Liar & Spy Page 3

  Once Mom told Yum Li that he could have a big classy restaurant in Manhattan if he wanted to. “The big-business types would pay triple for your food,” she told him.

  But Yum Li looked around at his peeling wood paneling, laminated menus, and hanging plants, and said, “What, more classy than this?”

  I shake some vinegar into my hot and sour soup and stir it in. Dad only likes won ton soup, even though sometimes Yum Li teases him: “That’s kid soup!” he tells Dad. “Time to grow up!”

  Dad wants to talk. I can tell by the way he leans toward me and says “So? Tell me things!” Which is his playful way of asking me to pour my heart out.

  “You tell me things,” I say. I’m just being dumb, but he gets this serious look on his face and says, “Okay. Well, today has been tough. It’s really hitting me, I guess, that—on top of, you know, everything—the house is someone else’s now.” He fishes in his soup for the last won ton dumpling. “I had a good talk with Mom on the phone,” he says. “She sounds really—good. And it’s been great to have your help today.”

  I don’t want to think about Dad needing me. I wish I had just told him something about school instead of asking him to tell me stuff instead. I could have told him about volleyball, maybe. About the slow clap, and Dallas’s foot in my stomach. But it’s too late now because it feels like all that would only make him feel worse.

  Dad leans back to give the waitress room to put down the rest of our food. “You remember how to get home from school tomorrow, right? To the new place?”

  “Dad, are you serious? The apartment is closer to school than our house was. Is. Whatever.” The point is that we’re still living in the same square mile of Brooklyn where I’ve spent my whole life.

  We stop talking and eat everything, and I mean everything, including the cut-up oranges that come with the check.

  “You were hungry,” the waitress says, studying the orange peels. Dad has scraped out the bitter white stuff with his teeth—according to him, it’s full of vitamins. She puts a little plate on the table: our fortune cookies.

  Fortunes are another thing about Yum Li’s. They’re not normal.

  Dad cracks his cookie open, pulls an extra-long fortune out of it, and reads aloud: “I read an article about those dark splotches on the sidewalk, and it turns out”—he flips the fortune over to read from the back—“those splotches are all chewed-up, spit-out, walked-on gum. Next time use the garbage can!”

  He looks up at me. “I don’t even chew gum!”

  I open my cookie. My fortune says, Why don’t you look up once in a while? Is something wrong with your neck?

  Like I said: not normal.

  When we leave the restaurant, Dad and I start walking home in the wrong direction, and we don’t even realize it until we’re in front of Sixth Sense Driving School on the corner. Neither of us points out that we were walking toward our house. We just turn around.

  At the apartment, I stretch out on the bed and think about how Dad used to lie right here when he was a kid. He probably never thought about the fact that his own son would be lying in his bed one day. I wonder whether Dad and I would have been friends, or if he would have been friends with Dallas Llewellyn, or Carter Dixon, or what. It’s kind of a bummer to think your own dad might have been someone who called you Gorgeous.

  Dad comes in, looking around the room. He’s always looking. He nods approvingly at the bookshelf, where I’ve stuffed all my books and games. The Scrabble box got stepped on at some point, and the letter tiles went everywhere. I rescued most of them and piled them on the desk. Dad plops into the desk chair and starts making neat little stacks out of them. He can’t help himself.

  “So,” he says. “What do you think so far?”

  “It’s good,” I tell him.

  He reaches out to pat the bed and then shifts over to sit on the edge of the mattress. “I forgot to buy breakfast stuff. Want to wake up early and eat at the diner before school?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  We say goodnight. From the bed, I can see into the hall and a little into Mom and Dad’s room. He’s got some music on low, and he’s putting their bed together with a wrench. The phone rings, and I hear Dad say, “Hey, Lisa.” Mom’s older sister.

  “Yeah,” he says, “everything is stable.” Then his voice drops.

  It’s weird that the ceiling is so far away. At home on my fire escape, I could almost reach up and touch it. I feel smaller.

  I’m trying to get comfortable when I feel something under my pillow. I pull it out—an index card. Tilting it to catch the light from the hall, I read:

  NEXT MEETING TOMORROW

  —S.

  I bolt upright, flick on the light, and look around. Safer has been here. In my room.

  I walk around, opening the closet door and squinting through the window to the fire escape. I get back into bed, and then I jump up again to look underneath it. But there’s no sign of anyone.

  This is when I realize that Safer might be what Mom calls an unknown quantity. In other words, even weirder than I thought.

  Salty

  I’m stuffing schoolbooks into my backpack the next morning when I see that Dad’s Scrabble-tile towers have been razed.

  Spelled out across the desk are three words:

  LOVE YOU PICKLE

  For one crazy second I think of Safer, that maybe he somehow got in here again when I was asleep, and I’m still staring at the words when Dad sticks his head in.

  “Message from Mom,” he says quietly. He tries to catch my eyes but I don’t let him.

  Right. Safer does not love me, and he does not call me Pickle.

  Mom’s job is officially the day shift, seven a.m. to three p.m. It takes her half an hour to report to the next charge nurse on duty and forty-five minutes to drive home. If a nurse on the next shift calls in sick, Mom can be “held over” to work the first half of the three-to-eleven shift, and someone else gets called in to cover the second half. That’s called a split.

  But if they can’t find anyone to come in for the second half of the split, Mom has to work the whole three-to-eleven shift, which means she works from seven a.m. to eleven p.m. That’s called a double.

  We all hated doubles until Dad lost his job. Then Mom started volunteering for them whenever she could. I still hate them, though.

  Dad’s in the doorway again. He’s wearing a tie, and his “client meeting” glasses, with the rectangular black frames. “Almost ready?” he asks in a low voice. We’re always quiet before school, because when Mom works doubles, the number-one rule of the morning is not to wake her up.

  “One sec,” I say. And, rearranging the Scrabble letters with two fingers, I quickly spell:

  HAVE A GOOD DAY

  LOVE ME

  First period. Science. The science lab is different from the other classrooms—it has these old thick wood tables with black marks burned into them, and metal stools to sit on. It’s the only room at school that makes me think of all the kids who were here before us. I look at the scratches and the burn marks, and I think about how each one happened on a particular day, maybe twenty or forty years ago, and how each mark was made by a particular person. Those people are probably scattered all over the country now. Some of them could be dead.

  Dallas Llewellyn passes me on the way to his seat, saying “You’re it, Gorgeous,” and flicking the top of my ear with his finger. I ignore him. Dallas is always on the lookout for other people’s weak spots so that he knows exactly where to poke them. And if you don’t have a weak spot, he’ll invent one and poke you anyway.

  Mr. Landau writes TASTE on the whiteboard.

  “Taste-test, Taste-test,” Carter Dixon chants. He’s pounding his fists on Table Two. Mandy giggles and gives him a thumbs-up. Everyone knows that she hopes the taste test will reveal that she and Gabe are destined to fall in love and be together forever.

  Mr. Landau doesn’t hear Carter, or doesn’t want to. But sometime next w
eek, he’ll hand out these little strips of paper, and when he tells us to, we’ll all put them in our mouths. The paper is coated with some kind of horrible-tasting chemical, so everyone will go running for the water fountain. Almost everyone. Some people can’t taste the chemical at all, and to them the paper will just taste like paper. Those couple of kids will be left sitting on their stools and wondering why everyone else looks like they’re going to puke.

  And they’ll be looking around to see who else is sitting there with them.

  Here’s the story:

  A long time ago, the only two kids who didn’t run for water were a boy and a girl who started dating when they got to high school. People say they got married, but I’ve never seen any proof. Another year, there was only one kid in the whole class who didn’t taste the chemical stuff, and he got killed by a drunk driver the summer after his sophomore year. So someone decided that the taste test is the universe’s way of revealing fate: love or death. And of course everyone else fell for it right away.

  Today Mr. Landau is talking about salty. He’s passed around these stale mini-pretzels, and we’re eating them. We’re supposed to chew slowly and take notes about what we taste, without using the word salty. I write down zingy. I think about writing stale or crummy, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

  I’m not much in the mood for stale pretzels because I just had the double-stack pancake special at Everybody’s Favorite Diner. It’s not actually everybody’s favorite, but that’s what the restaurant is called: Everybody’s Favorite Diner. Dad says the owner is a genius.

  Mr. Landau asks us to “share our observations.” When no one does, he starts calling on people.

  “It’s salty,” Dallas Llewellyn says, shrugging.

  Mr. Landau sighs. Then he takes this red and white plastic cooler out of the supply closet, puts it on his desk, and opens it. We can see a big plastic jug with ice packed around it.

  He asks Gabe to hand out some tiny paper cups, and then he walks around the classroom with the plastic jug, filling each cup with a tiny amount of mystery liquid.

  “Don’t drink it,” he says. “Just taste. Let it sit on your tongue.” He pours a bit into his own cup, leans back against his desk, and tips the cup into his mouth.

  We do the same.

  The liquid is salty and cold.

  “It’s just salty water,” someone says.

  Mr. Landau nods. “But salty how? How is this sensation of salt different from the pretzel?”

  Gabe says, “That was dry salty. This is wet salty.”

  But it’s more than that. This taste reminds me of dirt, or animals, or skin. I swish around what’s left in my cup, thinking.

  “Is it—is it tears?” one of the girls says.

  “Ew!”

  It isn’t tears. I know what it is. I decide to drink my cupful, tipping my head back.

  “Gross!” Dallas yells, “Georges drank a whole thing of tears!”

  Everyone starts screeching.

  “Relax!” Mr. Landau calls out. “It’s not a big deal. It’s not tears.” He looks at me: “But I did say not to drink it.”

  Dallas tries for another minute to make it seem completely catastrophic that I drank an ounce of salt water. But the moment has passed.

  “Georges,” Mr. Landau says as we’re filing out the door to math, “do you have a second?”

  “You doing okay?” he asks me when we’re alone.

  “I’m good,” I tell him.

  “If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

  Sensitive-moment alert. “I knew it wasn’t tears,” I say. “That’s just—stupid.”

  “Right,” he says. “Where would a person get that many tears?”

  Which makes me wonder: If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It’s one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we’ll never know what it is.

  I tap the red and white cooler. “It wasn’t just salt water, though, right? It was ocean water.”

  He smiles. “Correct.”

  I get this picture in my head of Mr. Landau with his cooler and his plastic bottles, heading out to Coney Island on the Q train.

  “I figured it wouldn’t matter if I drank it. When I swim at Cape Cod, I always drink a bunch of water by accident.”

  He nods.

  “And even if it was tears—who cares? I mean, why are people so afraid of everything?”

  “Georges?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you trying to engage me in a philosophical discussion so that you can miss part of math?”

  I smile. My mouth feels stretched out, like it might be my first smile of the day. “Maybe.”

  “Go to math.”

  “Okay.” I walk away, quizzing myself: twenty-eight stools in the room, ten buttons on Mr. Landau’s shirt, four pencils and two pens in the cup on his desk.

  Uncle

  On the way home from school, I stop at Bennie’s to buy a pack of Starbursts. I notice a pile of Chicks, Ducks, and Bunnies SweeTarts and think again how weird it is that Candy’s name is Candy. Not that I’m judging.

  Bennie is chatting, which means I have to wait to pay, because Bennie does only one thing at a time. I debate the morality of eating a Starburst before the pack is paid for and decide not to.

  “Do you know a girl named Candy?” I ask Bennie when he comes to the register.

  “Sure do,” he says. “One of my best customers.”

  I give him my dollar and he counts out my change: “Seventy-five cents for the Starbursts!” he announces. “A nickel makes eighty, a dime makes ninety, and another dime is one dollar.” That’s another thing about Bennie—he always counts your change back to you.

  “Do you know her brother—Safer?”

  “The tall guy?”

  “No—like my size.”

  Bennie shakes his head. “Don’t know him.”

  “Did you know that she calls this place the Chock-Nut? Candy does, I mean.”

  I didn’t even know I was going to say that. It all just seems so weird, how I thought Bennie’s was kind of my place all these years and it turns out to be some other person’s place, too—and some other person might even be one of Bennie’s best customers, but she calls it the Chock-Nut.

  He shrugs. “That’s what it says on the sign.”

  “But what do you call it?”

  “Me?” He cracks open a roll of dimes against the edge of the counter. “I call it work.”

  I’m in the lobby of our building, waiting for the elevator, when a teenage girl walks in with a boy who’s maybe four years old. The girl is talking on her cell phone, saying, “I’m telling you, forget it. Vanessa holds a grudge forever. Forever!”

  We all stand and look at the arrow that shows what floor the elevator’s on.

  “Six! Five! Four!” the little kid yells, and then he starts spinning in circles, just for fun. I remember doing that.

  The elevator comes, and we get on, the boy bumping into the walls because he’s dizzy from the spinning. He leans back into a corner and looks up at me, all woozy.

  “Knock, knock,” he says.

  “Who’s there?” I say.

  “Interrupting cow.”

  “Interrupting cow wh—”

  “MOOOOO! MOOOOOO!”

  The kid totally cracks up. He’s laughing so hard he almost falls over. Unless he’s just still really dizzy. They get off on two, with the girl still on the phone. I can hear the kid laughing even after the elevator door closes behind them.

  My stupid key sticks in the lock, and it takes me three tries to get the apartment door open. The whole time I’m fiddling with it, I can hear the phone ringing inside.

  “Hello?”

  “MOOOO!”

  It’s actually even weirder than you might be thinking. I sort of shake my head and try again.

  “He
llo?”

  “It’s Safer.”

  “Oh. Hi. How did you know about the—?”

  “Apartment 6A. Come on up.”

  I’m supposed to call Mom or Dad after school so they know I got home okay. Dad has a meeting with a “potential big client,” which he says is good news for our “potential summer vacation at the Cape,” where we always rent a house for two weeks, except last summer, when we didn’t.

  I call him on his cell, and then I quick call Mom because Dad says I have to. Her number at the hospital is stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. She sounds tired. I tell her school was good, lunch was good, coming home was good, I don’t have a lot of homework, and yes, I will make myself a snack. I don’t tell her about Carter Dixon’s incredibly stupid new “gay test,” which has something to do with what finger is longer than some other finger.

  I run up the three flights to 6A. I ring the bell. A thumping sound comes closer and closer, and then the door flings open. It’s Candy. There’s a long hallway stretching behind her.

  “Grand tour!” she announces, pumping one fist into the air. She pivots and marches away from me, leading me down the hall with her hand up in the air as if I might otherwise lose her.

  She points as we pass a series of doors. “My room, Safer’s room, bathroom, Pigeon’s room, bathroom, Mom and Dad’s room, Mom’s photography studio—quiet, she’s in there working—kitchen, dining room, and here’s the living room.”

  It’s a big apartment. I wonder if Safer and Candy go to private school.

  In one corner of the living room, I see Safer, sunk into a beanbag chair, reading. He doesn’t look up. I can see only the top of his head and his legs from the knees down.

  “Safer!” Candy shouts at him. “Your friend is here!”

  She turns to me. “You have to talk loud when he’s reading. Otherwise he just ignores you.” Then she marches away, down the hallway.

  “Welcome to Uncle,” Safer says.