Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  “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.

  “Who’s this?” he asks, pointing at me and smiling.

  “Pigeon!” Safer’s mom says. “Is that a hello? This is Safer’s friend, Georges.”

  “He lives on three,” Candy adds.

  Pigeon’s eyebrows shoot up. “Cool,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Georges.” He sticks out his hand, and we shake.

  “Hmph.” Safer slams into his chair.

  “Don’t mind Safer,” Pigeon tells me. “He’s still mad at me.” He turns to Safer and puts him in a headlock. “Can’t stay mad forever, buddy. I’m still the only brother you’ve got.” Safer squirms and turns his face away. Pigeon lets him go.

  The food is chicken stir-fry and rice, and it’s good. Safer’s mom and Pigeon pretty much carry the conversation, asking me questions about my family and school. I end up telling them about how we’re studying taste in science, and about umami. I don’t explain about how it’s the Science Unit of Destiny, because they would all think my school is full of idiots and they don’t need to know that. Safer frowns through the whole meal.

  Safer’s mom watches as Pigeon picks all the chicken out of his stir-fry and pushes it to one side of his plate.

  She frowns. “Not with your fingers, Pigeon. And have you had any protein today?”

  “Ate a bean burrito for breakfast,” Pigeon says. “Ha! ‘Bean burrito for breakfast.’ In poetry that’s called alliteration.”

  “Alliteration,” Safer mimics. “Oh la la.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?” I ask Pigeon.

  “No, I just don’t eat birds.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tell him the story!” Candy says.

  “Candy!” Safer’s mom says. “Don’t talk with your mouth full. S
wallow, then talk.”

  Candy swallows and looks at me. “It’s a really funny story.”

  Pigeon smiles. “Okay. So one day when I was totally little, Mom, Dad, and I are driving along this road up in Connecticut and we see these cows. And I’m like, what are cows for? I mean, what do they do, you know? And Mom’s trying to give me the easy answer, so she tells me, ‘Cows are for milk, remember? Cows give us milk.’

  “But then Dad pipes up, ‘And meat.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean, meat?’ Then he tells me that hamburgers are cow meat. And this lightbulb goes on in my head, and I start thinking about all the foods we eat, and I’m asking, what about dumplings, and what about bacon—and they’re telling me, pork dumplings are from pigs, blah blah blah. I was real interested in all of it. It’s one of those things you remember—you’re just a little kid, and you’re finally clueing in to the real world, you know? And so then I say, ‘What about chicken? Where does chicken come from?’ And right then this other lightbulb goes on in my head, and I start screaming, ‘Chicken is chickens?’

  “At first they thought it was funny—you know, ‘Chicken is chickens,’ ha ha. But I was horrified. I would rather gnaw off my own fingers than eat a bird. And that was it. No birds for me since that day in the car.”

  “Isn’t that hilarious?” Candy says. “Chicken is chickens?”

  “So what do you eat on Thanksgiving?” I ask Pigeon. Don’t ask me why I’m thinking about Thanksgiving in particular. It’s just the one day of the year when everyone in the country is eating a bird, I guess.

  He shrugs. “Stuffing, mashed potatoes, string beans, cranberry sauce—all the side dishes. I hear turkey doesn’t have a lot of flavor.”

  “I love turkey,” Safer says. “It’s delicious. I wish I could eat turkey every day.”

  “Safer,” his mom says. “No baiting.”

  Safer pushes back from the table and stands up. “Come on, Georges.”

  “You didn’t ask to be excused,” Safer’s mom says.

  “Fine. Can Georges and I be excused?”

  She smiles. “Yes. Thank you for asking.”

  I stand up and thank Safer’s mom for dinner. She beams at me.

  “Why do you hate your brother so much?” I ask Safer when we’re back in the living room, sunk into the beanbag chairs.

  “I don’t hate him,” Safer says.

  “He seems nice.”

  “Yeah,” Safer says. “He used to be nice. I wouldn’t know anymore, though—he’s gone all the time.”

  “Gone where?”

  “To high school.”

  “School!” I laugh. “How is that his fault?”

  Safer looks at me. “What do you mean, how is it his fault? It’s completely his fault. He’s the one who asked to go.”

  “Wait—don’t you go to school?”

  “Of course not. Neither does Candy. Neither did Pigeon, until last year.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Ninety-five percent of school is a complete waste of time.”

  At which point I experience a moment when I think my friendship with Safer is somehow meant to be.

  What Safer Does All Day While I’m at School

  • Learns math from a website.

  • Helps “prep” dinner.

  • Reads.

  • Plays online Scrabble with his dad between driving lessons.

  • Walks the dogs in the courtyard.

  • Has coffee with Mr. Gervais on the fifth floor. They read the French newspaper together, Safer says. Sort of.

  • Watches baseball-card auctions on eBay.

  • Plays chess with Candy. Candy is frighteningly good at chess, according to Safer.

  • Learns chemistry and Photoshop from his mom.

  • Watches the lobbycam.

  • Watches the parrots.

  When he gets home, Dad comes upstairs to meet Safer’s mom and to thank her for feeding me. He’s carrying a couple of binders and a saggy bag of groceries and looks tired, but he gets all excited when he sees the stove in their kitchen, which is apparently some kind of antique. Safer’s mom tells him about a warehouse right here in Brooklyn where you can buy old appliances. Then she asks about Mom and where we moved from and all that, and I know they’re going to be a while, so I wander into the living room.

  Safer looks up from his book. “I thought you left,” he says.

  “Not yet.”

  “You want to come for breakfast tomorrow? I’ll make us eggs. I make really good scrambled eggs. I’ll teach you.”

  “Is that a spy skill?”

  He shrugs. “Spies have to eat.”

  “I can’t. I have to leave the house by seven-forty-five. For school.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Dad comes out of the kitchen with Safer’s mom, who gives me a long look. Then she smiles and says, “Georges, I want you to know that you are welcome here anytime. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner.”

  “Thanks,” I say, wanting to leave all of a sudden. I look at Dad, who reads my face and says it’s time to go.

  Downstairs, I find the baseball game on TV while Dad puts away the stuff he bought, which turns out to be plums, chips, string cheese, and four packs of these yogurt drinks Mom likes. Then we chill out on the couch with Sir Ott, eating chips and plums and watching the game, neither of us saying that it’s a lot more fun to watch baseball with Mom, who actually knows something about it. Dad asks how I’m doing, and he even turns the volume down on the television just in case I want to pour my heart out, but I don’t.

  Mom calls before bed and doesn’t sound that tired. She asks me all about Safer’s family. When I tell her Safer doesn’t go to school, she says they sound like really nice bohemians. When I tell her that Safer plans to teach me the secret of truly excellent scrambled eggs, she says they sound like really smart bohemians. Dad calls them progressive. Nobody wants to say they’re weird.

  I give her a few play-by-plays from the Mets game, and we say goodnight.

  Later, while Dad is doing his nightly murmuring-into-the-phone ritual with the door to his room closed, I slip upstairs to Mr. X’s apartment and wedge Safer’s balled-up gum wrapper between the door and the frame. My heart is going a mile a minute, but nothing bad happens. It’s completely quiet up there.

  Before bed, I spell Mom a note with the Scrabble tiles:

  THE METS WON

  LOVE ME

  The Soft G

  Mom’s morning message says:

  BULLPEN NEEDS WORK

  LOVE YOU

  Dad is gone already, and he’s left a note and bagel money on the counter. I open the refrigerator and see that two of Mom’s yogurt drinks are missing.

  First period. Science.

  I’m sitting quietly at Table Six with Bob English Who Draws, who is drawing. Dallas pats me roughly on the head as he walks by. “Hey, G. Great to see you, G. See you later, G.”

  “That was weird,” I say when he’s gone.

  Bob doesn’t look up. “He’s out to get you, you know.”

  “No kidding. Isn’t Dallas out to get everyone?”

  “Yeah. But you especially. Ever since you knocked him over in the gym.”

  “What? No one even saw that.” But as I’m saying it I realize I must be wrong. Obviously, someone did.

  “Everyone saw it. Anita, Chad, and Paul were like, high-fiving. He’s been annoying them all year, calling them the Nerd Squad and asking Anita if she’s going to get a perfect score on her SATs.”

  “The SATs? You mean for college?”

  Bob is still drawing. “She thinks it’s because she’s Asian. You know. Like Asians are supposed to be super-smart or whatever.”

  I wonder if I’m wrong about Jason. Maybe he has changed, if he’s willing to sit near a guy like Dallas at lunch every day.

  “Speaking of the letter G,” Bob says, “did you know that Benjamin Franklin wanted to get rid of it?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. Not get rid of i
t totally. He wanted to keep the hard G and get rid of the soft G. You know, the hard G, as in go. And the soft G, like in Georges.”

  “Wouldn’t that make George Washington really mad?”

  “Well, he had plans for the soft G. He could have spelled it with a J, right? Except that J is one of the six letters he totally threw away.”

  “He threw out six letters?”

  “Yeah. But he invented six new ones. He invented this letter ish, which sounds like sh and looks like a lowercase H, except with a swirly top. He wanted to blend the ish with other letters to get certain sounds. So he made the soft G sound by blending the D and the ish. It’s a little confusing. And your name actually has a soft G at the beginning and the end, so it would look like this—”

  He scribbles in the corner of his notebook and slides it over: Dord.

  “Dehorda?”

  “No,” he says, “you have to think of the ish as ‘sh.’ ”

  “Shorsh?”

  “You’re not saying the D.”

  “Deshord-sha?”

  “Are you even trying?”

  “I thought the whole idea was to make it not confusing,” I say.

  “Yeah. But first you have to get used to it.”

  I don’t point out how that’s exactly the way regular spelling is. It may be weird sometimes, but you get used to it. I look at what Bob wrote, and I wonder: if Benjamin Franklin had his way, would Ms. Warner try to make everyone call me ish?

  Bob English has his head down again. Then he passes me a note:

  No ofens.

  He sees me staring at it. “No offense,” he whispers.

  Last period. Gym.

  Volleyball! Again.

  Ms. Warner is standing just inside the gym doors with a big smile on her face as we all troop in.

  “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.”