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