by Robin Benway
“Because when you do this job, it’s hard to not have your judgment clouded, especially on your first solo assignment.”
“And you think Jesse is a cloud.”
“I think …” My mom was choosing her words carefully, I could tell. “I think that you want to protect him from whatever his father might do, even if you don’t realize that.”
She was right.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I don’t think his dad’s going to run the article.”
“That may be true, but that’s not your decision to make. It’s the Collective’s.”
“What if they’re wrong?”
My mom shrugged. “Then they’ll deal with the consequences.”
“But if it affects Jesse’s dad, then Jesse has to deal with the consequences, too. You don’t understand. His mom …”
I stopped myself before I got started. I had promised Jesse that I wouldn’t tell anyone about his mom leaving, and I intended to keep at least one of my promises to him. “Can I go?” I said instead. “Roux’s waiting, and you can imagine what she’s like when she has to wait.”
My mom sighed. “Yeah, sure. Got your coat?”
“Of course. It’s November.” I didn’t know a single other spy in the world whose mother felt the need to remind her to take her coat.
The ever-present town car was waiting downstairs and I sent the driver to an address a block from Roux’s actual house. There was an alley that connected the two parts of the street, and after he dropped me off, I let myself into one building (no doorman, thank God), walked straight down the hall, and went out the back door to the alley.
Two minutes later, I was at Roux’s front door with nary a driver in sight.
“Hey, Harold,” I said when I saw her cranky doorman. “What’s new? Things good? Wife okay? Kids?” He didn’t even blink. “Great, glad to hear it. Do you mind buzzing Roux?”
He turned and pressed a button. Two rings later, I heard, “HELLOOOOO, HAROLD! It’s been too long! We haven’t talked since this afternoon! Did you miss me? Say yes, you’ll break my heart if you don’t.”
I have to hand it to Harold, he was as stoic as a soldier. A soldier in the Roux War.
“There’s a young lady to see you, Scarlet.”
“Ugh, Hare-Bear, call me Roux, for the love of God. Why do you insist on being so formal? Oh, by the way, I owe you twenty-five dollars. I stubbed my toe on my bed and let’s just say that my language got colorful.”
I don’t know how much Harold made per year, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.
“Maggie?” Now Roux was yelling down the phone at me. “Is that you?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Let me up.”
“Is it really her, Harold? You know this crazy city. Imposters everywhere!”
I raised an eyebrow at Harold when he narrowed his eyes at me. “Really?” I said.
“Oh, that’s Maggie, I’d know that sarcasm anywhere. Come on up, lady! Harold, let her pass.”
When I got upstairs, Roux flung the front door wide open. “I love surprises!” She grinned. “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you just call or text? Did you give up technology for Lent?”
“Lent’s not until the spring.”
“I didn’t know you were Catholic!”
“What? No, I’m not.” Not even five seconds had passed and Roux had already completely distracted me. “I came over because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Excellent.” She shut the door behind me and watched as I started to kick off my shoes. “Aww, you’re so polite. Listen, how cool do you think this would be? Next year I wanna make Harold dress up as Gandalf for Halloween.”
“The wizard?”
“No, the other Gandalf. Yes, the wizard! How many famous Gandalfs are there? Anyway, this is amazing. I just thought of this while you were in the elevator. He’ll dress up as Gandalf and then anytime someone comes to the building and doesn’t get allowed in, he can stand there and say, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Roux looked delighted. “Isn’t that great? He’ll complain, but I think he’d look good in a cloak and a floppy hat.”
I could feel a major headache starting to pulse and I wondered if I had made a huge mistake by coming here.
“Uh-oh, what’s wrong?” Roux said, reading my face. “Trouble in Jesse paradise? Was the first date that bad? I’ve been waiting for you to call me, you know. Tsk-tsk.”
My date with Jesse felt like it had happened last week rather than just yesterday. “No, it was fine. It was really nice.”
Roux waited for me to say more, and when I didn’t, she said, “Fine and nice? Wow, those are sexy adjectives. I bet you’ve waited your whole life to go on your first date to say it was ‘fine’ and ‘nice.’” She shook her head. “If he took you bowling, I’ll kill him. Why do guys think bowling is fun? It’s not fun.”
“No, we went ice skating. And he took me to this amazing atrium and we saw stars.”
“Ooooh.” She plopped herself down on the couch and tucked her legs against her chest. “That sounds very romantical. Tell me everything.”
I sat down next to her, feeling a little ill. My nerves were jangled, to say the least, and it was hard to hold a thought in my head. If this didn’t work, I was screwed.
“Do you really want to know everything?”
“Duh,” she said, then wiggled her toes. “Do you like the color? Is it too red?”
“It’s fine.”
She made a face. “Fine, fine, fine. Something’s wrong.” She sounded like Angelo when she said that. “Tell it to your old friend Roux.”
I was scared, though. I had spent most of the day worried about how I had been lying to Jesse, but I was only now realizing that I had been lying to Roux, too. And worse, I had been pretending to be friends with someone who didn’t have any friends left. I knew when I started this assignment that I would be digging a few large holes, but now I didn’t know how to fill them back up.
“Maggie?” Roux was as quiet as I had ever heard her. “Um, is everything okay? You look … well, not great. No offense.”
It was the first time I had heard her actively try not to offend. “I … I have something to tell you?” I said, even though it came out like a question. “And I’m really scared?”
She scooted closer to me on the couch. “Okay,” she said. “Well, just tell me. Let ’er rip.”
But I didn’t have the words. I had never had to say them before and now they weren’t there, leaving me speechless. “I’m not sure how to say it,” I admitted. “It’s hard.”
Roux was growing more concerned by the minute. “You can trust me, I’m your friend. Right? We are friends, right?”
That only made it worse, and I could feel my eyes watering. How many times had I cried on this assignment? At this rate I would dehydrate by the time I turned seventeen.
“Okay, Maggie.” Roux turned so she was sitting directly in front of me. “I’ll say something instead, okay? Is that cool?”
I nodded and thumbed at my eyes.
“Here’s the thing. Before you came here, I was a shitty friend. You know that, I know that. I lied, I cheated with guys that were losers—and I’m still not sure why, but I’m going to blame my parents—I spread rumors. I did all the things that girls do on those ABC Family shows. And it made me really, really sad, but I kept doing it because I didn’t know what else to do.
“And then you showed up at school and we became friends and now it’s like”—Roux’s voice was getting wobbly—“you taught me how to be a good friend. You listen to me, you don’t tease me about being all crazy sometimes, you made sure that I was okay after the Halloween party. I didn’t know how to be a friend until I met you, so if that’s why you don’t want to tell me whatever it is that you need to say, then I just want you to know that I’ve learned. I can be a friend to you because you’ve been a friend to me.”
Roux was crying now, too. “Okay? Does that make sense? I know I ramble, just ask Harold.” We both laughed
a little and then she got up to find tissues. “How many boxes of Kleenex does one household need?” I heard her mutter, but she returned after a minute. “Here, they’re the good kind, not those cheap, scratchy ones.”
I wiped my eyes and nose. “That was really beautiful.” I sniffled. “I’ve never really had a friend, either, and I’m scared that what I’m about to tell you is going to ruin our friendship.”
“Well, since I don’t have a boyfriend that you can sleep with, I highly doubt that.”
“Ooh, just wait.” I got up and started to pace. Apparently my mother’s nervous habits were genetic.
“I’ll get motion sickness if you keep doing that,” Roux said. “Just spit it out. Preach to the choir. You’ll feel better and then we can order food and watch movies and you can tell me everything about your date with Jess.”
I took a deep, deep breath. “Roux? I’m a spy.”
“Honey, Halloween was almost two weeks ago. Time to get out of character.”
I had forgotten about my costume. “No, for real. That’s what I do. That’s why I came to our school. My parents and I are spies.”
Roux sat there for almost a full minute without saying a word. (A possible record for her.) I stood there, my heart beating so fast that I thought I might be having my first anxiety attack. “We work for an organization called the Collective. Jesse’s dad’s magazine is going to publish an article about us, and it’s going to name names, including mine and my parents’. So they assigned me to become friends with Jesse Oliver so I could get access to his dad and stop the article from happening.”
I wasn’t sure if the blood was rushing to or from my head, but either way, it didn’t feel good. Roux still wasn’t talking. “You need to say something now,” I told her. “Please.”
She stood up very slowly, then grabbed a couch pillow and hurled it across the room. “Are you kidding me?” she cried. “I tell you all this stuff about learning how to be a good friend and you come back with this crazy story about spies? SPIES! You’re not even seventeen yet, how could you be a spy?”
“Safecracker,” I managed to choke out. “I pick locks and open safes.”
“Right. And I can fly. Are you mentally ill?” Roux paused, another pillow clutched in her hands. “You are, aren’t you. You suffer from delusions. Great, that’s just great!” She tossed the pillow down on the ground. “I went from having no friends to having one who’s batshit crazy!”
I stood up and went over to my bag. “Good! Leave!” Roux said. “I can’t believe I told you all those things about friendship. This is so embarrassing. I trusted you!”
“Roux—”
“No, do not talk to me. Wait, are you recording this?”
“What? No, Roux, I …”
“Are you gonna put it on YouTube so everyone can see what an idiot I am?”
“Roux!”
I yelled so loud that she froze with a third pillow in her hands. “Look,” I said, then unzipped my purse and dumped all twelve of my passports out on the couch. They lay there in a dark blue heap, each one with my picture inside, embossed with a very real-looking and very fake-being gold logo, courtesy of Angelo’s forgery skills. “I’m not lying,” I said. “Not anymore, at least. And I need your help.”
Chapter 28
“So you, like, save the world?”
Roux and I were sitting on the marble countertop in her massive kitchen, all twelve of my passports lying between us. Roux had gone through each one, scanning them like she was a border agent. “Daisy?” she said at one point. “Really? You couldn’t call yourself Jennifer or something? Wow, these look so real!”
It had taken a while to convince Roux, even after the big passport reveal. “I think you’re on the run from the law!” she had screamed.
“Where’s your safe?” I asked her. “Just tell me where it is!”
“What safe? We don’t have a safe, we—”
“Roux, your parents are gajillionaires, you live in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and the artwork in your foyer would be worth $2.6 million if it weren’t fake. Tell me where the goddamn safe is.”
She paused. “How did you know it’s a fake?”
“Because the real artwork is in the Collective’s vault in London.”
“The safe’s upstairs in my parents’ closet.”
Ten minutes later, the safe was open and Roux’s jaw was on the floor. “Do you believe me now?” I said, blowing my hair out of my face. “Or do you need me to break into your neighbor’s apartment?”
“No, I think we’re good,” Roux said.
Half an hour later, we were eating Thai food in her kitchen. I was starving after not eating since breakfast, but Roux was too wound up to eat. “So, you and your parents basically travel the world and stop bad guys.”
“In a nutshell,” I said, shoveling pad thai into my mouth.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Oh my God, no. I’m a safecracker, not an assassin.”
Roux’s eyes went wide. “Angelo was lying, wasn’t he. He’s really an assassin.”
“What? No, he’s a forger. Believe me, I’ve met assassins. They’re not as friendly as Angelo.”
Roux wasn’t convinced. “You know an assassin! That means that I know an assassin!”
“Roux? Bring it back home. He’s a forger, I swear.”
“Okay, sorry.” She took a deep breath and smoothed her already-smooth hair down. “This is all just really new. Is this why you knew how to forge my mom’s signature?”
“Yes. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
Roux sat up and squared her shoulders, looking like the least dangerous warrior ever. “Well, I’m ready,” she said. “Whatever you need me to do, I can do it. Sidekick, assistant, resident ass-kicker, I got it.”
“We need to break into Armand Oliver’s computer, find out who’s been trying to sell this story to him, then go find that person, find out where they’re hiding these documents, get the documents, make sure they’re not forgeries, and then destroy them.”
Roux blinked a few times. “Well,” she finally said. “That sounds ambitious.”
“It is. So are you in?”
“Hey, remember that time when I gave you a really emotional and heartwarming speech about friendship, and then you told me you were a spy and brought a dozen false passports into my house and then broke into my parents’ safe?” Roux gestured at me with her chopsticks. “Yes, of course I’m in. This is the best thing that’s happened to me in years. When do we start?”
“As soon as I finish eating.”
“Roger that. So, what’s my code name?”
Half an hour later, “Redwing” (sometimes it’s just easier not to argue with Roux) and I were piling out of a cab in front of the Olivers’ building. “This is going to be so bad,” I muttered to Roux. “How am I supposed to tell him that this whole thing was an assignment?”
“Well, you still like him, right? Just tell him that. Workplace romances happen all the time.”
“He’ll kill me.”
“Tell him that you know an assassin. I’m pretty sure that’ll keep him in line.”
I started to feel panicky as we rode the elevator up to the Olivers’ private rooftop house. “He’s going to be so disappointed.”
“You’re not breaking up with him, you’re just telling him the truth. He’ll probably thank you.”
I looked at Roux.
“Okay, probaby not,” she admitted. “But it’s not like you have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. I just don’t like what I have to choose from.”
“Hi!” Roux chirped when one of the maids answered the door. “We’re here to see Jesse.”
“Roux?” Jesse poked his head out of the kitchen. “Is that you? What are you … doing here?” He stepped into the hallway. “Maggie?”
I waved, not trusting myself to speak.
“We’re here for the group project,” Roux said, loud enough in case Arm
and was lurking around somewhere and could hear. “You know, for school.”
“The what?”
“Can we come in?” I said, finally finding my voice.
“Um, yeah, sure, okay.” Jesse looked wary, though, and the three of us stood in the foyer and looked at each other. “Is everything okay? You don’t look good.”
“Will people please stop saying that!” I cried. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, okay? Cut a girl some slack!”
“She’s having a rough day,” Roux whispered, patting my arm.
Jesse glanced back and forth between us. “What’s wrong? Are you breaking up with me? Is it because I took you ice skating?”
“Definitely not trying to break up with you,” I said. “I’m just here so we can work on the school project for English class.”
“Just go with it,” Roux whispered to him. “Trust me.”
“Oh-kay,” he said. “You’re here to work on a project. Got it. This isn’t weird or creepy at all, by the way.”
“Can we go to your bedroom? And work on our project?”
Jesse led us upstairs into his room, which seemed a lot more normal than the rest of the house. “There’s a dog,” Roux said, coming to a full stop in the doorway. “Dogs don’t like me, and, believe me, it’s mutual.”
I grabbed her arm and dragged her into the room before shutting the door. “Start forging a peace accord,” I told her, “because Max isn’t leaving and neither are you.”
Roux eyed Max warily. “This is my dance space, this is your dance space,” she told him as she planted herself next to Jesse’s dresser. As if the dog even cared.
“Will someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?” Jesse said. He was wearing pajama pants and an old T-shirt and there was a history textbook on his bed next to his laptop.
“I’m really sorry,” I started to say.
“Oh my God, you are breaking up with me.” He sighed, and the sadness in his voice nearly broke my heart. “Why did you bring Roux with you?”
“Excuse me?” Roux was offended.