And these MIT guys—or maybe it was Stanford, and if it was, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack worked on the video or was even in it, because like Laura said, he’s a Stanford man and very involved with what goes on there. Laura always told me that Jack was very, very involved, even though I don’t really think old Jack was bright enough to have actually thought up the video, or even to have been the guy in the gorilla suit, but was probably, most likely, one of the jocky guys making the passes. Anyway, these guys brilliantly demonstrate one of the best ways of hiding, which is to make the person you’re hiding from completely interested in something other than you.
I swear, I could have made that video.
I could have even been in it.
I bet I’d have made a great gorilla.
I dug in the lower cabinets to see what I could find, and pretty soon I came up with this red towel. I won’t say it was the exact same red as the carpet out there, but it was close enough, considering the cheesy color reproduction on most video monitors, because I figured the security system monitors I had to beat would be no better than the sort I’d seen in convenience stores, and they always looked pretty fuzzy.
Actually it was a tablecloth, a sort of vinyl picnic tablecloth that Laura’s family must use when they had dinner out on the deck, because I saw a long redwood table out there and a big chromium barbecue grill that looked like a spaceship, and I figured they had dinner out there a lot, or at least as much as possible, so as never to mar the perfection of the incredible dining room by actually eating dinner in it.
What I did now was unwrap this tablecloth—it was zippered in this sort of plastic bag—and unfold it, and then put it over my face and shoulders, so it hung straight down in front of me, all the way to the floor.
That was it.
That was my big disguise.
If anybody saw me—I mean any guy in an office downtown watching a monitor while he was half-asleep—all he would see as soon as I came onto the screen was a sort of big red rectangle moving slowly up the red carpet, and he wouldn’t notice it at all.
At least that was the plan.
I went back to the door, reached for the knob, and pulled it open just far enough for me to slip through.
Chapter
Eleven
I must admit that while all this was going on I was sort of thinking a lot about my dad—I mean, even as I was walking across the carpet down the hallway.
I was going very slow, holding the tablecloth straight out in front of me, stretched pretty tight between both my hands, and taking just one short step after the next.
I figured the less motion I made the better, and I was super careful about not hitting the tablecloth with my knees as I raised them, so I wouldn’t, like, dent the cloth and make it easier to see.
But even while I was doing all that—and also looking behind myself once in a while, to make sure my shadow was in line with the carpet, because light was coming in from the window on the front door, and the shadow of the tablecloth was like a big rectangle behind me—I had this nagging thought in my mind about my dad, because as you know, I’d left the house pretty late the night before, and since I wasn’t there in the morning, he might have wondered if I ever came back.
Of course, it wasn’t that bad a problem.
I mean, I knew I’d probably get away with it.
I’d been hanging around the house all summer with him, and it’s not like he ever really paid much attention to me. He felt too bad about what had happened with my mom, and mostly lay on the sofa watching TV, like I already told you everything about.
The only real problem would be if my mom showed up.
That would be hairy.
She still came by sometimes—well, practically every other day—because she hadn’t exactly packed up all her stuff when she left, but rather just sort of stormed out the front door and walked the two miles to her mom’s house over there in Greenway Terrace.
She’d come around every couple days, and because she refused to talk with my dad, she’d come up to my room and sort of look around and cry about how much she loved me and how sorry she was about leaving, which always made me feel pretty miserable, and then she’d grab something from the bathroom like her styling iron or toothbrush, and without saying too much to my dad, who was always sacked out on the couch anyway and not really up for much conversation, she’d sort of tramp out the door again.
Most of the time her visits were fairly undramatic, but if she were to come by and see I wasn’t there and he didn’t know where I went, I knew she’d totally blow her top, because one of the things she was always on him about was that he never kept enough of an eye on me.
The truth is, my dad was sort of out of it—well, actually completely out of it—and had been all summer since my mom left him. I mean, he might not have even noticed I was gone; it wasn’t like he spent a lot of time checking up on me anymore. And it wasn’t like I’d missed having breakfast with him or anything, because we no longer did that sort of stuff. In fact, we didn’t really do too much at all together, at least no family-type stuff, because with my mom gone he just wasn’t up to it, because like he said,
