Read Liar & Spy for Free Online Page B

raise mine, because I never do either. We sort of shrug at each other.
    “I almost forgot,” Mr. Landau says. He goes up to the whiteboard, writes the word bittersweet , and puts a 6 next to it. “Twenty minutes.”
    My bittersweet memory: Jason and I are six or seven, grocery shopping with my mom. We’re outside the Met Foods on Flatbush, and it’s a sunny fall day. Jason and I are looking at some big plastic balls in a wire bin on the sidewalk by the front doors. Mom is waiting for us.
    We’re about to go inside the store when we hear this thump, like someone has bounced a Super Ball against the store window, only there’s no one there, and no ball.
    Then we see the bird lying on the sidewalk. It’s tiny and brown and in a bad position, and Jason begins to freak out. I want to cry because I think maybe we did something that killed the bird.
    The first thing Mom does is pull us into a huddle and tell us that it isn’t our fault. What happened was that the sun was shining so hard against the store window that the glass reflected the trees on the other side of the street and the bird didn’t even know the window was there. The bird thought it was flying into the air and the trees, just like on any other day.
    She has us breathe. Then she turns to the bird, and says, “Look.”
    We look. The bird is pulsing—its neck is sort of vibrating. Jason gets scared, thinking that it’s having an attack or something, but Mom explains that it’s just the bird’s heart beating. Bird hearts beat very fast.
    “The bird is alive,” she tells us. “It must have been stunned when it hit the window.”
    And just then the bird’s head snaps back to a right-looking position on its neck, and it hops up and shakes itself. We start laughing and slapping each other five.
    Mom says this calls for a celebration. She lets us each choose a plastic ball out of the wire bin, and she buys them for us.
    I have no idea where that ball is now, and I’m pretty sure Jason didn’t keep his either.
    I don’t write any of this down on my paper, of course. In fact, I don’t write anything down.
    I glance at Bob English Who Draws and see that he isn’t writing either. He’s drawing a supervillain with pointy ears and a billowing black cape. He must feel me watching, because he looks over, then jots something down and shoves his notebook over to me.
    On one corner of the page, he’s written:
So dum!
    I lean over and say, “You do know dumb has a b on the end of it, right?”
    “Haven’t you heard of spelling reform?” he asks in a low voice.
    “No.”
    “I spell it like it sounds. Benjamin Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt both believed in it,” he says. “Look it up.”
    “Okay.”
    “Ask yourself: Does that b serve a purpose? Why is it even there?”
    “Mr. English!” Mr. Landau snaps. “Shall I presume that you have finished your work and are ready to share it with the class?”
    Bob English hunches over his drawing and says nothing. I don’t say anything either. But what I’m thinking is that dum just looks—kind of dumb.

Chicken IS Chickens
    Lunch. The hot lunch is pasta with meat sauce. It’s actually delicious. Maybe not umami delicious, but pretty darn tasty. Hardly any of the other kids will eat it, because if you eat anything other than a dry, crumbly bagel for lunch at this school you are basically announcing yourself as a freak. You might as well be walking around without pants.
    But I eat the hot lunch. I figure that life will have its share of dry bread, and that when there is meat sauce on the table, I should eat it. And I do.
    I’m finishing my garlic knot when Jason walks over to me with his tray. He is not coming to sit. He is on his way from the cool table to the garbage cans. I am a point on that line.
    “Hey,” he says.
    “Hey.”
    “My mom says you guys sold your house.”
    I nod. “Yeah.”
    “You moved into an apartment?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you bring the fire escape?”
    “No. We had to leave