Liar & Spy

by Rebecca Stead

  “So you weren’t about to walk in there, right? Into the guy’s apartment?”

  “What do you think I am? An amateur? I would never just barge in without a plan, Georges. Planning is essential. That’s why we observe habits, reactions, everything. This is what I’ve been trying to teach you.”

  He turns back to the window and raises the binoculars. “People are not so different from birds, you know. If you watch them long enough, you find out everything you need to know.”

  “Are the parrots back yet?” I squint out the window toward the nest.

  “Not yet. Give them a couple of— Candy, what do you want?”

  Candy is standing just inside the living room, holding a piece of paper. Safer must have eyes in the back of his head.

  She ignores Safer and holds the paper out to me. “I printed this out for you,” she tells me. “It’s about umami—remember the other night, you told us about how there’s this fifth taste?—anyway, it’s kind of interesting. This guy in Japan was obsessed with the idea of discovering the fifth taste, because he knew there had to be more than four, but no one really believed him, or, um, cared, I guess. So he boiled down all this seaweed and got to this deep flavor that isn’t sweet or salty or sour or bitter. It’s some glutamate thing that they put in Chinese food. Anyway, that’s the fifth taste. It’s also in mushrooms.” She thrusts the paper at me.

  “Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “It’s all in there—and by the way, umami means ‘deliciousness,’ even though I don’t remotely like mushrooms.”

  I look down at the article and see that she has underlined most of the sentences. “Thanks,” I tell her again.

  She starts to walk away, then stops. “It doesn’t really make sense. Delicious totally depends on the person eating the food.”

  I nod. “Yeah, I’ve thought about that. Why don’t we all like the same foods? Shouldn’t we be sort of programmed to eat anything that’s good for us? And to spit out anything that’s poison? You know, from evolution?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Like, why do I hate orange? Obviously if I was a cavewoman and I found some orange trees, I should eat the oranges, right? Who knows when I would find food again?”

  “Yeah.” I say. It’s kind of funny to picture Candy as a cavewoman wearing those pig slippers.

  “I really do hate oranges, though. I can’t even sit across from someone drinking orange juice.”

  “Weird.”

  Safer is staring at us.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Georges, weren’t you about to ask me downstairs? To help you look for that key? Not that it isn’t fascinating about the oranges and the seaweed.”

  Five minutes later, Safer is standing in my kitchen with a knife in his hand. “Remember, SOS is easy: three quick, three slow, three quick.”

  Holding the knife by the wrong end, he uses the handle to beat the rhythm against the heating pipe that runs from the floor to the ceiling:

  Tap-tap-tap … tap, tap, tap … tap-tap-tap.

  “Now you,” he says, holding out the knife.

  “Why SOS?” I ask. “I mean, I could just bang on the pipe, right? You’d know it was me.”

  “Banging on the pipe is sloppy. It could mean anything. It could be Mr. Gervais complaining about the heat.”

  “In May?”

  Safer fixes me with one his looks. “Who’s training who, Georges?”

  I take the knife and give it a try: Tap-tap-tap. Tap … tap … tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  “Harder,” Safer says. “Remember, I have to hear this upstairs. I can barely hear it standing right next to you.”

  “You still haven’t figured out how to get in. Shouldn’t that be number one on the agenda?”

  Safer takes an American Express card out of his back pocket. “This is how I’m getting in.”

  “You’re going to pay someone to open the door?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Georges. It’s expired. Mr. X doesn’t bolt his door, remember? For the slam-lock, this is all I need. I just shove it in that crack between the door and the frame”—he cuts down through the air with the arm holding the card—“and voilà.”

  “You’ve done this before?” I guess I finally know how Safer left me that note under my pillow.

  Safer looks at me scornfully. “Of course.”

  Maybe Safer has no conscience at all.

  “I’m not sure we should do this,” I say. Because I’m sure we shouldn’t do this.

  “It’s normal to be a little scared, Georges.”

  “I’m not scared.” Though it has crossed my mind that a person could go to jail for the kind of thing Safer is planning.

  “Fine, I’ll go in without a lookout. But if he finds me in there, he’ll probably kill me. I just want you to know that.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m telling you not to do it.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand, because you just moved in. But something has been going on with this guy for a while. The visitors, the suitcases …”

  “What visitors? You don’t even know if there were any visitors.”

  He shakes his head. “Spies don’t speculate.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “It’s not as if you’ll be exposed,” he says. “You’ll be right here, in your own apartment. Please, Georges? It would be nice not to go in there naked.”

  “Naked? Why would you be naked?”

  He blows his cheeks out. “Not actually naked. Naked means going in with no backup, no cover.”

  I give up. “I’ll be your lookout this one time. And maybe you’ll find out there’s nothing going on at all. Maybe Mr. X isn’t a murderer.”

  He smiles. “Remember, three quick, three slow, three quick.” He stands up and shoves the credit card into his back pocket. “See? It’s not so scary, Georges. Not so scary at all.”

  But it is scary.

  “When?”

  He smiles. “Now, Georges. Try to keep up.”

  Break and Enter (#1)

  “I’ll think I’ll leave my shoes here,” Safer says. “Do you mind? I don’t want to track anything in, and I don’t want to leave them by Mr. X’s door. If I have to leave in a hurry I might forget them. And then he’d find them, and he’d start looking for a boy about my size, and—”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Leave them.”

  He unties his sneakers and steps out of them. “Okay, so it’s three—”

  “Three quick, three slow, three quick,” I say. “Got it.”

  “If I’m not back in ten minutes, it means something is very wrong,” Safer says.

  “And what am I supposed to do then?”

  “Call the police, I guess.”

  “Are you serious? What if you wipe out in your socks on the bathroom floor up there, hit your head on the bathtub, and pass out, and then I call the police, and we have to explain what you were doing up there in the first place? We could both go to jail!”

  He stares at me. Then he bends down, takes off his socks, and tosses them on top of his sneakers. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, call the police because it means I have not slipped in the bathroom in my socks and I am most likely in the viselike grip of a raving lunatic. Okay?”

  I nod.

  Then he shakes my hand very formally and walks out the door.

  I rush over to the lobbycam and push the button. The lobby door flickers into view on the screen. I grip my butter knife. I have this pins-and-needles feeling in my legs, like it’s me who’s forcing open the door of a stranger’s apartment, walking in, looking, touching. It’s the same feeling I get when Dad and I fly kites at the Cape, as if holding on to the string means that part of me is up there, way too high.

  I watch the clock. Every two minutes, the screen turns itself off and I push the button to make the picture come back.

  Absolutely nothing happens for six minutes, except that I have pushed the View button three times. The pins-and-needles feeling is gone, and I w
ish I had brought a chair to sit on.

  Then, finally, there’s some action. The moo-cow kid comes into the lobby with his teenage babysitter, who’s wearing a pair of headphones and fumbling in her backpack—for her keys, I’m guessing. The moo-cow kid isn’t spinning around or anything. He actually looks a little sad.

  I push the Talk button on the intercom and say, “Knock, knock.”

  The teenager ignores me, probably she can’t even hear anything with those headphones on, but the moo-cow kid’s mouth falls open. He’s looking all around. “Who’s there?” he asks the ceiling.

  “Interrupting kangaroo,” I say.

  He breaks into this huge smile. “Interrupting kangaroo wh—”

  “Kanga-ROO! Kanga-ROO!” I shout, because I have no idea what sound a kangaroo actually makes.

  The moo-cow kid is cracking up. His babysitter has found her keys, and they walk through the door. Then the lobby is empty again.

  “Having fun?”

  I whirl around and there’s Safer, leaning against the wall behind me with his arms crossed.

  “It’s a relief to know that you were worried about me,” he says. “I mean, I could be bleeding to death from a head wound in Mr. X’s bathroom and here you are, playing with the intercom.”

  I glance at the clock. “It’s only been seven minutes. You took off your socks.”

  “And you have been here telling knock-knock jokes to the whole building!”

  “Safer, do you really think that anyone who isn’t us is standing around in front of their intercoms pressing the Talk button?”

  “The number-one rule of the lobbycam is silence.”

  “You never said that.”

  “I didn’t think I had to.”

  “So how did it go? Did you figure out what the key is for?”

  He shakes his head. “I saw a couple of disturbing things up there, Georges. Very disturbing.”

  “Like what?”

  Safer says he needs a minute. He wants to know if we have any potato chips, which we don’t. He settles for a string cheese. I get him a glass of water, which he guzzles. Finally, he looks up at me.

  “One word, Georges: handsaw.”

  Safer tells me:

  One, Mr. X has a handsaw laid out on newspaper on his dining-room table, and it looks sharp; two, he has all sorts of bleach and cleansers under his kitchen sink; three, his bathtub is very clean—“too clean”; and four, Safer couldn’t find anything that could be opened with the little gold key.

  He needs to go home and think. He takes a string cheese for the road and doesn’t invite me to come with him. After he goes, I look up kangaroo on Wikipedia and find out that kangaroos don’t make a particular sound. Mostly they just thump with their feet to communicate.

  I watch America’s Funniest Home Videos until Dad gets home.

  We go to Yum Li’s.

  Dad and I have the usual.

  “Tell me things!” Dad says, just in case I’m in the mood to pour my heart out.

  “Things,” I say, cramming chicken and broccoli into my mouth.

  So he tells me about another big potential client he might get, who’s a friend of the first big potential client. This is called word of mouth, and he says it’s good news for our summer vacation.

  “I saw Mom this afternoon,” he tells me. “She’s a trouper, Georges. You know that about your mom, right? She’s amazing. Really strong. Everything is going great over there.”

  “Good,” I say. “That’s … really good.”

  Dad’s fortune says: Only a goofus locks his keys in his car twice in one week.

  He looks injured. “I don’t even have a car!”

  Mine says: It’s a cookie, Sherlock.

  We’re almost home when I see Candy, Pigeon, and their parents walking from the other direction. Candy is carrying a pizza box. Everyone stops to say hi, and then we all walk into the lobby together.

  “DeMarco’s?” I say to Candy, while the dads are introducing themselves.

  She nods. “I was thinking that pizza must be umami. It’s got tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. And it doesn’t really fit any of the other categories.”

  “Definitely,” I tell her. “So where’s Safer?”

  “Oh, this is for him.” She raises the box. “We ate at the restaurant. Pigeon says DeMarco’s pizza has a half-life of ten minutes. That’s from chemistry, and it means he only eats it fresh out of the oven.”

  “So you’re the famous Georges,” Safer’s dad says to me. I tell him I guess I am, and he makes a big deal out of shaking my hand. He’s wearing a black polo shirt that has the words Sixth Sense embroidered on it. Nobody mentions Safer. I wonder if he didn’t go to DeMarco’s because he’s still mad at Pigeon. Maybe he’s one of those people who holds a grudge forever.

  I watch some TV with Sir Ott while Dad goes up and down to the basement, doing late-night laundry. Mom calls while he’s downstairs, and she sounds pretty tired. She says she could use a laugh and asks me to tell her about one of America’s Funniest Home Videos, so I tell her about the girl sticking the beans up her nose, and Mom cracks up, which is actually good to hear. But then she says one of the doctors just walked in and she has to hang up.

  When the laundry is dry, Dad sits next to me on the couch to fold, stacking everything on the coffee table in front of us. Dad’s a very good folder. He can even make Mom’s super-puffy bathrobe into a nice neat square. When he goes to the bathroom I plant my face in it and inhale. But it doesn’t smell like Mom—it just smells like clean laundry.

  Before bed, I stand over my desk and spell:

  KANGAROOS ARE QUIET

  LOVE ME

  Blue

  When my eyes open in the morning, the first thing I do is sit up and look at the Scrabble tiles.

  KOALAS LOVE TO SLEEP

  I wonder if Mom just made that up. I go out to the living room and find Dad’s laptop on the coffee table. According to the Web, koalas sleep eighteen to twenty-two hours a day. I lie back on the couch and look up at Sir Ott. “How does she know these things?” I ask him.

  First period. Science. I’m walking toward Table Six when Dallas and Carter are suddenly on either side of me.

  “You know, Gorgeous, you are really SDP.”

  Ignore.

  “So. Damn. Pathetic.” They laugh and walk away.

  Ignore.

  I slide into my seat. Bob is drawing.

  “Why do you do that?” he asks with his head down.

  “Do what?”

  “Do nothing.”

  It’s like the hard G and the soft G, is what I want to tell Bob. The hard G goes to school, and nothing can hurt him. And the soft G is the one who’s talking to you right now. Except he’s only talking in my head. I used to know which one was the real me, but now I’m not so sure. Now it’s like maybe there is no real me.

  Mr. Landau is asking for volunteers. He can’t quite hide the surprise in his voice when he sees my arm up, and he calls me to the front. I’m surprised too, actually.

  The next thing I know, I’m sitting on a chair at the front of the room with my mouth open and a white paper reinforcement perched like a bull’s-eye on the tip of my tongue. Mr. Landau dips a Q-tip into some blue water that he assures me is nontoxic and swabs my tongue with it. Then he gets out his digital camera, takes a close-up, and projects the picture onto the whiteboard, explaining to the class that we are looking at the blue tongue-flesh protruding through the hole in the reinforcement that is still in my mouth, magnified ten thousand times.

  “Oh—Georges,” Mr. Landau says. “You can spit that out now.”

  I stagger back to Table Six, where Bob English Who Draws is looking pretty sorry for me. He doodles something in his notebook and shoves it over: Above a mean-looking elf he’s drawn a thought bubble that says:

  That sux. Y did yu raze yer hand?

  “You’re the one who told me to do something,” I whisper.

  He takes back his paper, scribbles, shoves it back
over to me.

  I ment abowt DALLAS, yu dork!

  I knew that, of course. I still have no idea why I raised my hand. Just to stop myself from thinking so much, maybe.

  Everyone stares at the gross blue bumps on my tongue. Mr. Landau is yelling over the retching noises.

  “You all have tongues that look like this!” he shouts. “Those are the fungiform papillae!”

  “It’s a fungus?” Carter shrieks over the gagging.

  “No!” Mr. Landau says. “The papillae house the taste buds. Let’s count them!” But it’s useless.

  “Silence!” Mr. Landau booms.

  Everyone shuts up.

  Mr. Landau explains that not everyone has the same number of taste buds. Some people have more, and they’re called supertasters, and some have an average number, and they are regular, and some have less. They’re called nontasters. He has painted my tongue blue so that we can easily count the number of whitish taste buds inside the circle of the reinforcement. The average number is thirty.

  He counts out loud, and it turns out that I’m short a few taste buds. I have twenty-six. I am officially below average. Thank you, Mr. Landau.

  “Now we know why Gorgeous loves school lunch!” Carter Dixon says in the cafeteria. “He can’t taste it!” He bumps his tray into my ribs.

  “He probably eats dog food for dinner!” Dallas Llewellyn says, mouth wide open and full of chewed bagel. “The taste test is coming up, G. You know what I call it? The G-test. You know why? Because it’s going to tell us what we already know—that you’re not normal. You’re the biggest geek-sack in the seventh grade. You’re like a big phlegmy wad of geek, Gorgeous. Do you know that about yourself?”

  Mandy frowns at her bagel. “That’s not really what the taste test is about, Dallas. It’s love or death, remember?”

  “Not this year,” Dallas tells her. “This year it’s about who’s the biggest steaming pile of spaz.”

  She looks him in the eye. “Maybe it’s not up to you. You ever think of that?”