Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Page 13

"Men." He stopped in front of us, blocking our path. Which meant that unless we wanted to impress him with our unusual physical abilities even more, we were probably going to have to wait him out.
Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, he looked right at Macey. "How much do you weigh?"
"Hey!" I blurted, stepping between them. "It was nothing. Really! It was like those women who lift trucks off their babies—that's how I felt." I tried to sound like that moment was as exciting and adrenaline-filled and foreign to me as it had been for him.
"Yeah," Macey added.
"But the moves…" he started.
"My mom made me take a self-defense class," I blurted. (Totally not a lie.)
"Wow." He nodded. "Hope you got extra credit."
"I did," I said. (Also not a lie.)
"Well …" Preston ran his hand through his hair and straightened his tie. "They must be teaching you something special in that school of yours."
Macey and I looked at each other as if we knew we could kill him, but getting away might be way more difficult than usual.
And then he laughed.
And we breathed.
And he looked at both of us with (if he hadn't been a politician's son and all) an expression of genuine gratitude as he said, "I'm just glad I get to do this with girls like you."
"Mr. Winters!" one of the agents called. "We're moving."
A team of agents surrounded him, ushering Preston away, but Macey lingered a second longer.
"Well, he seemed…nice ?" I finally found the strength to mutter.
But Macey merely looked at me. "You're a spy, Cam. Don't you know that nothing is ever as it seems?"
I didn't get to mention Zach. I didn't get to tell her what I thought of her speech. I didn't even get to ask Aunt Abby if she was really serious about telling my mom that I'd been caught out-of-bounds.
Instead I watched the Secret Service swarm around my roommate once again. A gate swung open and Macey stepped toward her parents. Her father reached out for her hand, but she was already waving, pulling in votes and smiles and handshakes.
And there was already a voice in my earpiece telling me it was time to go home.
Chapter Fourteen
Do you know how long it took to get back to school? One hundred and seventy-two minutes. Do you know how long it took for things to return to normal? Well… I guess I'm still kind of waiting.
As soon as we got back, Mr. Solomon dragged us all the way down to Sublevel Two to review surveillance tapes and take a pop quiz. (I scored a 98%.) By the time we got upstairs to the foyer I heard the scraping of forks and the clanking of ice in our second-best crystal, but I totally wasn't hungry, especially when I saw Macey walking through the front door.
"Macey!" I yelled.
"Cam." Bex and Liz ran behind me. "What's going on?"
It was a normal night at a very abnormal school. But even by Gallagher Academy standards I'd had a very exceptional day, so I raced through the entry hall and climbed the stairs, still calling, "Macey!"
By the time I caught up to her she had already taken off her jacket and was standing there in a silk blouse. She was carrying a string of pearls and had crammed the scarf she'd been wearing at the rally into her purse. With every step, Macey was shedding her fake façade—her cover—one piece of pocket litter at a time.
"You're back," I said.
"Yeah," she said in the tone of the incredibly tired, "very observant. Hey, what was up with you today?" She took another step, then shed another piece of the clothing that only a mother can love. "When I saw you, you looked kind of…freaked?"
"Wait," Bex said, "you saw her?"
"Yeah, I was going to tell you, but well … we haven't exactly had a moment…And it's not exactly something you…And I just didn't know how…And—"
"Cammie." Bex snapped me out of it. She crossed her arms, stared me down, and gave me that "you've got some explaining to do" look that I've come to love. And fear. (Well, mostly fear.) And I knew I couldn't keep my secret any longer.
"I saw something!" I blurted. Then I had to correct myself as I said, "Someone."
The halls were quiet around us. Dark. The days were getting shorter. Summer was finally gone. And maybe that was why I shivered as I said, "Zach."
Time it took me to tell the whole story: twenty-two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
Time it would have taken me to tell the story had I not been constantly interrupted: two minutes and forty-six seconds.
Number of times Liz said, "No way!": thirty-three.
Number of times Bex gave me her "You could have brought me with you" look: nine.
"But what was he doing there?" Liz was asking again (time number seven, to be exact).
"I don't know," I managed to mutter. "I mean, one minute I'm thinking he's breaching security—well, technically, he did breach security …" I trailed off. "And the next I'm flipping him to the ground and—"
"Staring deeply into his eyes?" Liz guessed, because while security breaches might be serious, eye-staring-into is something that should never be ignored.
"Maybe Blackthorne was there for an assignment too?" Bex asked.
"Maybe," I said, but my heart wasn't in it. I thought about his cryptic postcard—his warning—and the way he'd looked at me that day. "It's just that something about him seemed…different."
"What?" Bex said. I could feel her moving toward me. Like a tiger. She was lethal and beautiful and very, very catlike in the curiosity department. "What are you thinking about?"
I didn't know what was more concerning—that there had been a gap, however small, in Macey's security perimeter, or that Zach had slipped through it.
I thought about the boy who had kissed me last spring and the one who had looked at me under the bleachers. "He seemed"—I started slowly, still trying to put the pieces together—"worried."
"Ooh!" Liz squealed. "He wants to protect you!"
"I don't need protecting," I told her, but Liz only shrugged.
"It's the thought that counts."
"Well, there is another option," Bex said, with a very mischievous grin. "Maybe he went under the bleachers knowing you wouldn't be able to resist following him under the bleachers…"
She let her voice trail off as she stared at me, the possibilities lingering until Liz felt the need to blurt: "So you could be alone!"
Okay, I don't want to sound braggy. Or unprofessional. Or naïve. But is it wrong to admit that I'd been kind of hoping all day that was the reason? (Partly because, as a girl, that's a good reason, and as a spy, it meant he wasn't conspiring to commit high treason.)
"No," I blurted. "No. That can't be possible. He wouldn't leave school and go all the way to Cleveland and sneak into a restricted area and everything just to see…me." I turned to Macey, our resident expert on all things boy. "Would he?"
"Don't look at me," Macey said, waving her hands (which were, by that time, holding a pump, a jacket, and a "walk the walk" campaign button). "I have a whole other kind of boy problem."
Wait. MACEY McHENRY HAD A BOY PROBLEM? I couldn't be sure I'd heard correctly, and evidently I wasn't alone.
"Boy"—Liz stammered—"problem. YOU?"
Macey rolled her eyes. "Not that kind of problem. Preston."
"Oh," Liz said, sounding way too matchmakery, if you want to know the truth. "He is kind of cute. And really socially aware. You know, I read this article in—"
"He's a dork," Macey said, cutting her off.
"But you have so much in common," Liz protested. Macey glared. "I mean, besides the dork thing."
"'Common' is overrated," Macey said with another sigh.
"Well then," Liz said, "what's the problem?"
"The problem is that we were attacked by three highly trained operatives and lived to tell the tale," I said without even realizing that I'd known the answer all along.
"Bingo," Macey said. "And Preston was impressed. Very impressed."
"So boys really do make passes at girls who kick—"
"Bex!" I cut my best friend off.
Can I just say that it's really pretty hard to deal with boys who may want to…
A. Date you, or
B. Kill you, or
C. Learn the origins of your freaklike self-defense capabilities!
And that day it was highly possible that we might have been dealing with ALL THREE!
Will the boy drama in my life ever go away?! Seriously. I'm asking.
"Even after you left, he wouldn't shut up about it," Macey told me.
"You could have shut him up," Bex suggested.
"Don't think I wasn't tempted."
A group of eighth graders passed by, singing at the top of their lungs, but the four of us stayed quiet and still inside the dark alcove.
"You're smiling," Macey blurted, no doubt accusing Bex of doing something Bexish. "Why are you smiling?"
"Nothing," Bex said with a shake of her head. "I just keep thinking…"
Bex isn't one for trailing off. She always knows what comes next and never starts what she can't finish. So maybe it was that fact, or the way the smile faded from her face, but something made me hold my breath as she found the words to say, "I just keep thinking how shocked they must have been. You know…them. They thought they were coming after a girl. But instead they got…"
"Gallagher Girls," Liz finished for her.
The two of them smiled at each other. But Macey and I—we just stared through the shadows, a new realization dawning on both of us as I said, "But they weren't surprised."
Chapter Fifteen
I've told the story here; I don't want to tell it again. This is my official record—hopefully the last time I'll have to answer the question, "So what happened last summer in Boston?"
I've told it now so many times that it comes out automatically, like a textbook I've memorized, like a song stuck in my head.
But after that…
After that the story changed.
The facts were still the same—I'd remembered them correctly all along. But I understood something else then. When the film played in my mind I didn't focus on the hits or the kicks. That night I saw the eyes, the way arms were ready to parry our punches. The way no one seemed shocked as Macey performed a textbook Malinowski Maneuver on a guy twice her size.
A spy is only as good as her cover—as her legend. The
bad guys weren't supposed to know the truth about us.
But they did.
"You're sure," Bex asked me. Again. We huddled together in the nearest, quietest, safest place I could find, surrounded by the remnants of the first-ever covert carrier pigeon breeding program. Liz sat on an overturned pigeon coop. A soft wind blew through the open gaps in the wall, which looked out into the night.
Roseville was just two miles away. And Josh. And normalcy. But somehow my first boyfriend and his perfectly ordinary life seemed like a different world entirely as I looked at Bex and then at Liz and, finally, at Macey.