by Carter, Ally
Our feet splashed down the soggy grass as we cut across the lawn toward where Madame Dabney sat waiting in the car, its headlights already slicing through the gray as the wipers sloshed back and forth.
Fifteen minutes later, Madame Dabney was saying, “Um, Rebecca dear, perhaps you should . . .” Her voice trailed off, though, as Bex made yet another turn and ended up on the wrong side of the road. One might have expected a spy to lay on the emergency brake and knock Bex unconscious with a well-placed blow to the back of her head, but Madame Dabney merely said, “Yes, a right up here, dear . . . Oh, my . . .” and gripped the dashboard as Bex turned across traffic.
“Sorry,” Bex yelled, presumably to the truck driver she’d cut off. “Keep forgetting they’re over there, don’t I?”
The rain had stopped, but the wheels made a wet, slick sound as they threw water up into the undercarriage of the car. The windows were fogged, and I couldn’t see where we were going, which was kind of a blessing, because every time I caught a glance at the world around us, I saw another year of my life flash before my eyes.
“Perhaps we should let one of your classmates take a turn?” Madame Dabney finally managed to say as Bex nearly ran into a cement truck, jerked the wheel, jumped the curb, and flew across the corner of a parking lot and onto another street.
But that’s when I noticed something strange. Not only was Bex not paying attention to Madame Dabney’s anguished cries and the laws which govern the operation of motor vehicles in this country, but—and here’s the weird thing—Liz wasn’t freaking out!
Liz, who hates spiders and refuses to go barefoot anywhere. Liz, who is a perfectly good swimmer and yet owns six different types of flotation devices. Liz, who once went to bed without flossing and couldn’t sleep the entire night, was sitting calmly in the backseat while Bex nearly took out a trash can on the curb.
“Rebecca, that could have been a pedestrian,” Madame Dabney warned, but she didn’t use her emergency brake, so now I’ll always wonder what Madame Dabney saw in France to make her definition of “emergency” so wildly skewed.
That’s also when I noticed the street signs.
“Oh my gosh!” I muttered through clenched teeth. Liz was grinning as a sign announcing we were on North Bellis whizzed by.
“Shhh,” Liz said as she reached into the pocket of her bag and pulled out the remote control from the stereo she’d destroyed on her first day back.
“What are you doing with—”
“Shhh!” She cut a warning glance toward Madame Dabney. “It will only be a little explosion.”
Explosion!
Seconds later a loud bang rocketed through the car. Bex fought for control of the wheel. I smelled smoke and heard the dull, lifeless flapping of rubber banging against the pavement.
“Oh, no, Madame Dabney,” Bex exclaimed in her most theatrical voice. “I think we’ve got a flat!”
“Oh, do we now?” I said as I glared at Liz, who just shrugged. Maybe I should take back my ringing endorsement for having genius friends. Normal friends probably don’t go around blowing up Driver’s Ed cars—well, not intentionally, anyway.
When the car finally came to a stop—you guessed it— we were in front of Josh’s house.
“Oh, girls,” Madame Dabney soothed, turning around to make sure that Liz and I were still in our original one-piece bodies. “Is everyone okay?” We nodded. “Well,” Madame Dabney said, composing herself, “I suppose we’ll just learn how to change a tire.”
Of course Bex and Liz had known that was coming. That was the whole point. But Bex still sounded surprised as she shouted, “I’ll get the spare!”
In a flash of blinding speed she was out of the car and popping the trunk, while Liz intercepted Madame Dabney.
“Tell me, ma’am, what causes the majority of flat tires, do you think?” As Liz dragged our instructor to inspect the damage at the front of the car, I met Bex around back.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
But Bex only grinned and reached into the trunk, revealing a bulging trash bag just like the ones that lined the street. “Couldn’t leave the curb bare, now, could we?”
And then I noticed it; all up and down Bellis Street, trash cans and plastic sacks covered the curb, waiting like soldiers standing at attention.
“You switched the days,” I said, dismayed. “You blew the tire. You . . .” I trailed off, probably because the next words out of my mouth were either going to be “You care enough to do this?” or “You’re destined for a life of crime.” It was a toss-up either way.
“Can’t give up now, can we?” Bex said, sounding very Bexish. Dramatically, she pulled the jack out of the trunk and cocked an eyebrow. “We owe it to your country.”
No, they thought they owed it to me. I’m just really glad she didn’t say so.
Within seconds, Bex and I had the spare tire out of the trunk, and Madame Dabney was illustrating the finer points of lug-nut-loosening, but all I could do was look up and down Bellis Street. What if he saw me and recognized the car and the uniforms? How would I ever explain? Would he want me to explain? Would he even see me at all, or would I simply be “some girl”? Would I just be “nobody”?
“School trip to D.C.,” Liz whispered in my ear when she saw how tense I was. “He won’t be back until after nine.”
I felt myself exhale.
“Do you have any questions?” Madame Dabney asked as she eased the jack out from beneath the car and Bex went to put the ruined tire in the trunk. Liz and I shook our heads. “Well, that should do it, then,” Madame Dabney said, slapping her hands together, obviously proud of her handiwork.
Yeah, I thought, as I stole one last look at the neighborhood around me and saw Bex flash me a quick thumbs-up. That should do it.
Summary of Surveillance
Operatives: Cameron Morgan, Rebecca Baxter, and Elizabeth Sutton
Report of trash taken from the home of Josh Abrams
Number of empty cardboard toilet paper rolls: 2
Preferred variety of canned soup: tomato (followed closely by Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom).
Number of empty Ben & Jerry’s containers: 3—two mint chocolate cookie, one plain vanilla. (Who buys plain vanilla ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s, anyway? Is there a greater waste?)
Number of Pottery Barn catalogs: 14 (No items marked or otherwise identified, even though the Windsor Washable Throw Pillows were on sale and appeared to be quite a bargain.)
“Where are we putting the paper towels again?” Bex asked, looking around our odd little circle of piles. “Are they household or food?”
“Depends,” Liz said, leaning toward her. “What’s on it?”
Bex took a whiff of the used paper towel in her hand and said, “Spaghetti sauce . . . I think. Or blood?”
“So, either they love pasta or are a family of axe murderers?” I quipped.
Bex turned and dropped the towels onto one of the half dozen piles that were growing around us while the original pile in the center began to slowly shrink. We’d opened all the windows in the suite, and a cool, damp breeze blew in, diluting the smell of garbage (a little) as we sat on a plastic tarp, examining everything from used tissues to empty cans of tuna.
If you ever wonder whether or not someone is too good for you, I’d advise going through their trash. Really. No one looks superior after that. Plus, if Mr. Solomon was right, there were answers here—answers I desperately wanted.
Why did he offer to walk with me to (supposedly) get my mom’s jacket, and then turn around and tell his friend I was no one? Did he have a girlfriend? Had he struck up that conversation with me in the street so that he could win some horrendous bet with his friends, like they always do in teen movies? I mean, I know I spend my winters in a mansion with a bunch of girls, and my summers on a ranch in Nebraska, but both places have movies, and a lot of them involve wagers in which plain-looking girls (like me) are approached by really cute boys (like Josh).
But those boys aren’t
Josh-like, not really, or so I realized the deeper into his garbage we went. The boys in those movies wouldn’t help their kid sisters with a fourth-grade ode to Amelia Earhart (Gallagher Academy, Class of 1915). Those boys wouldn’t write notes like the one I have taken the liberty of pasting below:
Mom, Dillon says his mom can drop me off after the field trip, so don’t wait up for my call. Love you, J.
He tells his mom he loves her. How great is that? I mean, the boys in the movies with the bets and the plain girls (who are never really plain, just poorly accessorized) and the big, dramatic prom scenes—those boys would never leave their mothers kind and courteous notes. Plus, boys who leave kind and courteous notes become men who leave kind and courteous notes. I couldn’t help myself: I instantly imagined what it would be like to get a note like that myself someday.
Darling, I may have to work late, so I might not be here when you get back. I hope you had a great time in North Korea and disabled lots of nuclear weapons. With all my love, Josh.
(But that’s just a draft.)
I stared at an empty pack of chewing gum—the teeth-whitening kind—and I tried to remember if his teeth had been extra white or just regular white. Regular white, I thought, so I chucked the pack into a stack beside Liz and dug back into the pile again, not knowing what I hoped to pull out.
I found an envelope, small and square, with beautiful calligraphy on the front. It was addressed to The Abrams Family. I’d never seen anything in my life addressed to The Morgan Family. We never got invited to parties. Sure, I remembered a time or two when Mom and Dad dressed up and left me with a sitter, but even then I knew she had a teeny tiny microfilm recorder in her rhinestone broach and his cuff links contained cables that could shoot out for fifty yards and let a person rappel down the side of a building if he really wanted to. (When you think about it, it’s not that surprising we didn’t get invited out much.)
I was just starting to imagine what it would be like to be the other kind of family, when I heard an ominous, “Uh-oh.”
I turned to look at Liz, who was holding a piece of paper toward Bex.
She has to go through Bex first, I realized in terror. Josh only has six months to live! He’s taking drugs that will prepare him for a sex change operation! His entire family is moving to Alaska!
It was worse.
“Cam,” Bex said, her voice bracing me for the worst, “Liz found something you should probably see.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Liz added, forcing a smile as Bex held out a folded piece of pink paper. Someone had written “JOSH” on it in blue ink with a flowery, ornate kind of penmanship that no one at the Gallagher Academy ever seemed able to master—after all, if you’ve got organic chemistry, advanced encryption, and conversational Swahili homework every night, you’re not going to spend a lot of time learning how to dot your i’s with little hearts.
“Read it to me,” I said.
“No. . . .” Liz started. “It’s probably—”
“Liz!” I snapped.
But Bex had already started. “‘Dear Josh. It was great seeing you at the carnival. I had fun, too. We should do it again sometime. Love, DeeDee.’”
Bex had done her best to make the note sound blah, adding lots of unnecessary pauses and dull inflections, but there wasn’t any denying that this DeeDee person meant business. After all, I didn’t write notes on pink paper with fancy writing. I didn’t even own pink paper. Edible paper— yes, but pretty pink paper—no way! So there it was, proof in black-and-white (or . . . well . . . pink-and-blue, but you get what I mean), that I was officially out of my league. That I really was nobody.
Liz must have read my expression, because she jumped to say, “This doesn’t mean anything, Cam. It’s in the trash!”
She turned to Bex. “That’s got to mean something, right?”
And that’s when I couldn’t ignore it anymore: the universal truth that, despite our elite education and genius IQs, we didn’t know boys. DeeDee, with her pink paper and ability to make the big, puffy J’s, might have known the significance of a boy like Josh putting her perfect pink note in the trash, but we sure didn’t. The boy of my dreams may have been as close as the town of Roseville—just two miles, eighty security cameras, and a big honking stone fence away, but he and I would never speak the same language (which is totally ironic, since “boy” was the one language my school had never tried to teach me).
“That’s okay, Liz,” I said softly. “We knew it was a long shot. It’s—”
“Wait!” I felt Bex’s hand lash out and grab my wrist. “Tell me what you told him again.” She read my blank expression. “That night?” she prompted. “When you told him you were homeschooled.”
“He asked if I was homeschooled, and I said yes.”
“And what reason did you give?”
“For . . .” I started, but my voice trailed off as I looked at the stack of papers that she had laid out between us. “Religious reasons.”
There was a program for the Roseville Free Will Baptist Assembly, a flyer for the United Methodist Church of Roseville, and a handful of others. Either Josh was collecting church bulletins for some kind of bizarre scavenger hunt, or he’d been busy traipsing to Sunday schools and Tuesday-night teen socials for an entirely different reason.
“He’s looking for you, Cam,” Bex said, beaming as if she’d just made the first step in cracking the ultimate code.
Silence washed over us. My heart pounded in my chest. Bex and Liz were staring at me, but I couldn’t pull my gaze away from what we’d found—from the hope that was spread out across our floor.
I guess that’s why none of us noticed the door opening. I guess that’s why we jumped when we heard Macey McHenry say, “So, what’s his name?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I shot back, way too quickly for the lie to be any good. Here’s the thing about lying: a part of you has to mean it—even if it is a tiny, sinister shred that only lives in the blackest, darkest parts of your mind. You have to want it to be true.
I guess I didn’t.
“Oh, come on,” Macey said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s been, what? Two weeks?” I was shocked. Macey cocked her head and asked, “You been to second base yet?”
There are entire books in the Gallagher Academy library about female independence and how we shouldn’t let men distract us from our missions, but all I could do was look at Macey McHenry and say, “You think I could get to second base?”
I hate to admit it, but it was probably one of the greatest compliments I had received in my whole, entire life.
But Macey only rolled her eyes and said, “Forget I asked,” as she strolled to the pile of garbage and, unsurprisingly, turned up her perfect nose and said, “This is disgusting!” Then she looked at me. “You must have it bad.”
Leave it to Bex to keep her cool and say, “We’ve got CoveOps homework, Macey.”
Even I almost believed that what we were doing was perfectly innocent.
Macey looked down at our piles, examining the scene as if this were the most exciting thing she’d seen in months, which absolutely, positively could not have been true, since I know for a fact that her class had been in the physics labs when Mr. Fibs got attacked by the bees he thought he’d genetically modified to obey commands from a whistle. (Turns out they only respond to the voice of James Earl Jones.)
“His name is Josh,” I said finally.
“Cammie!” Liz cried, as if she couldn’t believe I was giving such sensitive intel to the enemy.
But Macey only repeated, “Josh,” as if trying it on for size.
“Yeah,” I said. “I met him when we had a mission in town, and . . . well . . .”
“Now you can’t stop thinking about him. . . . You always want to know what he’s doing. . . . You’d kill to know if he’s thinking about you. . . .” Macey said, like a doctor reeling off symptoms.
“Yes!” I cried. “That’s sooooo it!”
She sh
rugged. “That’s too bad, kid.”
She was only three months older than me, so I totally could have gotten mad about the “kid” thing, but I couldn’t get mad at her—not then. I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening, but one thing was becoming obvious: Macey McHenry had intel I desperately needed.
“He told me I had a lucky cat,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“You don’t have a cat.”
“Technicality.” I waved that fact away. “So, what does it mean?”
“It sounds like he wants to play it cool. . . . That he might like you, and he wants to keep his options open in case you decide you don’t like him, or if he decides he doesn’t like you.”
“But then I saw him on the street, and I overheard him telling a friend that I was ‘nobody.’ But he’d been really nice and—”
“Oh, you have been busy.”
“He acts really nice, but based on what he told his friend—”
“Wait.” Macey stopped me. “He said that to a friend? Another guy?”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him?” She rolled her eyes. “Total hearsay. Could be posturing, could be territory marking, could be shame over liking the new weird chick—I’m assuming he thinks you’re a weird chick?”
“He thinks I’m homeschooled for religious reasons.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding as if that were answer enough. “I’d say you’ve still got a shot.”
OH. MY. GOSH. It was as if the gray storm clouds had parted and Macey McHenry was the sun, bringing wisdom and truth into the eternal darkness. (Or something a lot less melodramatic.)
Just in case you missed my point: Macey McHenry knows about boys!! Of course, this shouldn’t have come as a huge, colossal surprise, but I couldn’t help myself; I was groveling at her feet, worshipping at the altar of eyeliner, push-up bras, and coed parties without parental supervision.
Even Liz said, “That’s amazing.”
“You’ve got to help me,” I pleaded.
“Oooh, sorry. Not my department.”
Of course it wasn’t. It was clear that Macey McHenry was the lurkee, not the lurker. She couldn’t possibly understand life on the outside, looking through the window at a place she’d never know. Then I thought about the hours she’d spent locked away in the silence of those headphones and wondered, Or could she?