. Landau writes on the board:

  Sweet

  Salty

  Sour

  Bitter

  Then he turns around to face us. “There’s one more,” he says. “Does anyone know what it is?”

  No one does.

  Underneath Bitter, he writes:

  Umami

  “You mama,” Gabe says.

  Everyone cracks up. Especially Mandy.

  Mr. Landau looks at Gabe. “You know, someone makes that same comment almost every single year.” He sighs, like he’s really bored. “I just never know who it’ll be.”

  The class laughs even harder. Score one for Mr. Landau. He could teach Ms. Warner a thing or two. I wonder if they ever go out for coffee or anything.

  “Umami,” Mr. Landau says, “is often referred to as the fifth taste. Has anyone ever heard of it?”

  No one has.

  “Umami is a savory taste. Think of excellent Chinese food, a steak, or a perfectly ripe tomato.”

  At which point Mandy has to tell everyone for the hundredth time that ever since she saw her little brother throw up at DeMarco’s last summer, she can’t even think about eating anything with tomatoes.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” Mr. Landau tells her. He turns back to the board and numbers the tastes, one through five:

  1. Sweet

  2. Salty

  3. Sour

  4. Bitter

  5. Umami

  “Everyone take out a clean piece of paper!”

  We get out paper and look at him. He makes us wait a few beats, and then he says, “What is the taste of human experience?”

  Oh, boy. The room is quiet.

  “Can a moment in time be sweet? Can a memory be bitter? I want each of you to spend the next twenty minutes writing about a memory that can be described using the metaphor of taste. Table One, you will write about a sweet memory. Table Two, a salty memory. And so on.”

  Every hand at Table Five immediately shoots into the air. Mr. Landau calls on Natasha.

  “An umami memory?” she asks.

  Mr. Landau tells her to think of umami as meaning “delicious.”

  Natasha nods and starts writing immediately.

  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 th
e 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.