Liar & Spy (12 page)

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?”

Dallas wrinkles his nose like he smells something. “Maybe it is up to me. And maybe I say that you’re not going to marry Gabe after all. Maybe Gabe actually thinks you’re kind of gross. You ever think of
that
?”

Mandy walks away saying, “Blah-blah-blah-whatever!” But her face is all red and I almost feel sorry for her.

Dallas turns to me. “You know what? I bet the taste test is going to prove that you’re the only freak in the class. You can’t even
taste stuff
. Think about what a colossal freak that makes you.”

Lunch is macaroni and cheese, crusty on the top the way I like it.

Last period. Gym. It’s Friday again, so Ms. Warner and I do our high five.

The whiteboard says
Capture the Flag!

Normally I don’t mind
Capture the Flag!
because it’s pretty easy to fly under the radar: I run around the edges of the game, I get a little exercise, and I don’t attempt anything stupid.

But Ms. Warner has decided that today I will be a captain.

“G is captain of the blue team,” she announces, and everybody groans. She’s just trying to be nice, of course, but I’m disappointed in her. I thought she knew me better than this. Because being a captain is exactly the kind of thing I could never care about.

She looks at me. “C’mon, G. Blue team. Step up.”

So I walk up to her, and she smiles.

“Blue
tongue
team,” Dallas says, and Mandy laughs. I guess she and Dallas made up.

“And Mandy is the captain of the red team,” Ms. Warner says. Mandy claps, jumps up and down, and hugs a few of her friends as if she’s just been crowned prom queen in a bad TV movie. She runs up to stand on the other side of Ms. Warner. The rest of the class lines up against the wall.

Now I will have to “pick my team.” And I have to be careful, because if a kid is picked last, it can absolutely destroy his or her self-confidence. I decide that the best thing to do is to choose the kids who are normally picked last,
first
. I know exactly who they are. Everyone in the room knows who they are.

Mandy looks more and more confused as I make my way through the smallest, least athletic, most officially uncool kids in the class. Ms. Warner is giving me knowing looks. If we could talk, I would remind her that I never asked to be
captain, and that my goals as captain are probably different from most people’s. And I’m having fun, I realize.

I let my team members pick code names. Joanna is Spike; Karl and Carl are Smoke and Fire; Bob English Who Draws is Squid; Kevin is Shark Attack; Natasha Khan is Mist; David Rosen is Stingray; Eliza Donan is Laser; Chad, Anita, and Paul are Thing One, Thing Two, and Thing Three; and I am Mask. This eats a couple of minutes. Mandy is complaining to Ms. Warner that we aren’t “taking the game seriously,” but Ms. Warner doesn’t rush us. Everyone on Mandy’s team looks competitive and grouchy.

We play. Most of us get our flags pulled and land in jail, and the rest of us plot elaborate rescue missions. Whenever we get a jailbreak, Paul, aka Thing Three, streaks around the gym with both arms up yelling “Blue Team! It’s what’s for breakfast!” Anita, aka Thing Two, explains that this means Paul is having a good time.

We ignore the red team’s flag. We’ve hidden our flag really well. Karl, aka Smoke, had the idea of tucking it around the basketball hoop. Smoke is tall.

Carter Dixon and Dallas Llewellyn are getting angry. Mandy complains that our flag is nowhere. Ms. Warner assures her that it is somewhere.

“Well, I’m not going through anyone’s
pants
or anything,” Mandy says. Ms. Warner tells Mandy that our flag is in plain view.

I think of my fortune from Yum Li’s:
Why don’t you look up once in a while? Is something wrong with your neck?
I’m laughing when the bell goes off. Even though most of my
team is incarcerated, it’s officially a tie because they never found our flag.

I’m walking out the door when Ms. Warner calls out, “Happy weekend, G. See you on the dark side of Sunday. Get it? The dark side of Sunday? Monday!”

“Hi, G,” Carter Dixon says to me at Bennie’s after school. I’ve already made my selection, which is peanut M&M’s, otherwise known as one of the world’s perfect foods, and I’m waiting for Bennie to take my money and count my change back to me.

“Yeah
G
, good game today,” Dallas Llewellyn says. He drapes an arm over my shoulders.

“G as in
gorgeous
,” Carter says.

“G as in geek,” Dallas says.

“D as in
definitely
,” Carter says.

“D as in
Dallas
,” I point out, trying to be helpful. “Soon you guys will know the whole alphabet.”

Dallas can move pretty quickly. He has me up against Bennie’s potato-chip rack faster than you can say sour cream and onion. I feel the chips against my back, and I’m thinking that a thousand bags of potato chips wouldn’t be the worst way to break a fall.

“You!” Bennie shouts, pointing two fingers at Carter and Dallas. “Out!” He grabs an open bag of Doritos out of Carter’s hand and shakes it in his face.
“Out.”

Even the high school kids in our neighborhood know better than to mess with Bennie. He learned to fight when he was growing up in Cairo. He says they don’t fool around over there.

When Dallas and Carter are gone, Bennie whirls on me. “You’re fighting? Since when?”

I shrug.

“I’ll tell you something,” Bennie says. “That kid, Dallas …”

“Yeah?”

“His real name is David.”

I laugh. “I know. He changed it in third grade.”

Bennie shakes his head. “What’s wrong with the name David? Perfectly good name! Seventy-five cents for the M&M’s.” I give him a dollar, and he counts back my change: “A nickel is
eighty
, a dime is
ninety
, and another dime makes
one dollar
!”

He’ll never just hand you a quarter.

At home, there’s a note under my door. Yellow paper, folded into fourths:

Departed with suitcase, 12:45 p.m.

Report to Uncle ASAP.

I’ve barely had time to read it when the phone starts ringing. I pick it up and say, “I’m on my way.”

“Um, on your way where?” a voice asks.

“Bob?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey. I thought you were someone else.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?” I’m hoping it isn’t more creative spelling.

“About the taste test.”

“Oh.”

“The thing is, no one really knows what you can or can’t taste, right? So even if you don’t taste something, you can still act like you do. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He means I can pretend. I may be a nontaster, but when Mr. Landau hands out those chemical papers and tells us to put them in our mouths, I can run for water like everyone else. I don’t have to be the freak.

“Just in case,” Bob says.

Candy answers the door in a dress and her pig slippers.

“Is Safer home?” I ask.

“Safer is always home.”

“Don’t be a pain, Candy!” Safer’s voice, right behind her. “I’m here
babysitting
. Guess who the baby is? Go away, I need to talk to Georges.”

“About what?”

“None of your business. Just go back to whatever you were doing, okay?”

“What do you mean ‘whatever I was doing’? You left me there watching for the parrots. I fell asleep! And you owe me a dollar. What time is it, anyway?”

“Time for you to go away.”

“What about my dollar?”

“Take the dollar! You know where my dog-walking money is! Geesh.”

“
Geesh
yourself!” She walks down the hallway.

“What took you so long?” Safer asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Mr. X stayed in his apartment all morning. And then he left with one of the big suitcases. I caught him on the lobbycam.”

I don’t remind him that I still haven’t even
seen
Mr. X, let alone familiarized myself with his luggage.

“You think he went away somewhere? On a trip?”

“Can’t say for sure. But it’s an opportunity. I’m going back in.”

“Back in,” I repeat.

“Only first we have to make a list.”

“A list,” I repeat.

“Yes, Georges, a
list
. Of everything that can possibly be opened with a key.”

“What about a desk drawer?” I say, when we’re settled in our beanbags. “Or a briefcase?”

“Desk drawer,” Safer says, writing in his notebook. “Briefcase.”

“Or maybe a cabinet,” I say. “Some old cabinets have little keys like that—did you see anything old-looking in his apartment? Once my dad showed me this desk at an antiques store that had a secret drawer, behind this panel—”

Safer looks up and stares at me. “This is an area of strength for you, Georges.”

“Not really. I’ve just been dragged to a lot of antiques stores.”

He smiles. “Still. You’re thinking like a spy. It’s progress.”

Which makes me feel good, actually. Like I’m possibly getting better at something.

And then, as if he can read my mind, Safer says, “You’re not a novice anymore, Georges. Is
novice
on your famous vocabulary list?”

“I know what
novice
means.”

“Good. Then you know what it means to be done with novice work.”

I’m not sure I like where this is going. “So what’s after novice work?”

Safer gives me his serious look. “Night work.”

Break and Enter (#2)

Night work means sleeping with my cell phone stuffed into a tube sock, under my ear. It’s on vibrate, and it goes off at two in the morning, dragging me from what feels like the bottom of the ocean.

“This is my third call,” Safer says when I fumble it out of the sock. “Now that you aren’t a novice, you have to learn to be a lighter sleeper.”

“How does a person
learn
that?”

“I’ll be outside your door in sixty seconds.”

“Now what?” I say when we’re standing on my doormat.

“You’re not dressed.” Safer takes in my T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down oxford, tucked in.

“What’s the point? You said the whole idea is that we aren’t supposed to see anyone else.”

He starts up the stairs. “It’s just—spies get
dressed
. You know?”

When we get up to Mr. X’s, we both automatically look for the gum wrapper, which is still stuck in the door.

“Told you,” Safer says.

“And can you guarantee that he won’t come back in the next twenty minutes?”

“In the middle of the night?” Safer steps out of his shoes and lines them up on one side of Mr. X’s doormat.

“I don’t think I can go in there,” I say.

Safer opens one hand, showing me the little gold key. “I have to know what this opens, Georges. And that isn’t going to happen if we just stand here whispering in the hallway, is it?”

I shake my head. “I can’t. It’s not right.”

He looks at the ceiling for a second. “I could use your expertise in there, Georges. But if you aren’t comfortable with it, you can stand guard.”

“Stand here, you mean? In my pajamas? What if someone walks by?”

He pulls his credit card out of his back pocket. “The pajamas were your idea.”

“Like it would make a lot of sense for me to be standing here in a James Bond suit!”

“
Shhh
. No one is going to walk by, Georges. It’s two in the morning.”

“Then why do you need a lookout?”

He shoves the credit card between the door and the frame, just above the knob. “Look, I need to know. Do I have a lookout or not?”

“No,” I say. “You don’t.”

“Fine.” Safer forces the credit card down in one quick
motion and turns the doorknob at the same time. The door opens, and he slips inside, closing it silently behind him.

I pace back and forth in the hall for a minute and then run back downstairs. I get into bed and lie still, but sleep is not happening. I listen for footsteps above me, though the fact is that I have never heard a single sound from Mr. X’s apartment.

That’s when my cell phone goes off. I’ve left it on my desk, where it buzzes against the wood and makes my heart practically explode.

“Hello?”

“If you were a key, what would you open?”

“Safer,” I whisper, “where are you?”

“You know exactly where I am, Georges. In fact, you’re the only person who does.”

“Oh my God—whose phone are you on? Are you calling me from
his
phone?”

“It’s not long-distance. He’ll never know.”

“Safer!”

“The key, Georges. Think.”

“Get
out
of there. You’re freaking me out!”

“Uh-oh,” Safer says.

“Uh-oh
what
?”

“Shhh—hold on.”

I hold on. I’m squeezing my phone so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t shoot out of my hand and hit the ceiling. “Safer?” I whisper. “Are you okay?”