i told you she was tricky.

Mr. Banks: "Will you be good enough to explain all this?"
Mary Poppins: "First of all, I would like to make one thing quite clear."
Mr. Banks: "Yes?"
Mary Poppins: "I never explain anything."

I received a text before nanny duties began today warning that Rainbow (the bearded dragon) had been spending all of her time sulking in the corner of her cage, so C2 and I grabbed the grumpy lizard after all of our secrets were shared and cuddled in front of cartoons until she snapped out of her semi-depressed state. As C2 uncurled her from the towel and set her back under her heat lamps, a commercial for the new movie The Spy Next Door burst on screen: a potential classic (… I said potential), where Jackie Chan’s character is “part spy, part babysitter, all hero.”

I chewed on my pen cap and wondered if Mr. Chan carried a carpet bag. C2 snapped the cage shut. I flipped a page in my textbook as the trailer ended. You know..., I’m a spy.

“Nuh-uh!”

Are you sure about that? He turned around and studied me.

“There’s no way.” He grabbed my pen and examined it. “But if you were a spy, this pen would blow up if I threw it.” He threw it. Gravity pulled it across the giant snake painted on the wall and down to the carpet. The sleeping cat lying beneath the mural opened a lazy eye, saw C2, and ran out the open bedroom door. “It didn’t blow up.” Naturally. You didn’t use it correctly. He squinted.

“Well, what about THIS?” My textbook hit the wall. (Sorry, Mom.) “It didn’t explode. You’re not a spy.” I smiled and jumped up to retrieve the nonvolatile study materials.

I reopened my book but, out of the corner of my eye, saw him place one bare foot on top of his giant basketball-shaped-chair. Oh no. “Oh YES!” He sprung off the chair with the most unnatural screech to ever come out of an eight year old boy’s throat and tackled me, pulling at my hair and screaming, “IS IT A MASK? IS IT A MASK?!”

He let go of my “real face” and toppled over my head. I sat up and grabbed my scalp to feel if any hair remained and heard him beside me, gasping for air, laughter filling the spaces between words,

“If you are actually a spy, why are you telling me?”

If I tell you, you don’t know whether I’m telling you because I’m not and want you to think that I am what I’m not, or if, in fact, I am and I’m telling you to make you question everything you know to be true.

“What?”

Indeed.