Spy in the Alley

by Melanie Jackson

  There were a lot more GASPers milling around a table piled with brochures and booklets about smoking. Placards, stacked against a side of the table, were plucked up one by one by the GASPers: NO JOKE, DON’T SMOKE, the placards read, and GASP AGAINST SMOKING.

  Lifted high, the placards bobbed in a circle in the clearing behind the totem poles. At the opposite side of the table, a guitar player strummed and sang.

  “On top of old Smokey

  All covered with tars

  I found some rat poison

  And switched to cigars

  But cigars weren’t much better

  With nail polish they’re filled.

  Be you poor or jet-setter

  You’re bound to be killed.”

  “Catchy, isn’t it,” Lorraine remarked to Pantelli and me. “There are a lot more verses, because there are a lot more yucky things stuffed into smokes. Like paint thinner. And gasoline.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jack, noticing our aghast expressions. “If you make it to sixteen without smoking, you’ll probably make it through life without getting addicted.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Pantelli. Once or twice, at recess, he and some of the other boys had sneaked away to try smoking.

  “I might have experimented,” Pantelli said, guessing my thoughts. “Just out of curiosity.”

  “Ah well,” Jack said sadly. “That’s what Mom told me she’d thought, when she ‘experimented’ at age thirteen.”

  “Not me,” Pantelli replied. “Doesn’t mean anything.” In a sudden, angry gesture he grabbed a placard and began marching round and round with the others.

  Since Jack, already holding a placard, was about to do the same thing, I lifted one from the stack and joined them.

  Chapter Nine

  Madge is not amused

  On TV, scenes of protesters trudging in a circle always looked kind of monotonous to me. This wasn’t at all dull. Our circle was more like a merry-go-round, with kids jumping up and down to wave at passing cyclists, walkers and drivers, and clapping and singing along with the GASP guitarist.

  I was enjoying myself — but I was also peering around to see if I could spot Buckteeth. He was, after all, supposed to be involved in the anti-smoking movement.

  “Looking for something?” inquired a red-haired girl in cut-offs and a GASP T-shirt with a bunch of stick figures kicking at a pile of cigarettes. Kicking the habit. I got it. I got something else, too. A sick, sinking feeling. Her T-shirt had the same design as the one I’d spotted Buckteeth in last night. The stick figures must be some sort of GASP logo.

  Buzz had been right: Buckteeth was in some way associated with GASP.

  “Buckteeth. Great,” I muttered.

  The girl flushed. She opened 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.”

  “Buckteeth 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.

  “When 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.

  “The 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 … ”

  “Yeah?” I said eagerly.

  “When 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.

  “You don’t believe me,” I accused.

  “I do!”

  “You don’t!”

  “I 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?”

  “He doesn’t believe I really saw Buckteeth last night,” I said hotly.

  “Yeah, I do. It’s just that, well, you might, I said, might, have seen him in a dream.”

  “I 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.

  “Then 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 their signs about. Pantelli and I were too short to see what was going on.

  “GASP for relief!”

  “Why don’t you put health before profits?”

  Slogans like this whipped rapid-fire from the protesters — but at whom? After yelling at Jack in vain, I finally stepped on his foot.

  “What? Oh.” He bent, listened to my question and explained in my ear, “Some tobacco executives just pulled up in a limo. They’re using the totem poles as the backdrop for publicity shots for one of their events.”

  The protesters began to move forward. Pantelli and I still couldn’t see anything, but we edged forward along with them. Pantelli bellowed in my other ear, “I hope we’re not gonna plunge over the cliff!” Beyond the totem poles, there was quite a drop to the ocean. Our eyes widened at each other.

  Then we both got the giggles. But, at a stern look from Lorraine, we started shouting dutifully with the others.

  “Stop deceitful advertising!”

  “Tobacco kills!”

  “Smoking schmoking!”

  That last one was mine. A few protesters glanced down, puzzled.

  Okay, so it wasn’t brilliant. The spirit was there, though.

  The kids ahead of us started fanning apart. I saw that they’d reached a yellow cordon rope. Past it, a few moving bodies were just visible; Pantelli and I jostled to see these executives.

  “Executives schmexecutives!” I said scornfully. I plucked at the T-shirt hem of a serious-looking girl with ch
estnut hair permed into a tight globe.

  “I know all about executives,” I told her. “I know how the seven big tobacco executives showed up in Washington and claimed to the US Congress that cigarettes are not addictive.”

  The serious girl was impressed. “Wow,” she said, adjusting her weighty glasses that had been sliding down her nose. “You’ve been doing some intensive research.”

  “Actually, we rented The Insider the other night,” I responded, feeling important.

  I felt the rope bump against my stomach, and, invigorated with the thought that I was just as well-informed as any GASPer, turned frontward, waved my sign and shouted, “Nerds! Dweebs!”

  Trying to think of a fresh insult, I took a breath. It was then that I looked, really looked, at the people I was defaming, and saw staring back at me in white-faced horror — Madge.

  “When you said park, I thought you meant the park down the street,” Mother said in surprise.

  Pantelli, Jack and I were in the living room. Mother had already received a full, detail-by-ghastly-detail account of the confrontation between the Galloway sisters, by telephone from an, um, let’s just say, less than delighted Madge.

  “I didn’t know you meant Stanley Park,” Mother went on.

  Jack covered his face with his hands. “You Vancouverites,” he moaned. In spite of feeling awful, Pantelli and I bit back smiles.

  “Oh dear,” Mother said. “If I’d known you were heading to Stanley Park, I would’ve warned you about Madge’s shoot there. She was scheduled to model Bonna Terra’s line of skating outfits in front of the totem poles. And, yes, since Fields Tobacco is sponsoring the Bonna Terra Skate-For-Health-A-Thon in December, its executives were coming along to be in some photos, too.”

  From behind his hands, Jack mumbled miserably, “I didn’t know Bonna Terra was involved. I just heard the Fields people were going to be there promoting one of their phony health-a-thons. Not that a health-a-thon is phony, if you understand what I mean, but promoting tobacco products along with it sure is.”

  “Have some tea,” suggested Mother.

  She poured us all rosy-colored tea that sent up delicious wafts of strawberry. Tea, my mother believed, solved everything.

  Jack removed his hands from his face to reveal sad gray eyes. “Madge was so caustic with me,” he mourned. “So frosty. She hates me now.”

  “Hmm,” said Mother, biting into a chocolate ladyfinger. “Do you think the one follows the other? I wonder.”

  Proving that, for all her dottiness, Mother had her flashes of insight. Reaching for several ladyfingers at once, I proclaimed, “I knew from the start that Madge li — ”

  Mother took one of the ladyfingers from my hand and stuffed it in my mouth. “Interesting that Stanley Park would be the site of a showdown between GASP and Fields Tobacco,” she resumed comfortably, as if I hadn’t tried to speak. “Originally Stanley Park was called the much less dignified Coal Peninsula. It was a military reserve, with weapons at the ready in case the United States invaded.

  “By 1889, Canada’s Governor-General, Lord Stanley, sensibly realized that such an attack was unlikely. The land should be enjoyed for its beauty. So, he dedicated it as a park, perhaps rather immodestly as Stanley Park.”

  Pantelli and I laughed. A wan grin was even dawning across Jack’s freckled features when the front door opened. Madge walked in, her blue eyes icy enough to sink the Titanic. She saw Jack and stopped.

  He got up. There was a moment of tense silence.

  Cr-r-runch! Out of sheer suspense, I’d just broken a ladyfinger.

  “I could have accepted that you need to humiliate me,” Madge informed Jack. “I guess you and your friends are entitled to get your jollies in a sick kind of way, if that’s what you want. But vandalizing Rod’s car!” With a toss of her auburn hair, she scowled out the window.

  Of course we all craned our necks to see. On the sidewalk, Rod was standing — and also scowling — beside the new pink Mazda his dad had bought him.

  Wait a minute. Pink? I’d thought Roderick’s new Mazda was forest green. I shoved my glasses up closer to my eyes — in hot weather, my specs tend to slide — and squinted.

  Pink spray paint covered the Mazda. Specifically, pink spray paint in the shape of the letters GASP SAVES THE DAY!, GO GASP and other slogans.

  Jack looked as stunned as the rest of us. At last he commented weakly, “That’s pretty awful. I’ll definitely have to speak to the GASP art department about this.” I understood his reaction. When on the spot, try to make a joke — I do this all the time, most frequently in the principal’s office.

  But Madge had no empathy whatsoever. “Yes, you would find this humorous. Your buck-toothed volunteer at work again, I suppose,” Madge said witheringly.

  From Jack’s unhappy face it was obvious he didn’t really find the spray-paint job humorous at all, but Madge didn’t wait to look at him. With another auburn toss, she went to the front door again and waved good-by to Roderick.

  El Dweebo’s voice drifted in: “I’ll phone you, hon.”

  “Yes. Fine,” replied Madge.

  Jack lifted the bouquet of beige roses he’d brought with him. The paper and plastic wrapping made loud, embarrassing crackles in the silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told Madge. “I honestly don’t know anything about the spray-painting. But I’ll find out, I promise you. I’m also sorry you were embarrassed at the rally. Please believe that the protests have nothing to do with you personally. If I’d known that you would be there, I’d have warned you. It was Fields Tobacco we were after, not you.

  “I’d do anything to make up to you for what happened,” he said. “Walk on hot coals. Sleep on a bed of nails. Or sleep on hot coals and walk on a bed of nails. You name it.”

  “Wow,” I breathed, munching the broken ladyfinger. How poetic!

  Madge turned up her elegant nose. She dropped the bouquet at his feet and went upstairs.

  Chapter Ten

  Jack’s really bad day, continued

  An evil green blob, oozing icky, deadly mini-blobs, hung over the city. Liquefied by the dropping, plopping mini-blobs, city hall collapsed, followed by the museum and several stately houses.

  “Isn’t it time for Deathstalker to arrive?” I mused, forking out a hole in my mashed potatoes so the gravy could flow in and smother them. The same effect, you might say, as a mini-blob.

  “Deathstalker’s busy hacking his way out of the blobby chains that the evil Mega-Blob put him in,” Pantelli reminded me.

  We were eating our dinner in front of the TV. As a rule, Mother didn’t permit this. However, tonight she was too busy upstairs trying to soothe Madge to object.

  “Oooo, here’s Deathstalker,” said Pantelli. “He looks pale.”

  “He always does, after breaking blob chains.”

  “Yeah, positively sickly. And boy, does Madge have bad acne!”

  “Huh?” I looked up from the green beans, which I’d been spearing one by one into a fat forkful. That way you have a chance at getting them all down in one gulp. “Madge has porcelain skin, dodo bird.”

  With his dinner roll, the dodo bird pointed at the TV screen. I stared. He was right. It was Madge — covered with red spots!

  A billboard Madge, anyway. She was posing in what had been a white — now red and white — tennis outfit to promote both Bonna Terra Sports and an upcoming tournament Bonna Terra was co-sponsoring with Fields Tobacco. Somebody had splattered the billboard with red paint. The letters “GASP” were plainly visible; I guessed that all the extra spots and splashes were added just for effect.

  The news announcer was exclaiming, “We break into our regular Deathstalker programming to show you this shocking eyesore! Lovely model Madge Galloway must be seeing red by now — Roderick Wellman sure is! He’s the owner of Wellman Talent, which is working with Bonna Terra and Fields. His car got spray-painted with GASP slogans! In pink, yet!”

  A shot of the Mazda. Beside it, Roderick
, somehow managing to look indignant and dweebish at the same time. “I know this is GASP’s work,” he told the camera.

  “Ha!” I said. “This is the work of Buckteeth, the mutant GASPer. Jack and his friends would never do this.”

  Roderick continued to spout off. “In my opinion, the whole GASP operation should be shut down. I’m sure it will be, when the national GASP office hears about this vandalism. Then, finally, Bonna Terra, Fields Tobacco and I can just get on with our work together.”

  Suddenly I heard Mother’s voice on the stairs: “I’m so glad you’re coming downstairs for dinner, dear. Things are never so bad as you think.”

  “Hmph!” That was Madge, accompanying her.

  Mother said soothingly, “Really, you were a bit harsh with poor Jack, dear.”

  She and Madge would be down in seconds. “Oh no,” I moaned. “Throw me the remote, Pantelli. I gotta switch away from this. Maybe there are some tigers attacking antelopes on the Discovery Channel … anything but this … ”

  I don’t know if it was the urgent note in my voice or the prospect of watching bloodthirsty tigers, but Pantelli got so excited he fumbled the remote and dropped it plunk! into his mashed potatoes.

  Madge descended the last step just in time to see the camera refocus on the red-splotched billboard of herself.

  “That does it,” she said ominously.

  At which point I saw my matchmaking plans for her and Jack go up in smoke. Fields Tobacco smoke, to be precise.

  An hour later, Pantelli and I were trudging down the alley with a gift intended to console Jack: a broccoli-and-cheese casserole, prepared by Mother. She believed everyone should be fed large amounts of broccoli, as often as possible. Especially people who had troubles.