by Robin Benway
Booor-ring. I picked up the dossier page labeled OBJECTIVE and started to scan through.
“Jesse Oliver, sixteen years old, son of Armand Oliver, editor in chief of Memorandum magazine. Student, the Harper School.”
I sat back in my chair and sighed. “I have to seduce someone,” I announced to my parents. “High school is already destroying my moral code and I haven’t even set foot on the campus yet.”
My mom peeked at my dossier. “I think ‘befriend’ is the word you’re looking for,” she said after a minute.
Sometimes she’s no fun.
The three of us sat at the table for a good hour, going over the new assignment. My job was to make friends with (or seduce, depending on your interpretation) Jesse Oliver at school and then use that friendship to get access to Armand Oliver’s computer and e-mails. “So,” my dad said, and then he and my mom put on their Serious Parenting Time faces. “We think that Armand is going to publish a story about the Collective and it’s going to name names.”
I froze when they said that. “What?” I asked. “How would he even know who we are?”
“No one’s quite sure,” my dad said. “Someone may be selling information or they might have heard rumors. Either way, we need to stop it. You need to stop it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said as I read through the assignment. “If you just want to kill the article, why doesn’t Mom just go work in the IT department at Memorandum or something?”
“Because Armand’s paranoid,” my mom said. “His hiring process takes months. He’s notorious for it.” She held up her hand. “He demands fingerprints.”
Fingerprints. The one thing a spy can’t change.
“So you get in through Jesse,” my dad said to me. “This one’s on you, kiddo.”
“I have to go to school while you two get to stay home?” I glared at both my parents. “You’re so lucky.”
“Hey, I did my time in high school,” my dad said.
“But Maggie,” my mom added, her voice cautious. “You know this means that you aren’t actually making friends. You’re getting to know people to gain information, but it can be more difficult if you get attached.”
“Duh,” I said, flipping through the paperwork and wondering if I could possibly retake my school ID photo. “This is not a friendly business, I get it.”
I could feel my parents exchange glances over my head, but I ignored them. “Besides, the people in this pamphlet look lame. These aren’t the kind of friends I’d want to have, anyway.”
“Well, once you get the paperwork, then your mom and I will do our analysis. Et fin.” He stood up and went to gather up the dossiers. “Everybody got it?”
My mom and I handed him all the objectives and mission statements, which he took to the sink. One lit match and two minutes later, our assignments were burned to a crisp. We used to shred everything, but even cross-cut shred isn’t that safe anymore. No one can tape together ashes.
I started to gather up everything else: my new social security card, birth certificate, school ID, and cell phone. “I have to go to work now,” I told my parents. “I have to start assimilating. I hope you’re proud.”
“Bursting with pride,” my dad said, not even looking up from his bagel.
“Glowing,” my mom added.
“You’re no fun,” I told them, then went back to my new bedroom.
I spent my first day in New York huddled over my laptop, gathering as much information as I could about Jesse Oliver and the Harper School. You’d think we’d get a vacation between jobs, right? Wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Sometimes I think it’d be amazing to just sit on a beach or, I don’t know, go to Disney World or something touristy like that, but then I remember that I burn instead of tan, and giant crowds of people wearing Goofy hats just sounds scary. Still, it’d be nice to have a few days without being inherently suspicious of the world at large. Including Jesse Oliver.
And when it came to Jesse Oliver, I was suspicious.
“He’s a delinquent!” I yelled out to my parents. “He was arrested for shoplifting last year!”
No response.
“I just want you to know that I’m going to be hanging out with someone who has a criminal record!” I cried.
“Let’s not forget that our family can never reenter Luxembourg without being arrested!” my dad yelled back.
Touché.
The truth of the matter was, Jesse Oliver sounded kind of lame, like the rebel-without-a-cause in a really bad made-for-TV movie. The New York Daily News reported that he had been busted for trying to steal a copy of The Catcher in the Rye from the Union Square Barnes & Noble, and I lowered my head and banged it gently against the computer keyboard. Shoplifting a paperback and getting caught? Amateur. Wanting to be Holden Caulfield? Poseur.
Jesse Oliver also knew nothing about protecting his Facebook profile from strangers and third-party phishing schemes, judging from how quickly I was able to see it. My mom came in to check on me right when I pulled up his profile picture, which just goes to show that parents have eternally terrible timing.
“Well,” my mom said with a grin. “He’ll be easy on the eyes.”
“Mom!” I cried. “Please do not ever say that again!”
“What? He’s cute!”
The worst part was that my mom was right: Jesse Oliver, damn him, was really cute. Dark brown hair that curled over his ears and forehead, hazel eyes, dark olive skin, and teeth that had either been borne from amazing genes or seen a boatload of orthodontia, judging from how straight they were.
But there was no way I was admitting this to my mom.
“He looks entitled,” I said, craning my neck to look up at her. “He got caught stealing Catcher in the Rye. What does that tell you?”
“That you’re more criminally adept than he is,” she replied.
“Exactly.” I clicked through to his information page. “His interests are ‘hanging out’ and ‘doing stuff.’ Is it too late to go back to Reykjavík?”
Even Jesse Oliver’s photo page was banal. Hanging out with friends in one shoot, giving the finger in another, hugging a golden retriever in the third. (I had to admit that the dog photo made me jealous. I’ve always wanted a pet, but even a goldfish is inconvenient when you’re constantly moving around the world.) Maybe the golden retriever would be the best part of getting to meet Jesse Oliver.
By the time I was in bed that night, I had a headful of information about Jesse Oliver and one thought that stood out above the rest: I had to stop calling him Jesse Oliver. I mean, really.
I woke up the next morning at 5:44, fifteen seconds before my alarm went off. As you can imagine, spies are morning people, except when we have to pull our version of an all-nighter, in which case we become night owls. Basically, we are very amenable twenty-four hours a day.
Still, 5:45 in the morning is 5:45 in the morning, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck. Sleep hadn’t been easy that night, and I tried to tell myself that it was because of the new bed and the fact that New York was a hell of a lot louder than Reykjavík.
But I knew the real reason: I was nervous about my first day of school.
It was time for the mirror pep talk.
“Okay, Maggie,” I said to myself after my shower, wiping the steam off the medicine cabinet. “You could eat these kids for breakfast. You won’t, though, because that would be cannibalistic and wrong.”
Even talking to myself, I was easily distracted. Not a good sign.
“Focus,” I told myself. “You are there to get information about Jesse Oliv—Jesse. That is it. You’re not there to make friends or look cool or whatever you’re supposed to be doing. You have a job. You don’t have time to worry about your bangs and whether or not they’ll stay straight all day. That is not the objective.”
I nodded firmly at my reflection.
Then I plugged in my hair straightener.
After breakfast (coffee and leftover bagels), I prepared myself to leave the safe have
n of the loft.
“Hasta!” I yelled to my parents. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine!”
I started to climb into the freight elevator, but just before I pulled the gate, my dad ran up and handed me a twenty. “Cab it,” he said. “At least until you know your way around.”
“Will do,” I said, then pressed the button to go down. We’ve never had our own private elevator before. That was kinda nice. Now we didn’t have to share with neighbors.
I wondered if we even had neighbors.
There were already tourists and residents in front of our building, streaming through Soho at seven in the morning. I put my hands in my blazer pockets and stuck my elbows out slightly to keep anyone from getting too close. I’m not anti-people at all, but it’s instinctive at this point. Still, I figured I was pretty safe. Tourists are generally harmless.
Except when they stop walking in the middle of the street to look up at all the buildings. That just bugs. Architectural walking tours are the worst. A brick wall is easier to pass than those groups.
I pocketed the cab money from my dad and hoofed it over to West Fourth and headed north instead. My parents are always, “Safety first!” but it’s important to get to know a city when you’re assigned to live there, and there’s no better way to do that than walking.
The pep talk resumed during the ten-block walk to the Harper School. “You can do this,” I said to myself, grateful for being in New York, where it’s perfectly acceptable to talk to yourself in public. “You’re considered a fugitive in Luxembourg, remember? This is the cotton candy of assignments. Fluffy, airy, bad for you.”
I really had to work on my pep talks.
The Harper School was on a tree-, squirrel-, and brownstone-lined street, over on Jane Street in the West Village. Red brick buildings lined the streets like antebellum soldiers at attention, and I sort of felt like saluting them as I walked up West Fourth toward the school.
As soon as I reached it, I could tell I had made a tactical error. I was just wearing my normal, semi-inappropriate school uniform, nothing flashy or cool, along with the suede boots I had found in my closet. Everyone else, though, had accessorized to the teeth. (Literally. One kid had a gold cap on his front tooth when he grinned. It made him look like an entitled pirate, but still, A+ for effort.)
Girls were wearing tights, necklaces, and gaudy brooches on the lapels of their blazers. I was wearing none of that. If this school were a circus, these girls would be the trapeze artists and I would look like the sucker who had to clean up after the elephant act.
Well, shit.
I had a backpack, too, something black and simple that traveled well, but everyone else had messenger bags or purses slung over their shoulders. I might as well have had a neon sign over my head that flashed, NEW KID! NEW KID! as I walked up the concrete steps, and I could feel everyone looking at me, which was so uncomfortable that I wanted to turn around and run back to our loft. Or Reykjavík. Either place seemed better than the front stoop of the Harper School.
Was this what teenagers did at school? I glanced down at my uniform and then back at the girls, realizing how boring and, well, beige I looked. Beige is great when you’re opening a safe, but in a world of neon and color, beige was suddenly anything but.
At least I had worn my gray suede boots. That had to count for something, right?
I pressed on. It’s rule number three, after all: Never look back.
The hallways inside were filled with kids my age and I took a deep breath. I hadn’t been around this many teenagers in … well, ever. It was sort of claustrophobic and reminded me of that one time we got stuck at O’Hare in Chicago during a blizzard and almost missed our flight to Amsterdam. (Now that is a story for another time, but I will say that it involved the mutiny of the airport Starbucks employees and a nun who turned out to be an undercover cop.) “You survived O’Hare, you’ll survive this,” I muttered to myself.
I let the crowd carry me toward the office, which was blessedly empty. I wondered if I could just stay in here all day, maybe tell them that I had a contagious disease that flared up whenever I was near people my own age. “Hi,” I said to the woman behind the front desk. “I’m Maggie Silver, it’s my first day.”
I don’t know what I had been expecting, but this woman barely blinked. I mean, she didn’t have to fire a confetti cannon or cue the tap-dancing elephants, but a smile would have been nice.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being part of a spy family, it’s that you have to give to get. If you want someone to talk to you, you have to talk to them. So I grinned at her, a full-banana smile that made my cheeks hurt, and turned on the charm. “I am just so nervous,” I told her. (For some reason, I had also adopted a slight Southern accent, but whatever.) “First-day jitters. Any advice?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. She would be amazing during an interrogation. “Study hard,” she told me, then handed me my class schedule.
I nodded as I took it, doing a quick scan of the office. Three secretaries; four closed doors, which probably led to various principals’ offices; and three computers. One of the doors near the very back had a Simplex vertical push-button lock on it. Most people set a three-number combination: just push the buttons in the correct order and the door clicks open. I smiled to myself when I saw it because they’re pretty much the easiest locks in the world to crack. All you need is a thirty-dollar magnet. (I got mine on Craigslist two years ago.) Hold the magnet up to the lock and BOOM! The lock pops open.
Seeing that lock sort of flipped a switch in me, and I smiled even wider.
“Good luck,” she said to me.
“Right back atcha,” I said, taking my class schedule and sauntering out.
Bring it, Harper School.
The Harper School definitely brought it.
By the time lunch rolled around, I felt like I was ready to retire. What had I been thinking, cursing my lazy summer in Iceland? I would give anything to be on my couch, surrounded by combination locks and practice safes, making up imaginary conversations with Cute Boy.
It wasn’t that the schoolwork was hard. I had been put in geometry, which was outrageous because I had learned geometry three years ago, and French, which was going to be ugly because my accent was terrible. They should’ve put me in calculus and Latin, but I would take care of that later. And it wasn’t that any of the students were mean to me, either.
No, it was that everyone kept looking at me.
I’ve never stood out so much in my life. I mean, my whole job is to make sure that people aren’t looking at me. If people notice anything strange, the jig is up, and what’s stranger than a new kid at school? I was sure that everyone was on to me by now, that my family and I would be outed and our lives over. The Collective should have enrolled me on the first day, not three weeks into the semester. What were they even thinking? I didn’t know who made up the Collective, but clearly, there wasn’t a teenage girl among them.
Right off, I noticed that no one else was alone: students traveled in packs of two, three, or four through the halls, not moving out of the way for anyone else. At one point, I actually had to duck under someone’s arm and almost got an accidental elbow to the eye. Wild animals also traveled in packs, I realized. That was usually how they surrounded and devoured their prey.
I probably shouldn’t have watched so many nature shows in Iceland. They were starting to mess with my head.
Another problem: everyone was sizing me up, checking me out, taking me in. Sometime between second and third period, I could feel the sweat start to creep up the back of my neck, and by the time we got to lunch, I was on the fast track to full-blown paranoid.
And I still hadn’t seen Jesse Oliver.
I needed some air.
As soon as the lunch bell rang (and having a bell going off every hour wasn’t helping the situation), I walked outside into the autumn afternoon sun and took a deep breath, pushing my hair out of my face and willing my heart to slow down
to a more manageable beat. The air was nice and cool in the courtyard and there were groups of students gathered by different tables, mostly girls huddled around one another, none of them acknowledging me. At first it was a nice change of pace, but I started to realize that standing by myself wasn’t exactly subtle.
That was it. I was going to quit spying. I didn’t care what my parents said, this was just insane. I was a sitting duck, and frankly, I’d rather be on trial in Luxembourg because at least then I could—
“Are you going to stand there all day?”
I turned around to see a blond girl sitting by herself at a table behind me, regarding me with an expression that could be described only as haughty. It reminded me of that time when the Queen of England—
“You seriously are going to just stand there, aren’t you.” She laughed to herself. “Jesus, you’re like a bleeding gazelle in the middle of the grassland.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “Do I know you?”
She took a huge bite of her apple and spoke around it. “Nope.”
She was familiar, though. Not necessarily in looks, just in the way she sat, like she was waiting for something to happen. Her uniform was on inside out, which, I am sorry to tell you, looked really cool, and she was dangling the apple from her fingers like she didn’t care whether or not she dropped it.
“Then why are you—?”
“Look,” she interrupted. “First rule of New York: Don’t just stand there. Keep moving. We don’t like it when you stand there. It makes us angry.”
I was sure I knew her! Maybe she was a spy, too. Maybe the Collective had two of us infiltrating the system. That would be a first, but hey, it wasn’t any crazier than enrolling me in geometry.
The girl started to laugh, only it was more of a cackle. “Fine.” She shrugged. “Have it your way. Enjoy the lion stampede.”