Free Spying on Miss Muller by Eve Bunting

alone,” Lizzie Mag told us. “She’s hurting too much.”
    â€œSuffering from emotional disturbance” was the way Old Rose put it.
    And no wonder. Two mornings a week Greta saw a psychiatrist, the word always whispered among us behind our hands. After we found out, we pretty much stayed away from her.
    Once when we went for a ramble by the river, Lizzie Mag asked Greta to be her walk partner. I was really hurt and mad, too, because Lizard and I were always partners in the crocodile when we walked two by two by two in a long, winding line. I ended up having to walk with Marion Kelleher, who was a swot, studying day and night. She spent the whole ramble telling me why Pythagoras was a genius and how numbers became for him the ultimate way to interpret the universe. As if I cared.
    But I couldn’t ever stay mad at Lizzie Mag for long. When we were friends again, she told me Greta hadn’t said one word during the whole ramble. Lizzie Mag talked to her every time she saw her, though, even after the rest of us had given up trying. Lizard was always nice to everyone. I thought of her inside assembly now, saving a seat for me, defending Mean Jean Ross if Maureen and Ada were saying bad stuff about her.
    Lizzie Mag defended everyone. It wasn’t fair about her parents. How could they have a tug-of-war with poor little Lizard in between them? Bad enough having them so far away in India, but now this.
    I glanced sideways at Greta sitting on her schoolbook, staring across the wet quad. What was she thinking? About her parents? Poland? What? It was so sad for her, all of it.
    I gave a little cough to remind her I was there and said conversationally, “Well, I hope we won’t have any more air raids.” Lizzie Mag would have been proud of me.
    I wasn’t expecting an answer, and I was startled when Greta said casually: “The Germans like to bomb.”
    I nodded. I’d seen her in the shelter and I’d known she wasn’t too impressed with our air raid.
    Inside assembly hall they were now into another verse of the closing hymn. The cello was way off key, sounding like a seal barking. “Thanks for mercies past received,” the Alveara students sang with gusto.
    Greta might be wondering what mercies she’d received. Well, she
did
get out of Poland. I was pleased that she’d said something to me. It was a kind of crack in her armor and probably a good sign. It would also be something else to tell the girls in the dorm later. Way down the list, after my other discoveries of the day. But maybe the air raid had brought Greta closer to us. After all, we all hated the Germans, and last night the war had come to our city, too.
    â€œListen.” I leaned toward her trying to open up the crack a little more. “We have reason to think Miss Müller might be a German spy.”
    Greta turned her face toward me. Looking into her eyes was like looking into deep, still water. The depths made me nervous.
    I shifted my gaze and stared across the quad.
    â€œSquad... halt!” Mr. Guy bellowed, and I had a mysterious flash of a German school somewhere, a quad like this one. Linden trees maybe, German sixth formers training to fight us. Like a game, like checkers. Your move, my move. You bomb, we bomb. I shook my head. What a traitorous thought.
    â€œYou think she might be a
spy
?” Greta repeated. “Why?”
    â€œShe goes spy walking on the roof at night,” I said, “and we’re going to find out more. Ada and Maureen and Lizzie Mag and I are planning to follow her when she leaves her room.”
    Greta didn’t speak. She watched me carefully.
    It was a funny thing that I’d noticed before. When a person doesn’t say anything, just waits, the other person has to jump in to fill the silence gap. It must be a law of physics, Pythagoras, or something like that. Silence is not always golden—sometimes it’s creepy. “Miss