Read Online Spy in the Alley by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

her mouth and I saw that her teeth were covered with train-track braces. You couldn’t even see white. “I’m trying as hard as I can to improve my appearance,” she snarled. “I don’t think cruel personal remarks are called for.” She stomped off, her mood ruined.
    Nearby, Jack was biting his lower lip in an effort not to smile. “I’ve been watching for any male buck-toothed members of GASP myself,” he assured me. “So far I’ve come across a chipped tooth and a missing tooth. No buck ones, though.”
    â€œBuckteeth must have something to do with GASP,” I said. “Maybe he’s in a weird cult branch of your organization. You know, that only meets at midnight, flapping around in sheets and chanting.”
    Now Jack did laugh — quite rude of him, I thought. It had been a perfectly good theory. He rumpled my hair. “It’s true I haven’t met all the volunteers yet,” he admitted. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
    Pantelli was listening. He pretended to remove an eye, examine it and eat it. I giggled. Now that was humor.
    After a while a catering truck pulled up, and a woman got out, opened a huge flap on the side of the truck and gave us all sandwiches and cans of iced tea. Her treat, she said; her husband had died a long, lingering death from lung cancer, and she’d do anything to help the anti-smoking movement.
    â€œWhen he and I were growing up,” the woman reminisced, folding her arms and shaking her head ruefully, “cigarettes were considered glamorous. Before you could even start chatting with each other, you surrounded yourselves with a cloud of smoke. I suppose it provided a certain aura.” She laughed. “Sometimes the aura got so thick you could hardly tell who you were with anymore!”
    Everybody laughed along with her, me included — though, as I whispered to Pantelli, the story just confirmed what I’d thought all along: older people were weird .
    â€œThe question is,” I murmured, “will we grow up and be like we are now, I mean, sensible , or will we grow out of that? Is weirdness something you grow into?”
    This was something I had long worried about. One day, around your sixteenth birthday, maybe your brain softened into mush. Finally, here was an opportunity for a meaningful peer conversation about this.
    Pantelli murmured back, “Uh, Dinah, about this growing-out-of-what-we-are stuff … ”
    â€œYeah?” I said eagerly.
    â€œWhen you grow out of wanting to play baseball, can I have your glove? The dog ate mine.”
    Tramping around with our placards, Pantelli and I got into an argument.
    â€œYou don’t believe me,” I accused.
    â€œI do!”
    â€œYou don’t!”
    â€œI do!”
    I would have been quite happy to continue this exchange for hours, but Jack, clutching his head as if a massive migraine were descending on it, demanded, “And what, pray tell, are you infants squabbling about?”
    â€œHe doesn’t believe I really saw Buckteeth last night,” I said hotly.
    â€œYeah, I do. It’s just that, well, you might, I said, might , have seen him in a dream.”
    â€œI did not! We were looking for the thief, and I was as wide awake as you were. Then — ” I stopped so abruptly that the person marching behind me crashed into me.
    â€œThen what?” prompted Jack, trying not to smile.
    I said slowly, “Does it strike you as odd that Buckteeth and the thief were both in our alley last night? Maybe ... ” Maybe they’re one and the same, I was thinking, though it didn’t make sense. Why would Buckteeth switch back and forth from being a spy, a voyeur, to being a thief?
    However, I didn’t have the chance to share these speculations, because just then a GASPer shouted loud enough to split my eardrums, “Here they are!”
    The other GASPers began yelling, too, and waggling