“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 wish 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: