Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  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.”

&nbs
p; “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?”

  And I do see.

  “Black!” I shout, pointing at the middle dryer. “The clothes in there are all black!”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “Sorry.” I keep forgetting that the number-one rule of spying is don’t yell.

  But Safer looks pleased. “It’s time for some field training. You’re going to go through those clothes and see what there is to see.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be your lookout,” he says.

  “You mean take some guy’s sopping wet clothes out of the dryer and—and what?”

  “And go through the pockets. No biggie.”

  “No biggie? No way.”

  “Fine. I’ll do it. You be my lookout.” Which I get the feeling was his plan all along.

  Safer posts me in the little hallway between the laundry room and the elevator. I’m not watching the stairs because Safer is pretty sure he’s the only person who ever uses them.

  I hear the sound of the dryer stopping, like a little sigh, and I glance up at the arrow above the elevator. It’s resting at L, for lobby, just sitting there, so I step away and peek into the laundry room.

  Safer’s moving fast, grabbing armfuls of black clothes and throwing them onto the Formica table. When the dryer is empty, he shoves his pile to one side of the table, grabs something—a pair of pants—and checks the pockets. Which can’t be easy, because they look pretty wet.

  He looks up, calm as can be, and says, “Georges, the elevator is moving.”

  I rush out and see that he’s right. It’s on three already, still going up. I watch the arrow move … 4 … 5 … it stops on 6.

  “It stopped on six!” I call to Safer, because that’s his floor, but he doesn’t answer.

  I hear the motor start up again and keep my eye on the arrow: 6 … 5 … 4 …

  It stops on 4. Mr. X’s floor. And if that’s Mr. X’s laundry …

  “It stopped on four!” I shout.

  “Stay calm,” Safer replies. “Spies don’t freak out.”

  “It’s moving again!”

  … 3 … 2 … L.

  It doesn’t stop on L.

  It’s coming to the basement.

  “It’s coming down!” I yell. “To the basement!”

  Safer calls back one word: “Stall!”

  Stall? I’m going to look like an idiot just standing there staring when the elevator door opens. I quick open one of the garbage cans behind me and grab a bag of garbage. It’s wet from something that spatters my leg below my shorts. I hold tight to the top of the bag and wait.

  It’s only when the elevator door begins to open that it occurs to me that waiting in the basement with a bag of garbage
makes absolutely no sense. Waiting with a bag of garbage to go to the basement, yes. But waiting for the elevator in the basement, not so much. I quickly step away from the bag, which is now leaking all over the floor. And smelling kind of bad. Maybe it’ll just be Candy, I tell myself.

  It isn’t Candy. And it isn’t Mr. X. It’s Safer’s mom.

  “Oh, hi, Georges. I’m looking for Safer. Is he down here?”

  “Hi! Um, I’m not sure. I think so. He might be.”

  She looks at me funny.

  “Is that your garbage, Georges? It’s leaking. Better get it into a can.”

  “That? No! I just saw it here. Just now.”

  She blinks. “Oh. How strange.”

  This is not going well at all. “You know what?” I say. “I was just thinking I should put it into a can. That’s what I was doing—standing here, thinking that. Because it’s leaking.”

  “Yes, it is. I think I just said that.” She starts to move past me.

  “But then I was thinking, what if someone is coming back for it?”

  She stops. “Coming back,” she repeats. “For—the garbage.”

  “Yeah! But that’s dumb, isn’t it? I’ll throw it away right now.” I open the same garbage can I took the bag out of, which is a mistake because the bottom of the can is covered with the same gucky brown stuff that’s leaking out of the bag, which, if you are a person who likes to analyze things, might suggest that the bag had actually been in there before.

  But Safer’s mom doesn’t ask me about that, because right then the dogs both start barking up a storm in the courtyard. They want Safer.

  “Didn’t you come down here with Safer to walk the dogs?” She points to the courtyard door. “Is he outside?”

  “Um. He was.…”

  Safer comes walking out of the laundry room. “Hi, Mom.” He holds up two wet hands. “Just washing up. After the dogs.”

  “Good idea,” she says. “Listen, can you stay upstairs with Candy for a little while? I have to run an errand.”

  “Sure. I just have to drop off Ty and Lucky.” He looks at me. “Coming?”

  “Yeah. I have to stop by my apartment first, though.” Because my leg is covered in smelly brown gook.

  I get in the elevator with Safer’s mom, and Safer waves goodbye to us, smiling through the little glass window in the elevator door.