by Ally Carter
Macey shrugged. “Hard to say. Will there be food or entertainment?” I shook my head. “The winning of stuffed animals through competitive means?” Another shake. “Then probably not.”
Liz, I noticed, was writing everything down. “But what if there’s kissing?” she asked.
“Liz, there will be no kissing. Or hand holding. Or dancing—unless we’re studying C&A, and then . . . There will be NO kissing!”
Liz looked a little confused, so Macey explained. “You can have dating without kissing, but kissing without dating is entirely different.” Macey walked to the bed and started sorting through the nine million tops we’d already ruled out as “too dressy” or “too casual” or “too cleavage-dependent” (since I don’t exactly have cleavage).
“She’s ready!” Bex exclaimed, spinning me around.
Well, I didn’t feel ready. With Josh I’d always felt nervous; with Zach I did, too, but in a very different way. I didn’t even look ready, not the kind of ready I’d looked like with Josh. Then there’d been lip gloss and skirts and shoes that may not have been conducive to running four miles in the dark. Now I just looked like . . . me.
“No,” I said. “This won’t work. He’s a spy. He’ll figure out that I’m . . . spying.”
“It’s perfect, and no he won’t,” Macey said. She placed a lip brush in her mouth and circled me, surveying what she saw.
“But shouldn’t I look . . . better?”
“Cam, he’s seen you in P&E,” Bex said, obviously referring to my tendency to be, shall we say, perspiration-challenged.
“And he’s seen you totally dressed up,” Liz added.
“What he hasn’t seen,” said Macey, positioning me in front of the mirror, “is casual Cammie.”
I felt like Barbie’s less-than-perfect friend.
“Everything about tonight has to seem normal, Cam,” Bex warned, not seeing the irony in the amount of effort it took to achieve the look of utter effortlessness.
“She’s right,” Macey said. “Guys are like dogs—they can always tell when you’re needy.”
“Just remember your cover,” Liz said, handing me my backpack.
“And remember to let him lead the conversation—see what he’ll give you before you know what you’ll have to take,” Bex said, quoting one of Mr. Solomon’s best lectures.
“Right,” I said, reminding myself that we were just going to be in the library. What kind of terrible things could happen in the library, for crying out loud?
“And, Cam,” Macey called after me. “Be yourself.”
No matter where I went that semester, I couldn’t get away from those words: be yourself. But I could never be all of myself, especially then, because a solid twenty percent of me wanted to spike Zach’s morning orange juice with truth serum and be done with it. (Actually, that was Bex’s idea, but we were saving it for an emergency.)
As I walked down the Grand Stairs I reminded myself that I shouldn’t be nervous. I’d been on dates before—both real and of the study variety. And studying with Zach—not Josh—meant I wouldn’t even have to hide the fact that I was doing PhD-level physics in the tenth grade. But as I entered the library and looked around for Zach, I couldn’t fight the feeling that “myself” was one cover legend I didn’t quite know how to be.
“Hello, Gallagher Girl.” He’d claimed a table in the back of the library. The VERY back.
18:00 hours: The Operative met The Subject in a suspiciously remote location, indicating that he may have had more “date” and less “study” on his mind.
—Analysis by Macey McHenry
Books covered the table. His school jacket hung over the back of his chair.
I sat down across from him. “So,” I said, feeling my voice crack, “what should we start on?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but I got the distinct impression that he did know. A lot of things. Because, for starters, it was my scientific opinion that Zach was one of those people who used his intelligence to make sure no one knew exactly how intelligent he was (a tendency Macey tells me is common among boys with really sexy arms).
18:02 hours: The Operative became overwhelmed by the complete and utter silence at the table.
“Zach,” I said, just to make sure my voice was still working. He looked at me. “So, I was thinking we could look at the impact of propaganda in third world economies?”
“That’s what you were thinking?”
“Yes,” I said, but he kept looking at me . . . I mean really looking at me. I wanted to be Tiffany St. James (even if it meant wearing the strapless dress). I wanted to be a homeschooled girl with a cat named Suzie. I wanted to be anyone but myself as I sat there feeling completely out of cover.
“So . . .” I tried again. “I guess we should outline the report and maybe summarize our notes and—”
“Gallagher Girl,” Zach said, not waiting for me to finish a sentence that didn’t have an end. “Is there something you want to ask me?”
“No,” I lied, and then we both went back to our books.
18:14 hours: The Operative began to realize that the study date might actually consist of studying.
How long does it take for two people to find a comfortable silence? I don’t know. One time I drove all the way to Omaha and back with Grandpa Morgan, and he hardly said ten words. My dad and I used to spend Sundays on the living room floor, trading sections of the newspaper, and there was no noise except for the sound of turning pages. But sitting there—with Zach—was different.
“So—” I started, before realizing I had no earthly idea what was supposed to come next.
He raised his eyebrows but not his head, and studied me with upturned eyes. “So . . .” his word dragged out longer than mine, filling that terrible void of noise.
“So what do you think of the Gallagher Academy?”
He tried to laugh, then seemed to think better of it at the last minute. “Oh. It’s swell.”
The Operative noticed that The Subject’s use of the adjective “swell” was either intentional sarcasm or regional slang and noted to check it against the Gallagher Academy database.
I went back to my notebooks but couldn’t read a single word. I used to think talking to a normal boy was hard. Turns out it’s nothing compared to talking to a highly trained boy-spy who may or may not have been bred and raised by the U.S. Government.
I was just starting to consider aborting the mission altogether when two eighth grade girls came running out of the stacks and stopped short, staring at me and Zach. Then they turned and dashed away, their giggles and whispers floating to me through the aisle.
“You handled that pretty well,” Zach said with a subtle nod toward the gossip I inspired.
“Well, I’ve had some practice, I guess. Besides, sticks and stones,” I said, and it was true. For a spy, it takes a lot more than giggles to hurt you.
I turned the page in my notebook and felt my eyes lose focus as I listened to the silence that seemed louder in Zach’s presence.
“I gotta say,” he said as he laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair onto two legs, balancing. “I’m a little disappointed.”
“Disappointed!” I cried.
He laughed. “Yeah, Gallagher Girl. I thought you had a reputation for being . . . proactive?”
Which was a nice way of putting it, I guess. “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could figure out some way to turn the conversation back to him. “Well, what would you do if everyone thought you had breached security?”
He smiled and leaned forward. I heard the front legs of his chair land on the hardwood floor with a crack. “I’d probably find out everything I could about everyone who . . . was new?” he said, as if the words had come right off the top of his head. “Who maybe didn’t have an alibi on the night of the ball? I might even try to get close to anyone I suspected,” he said. He eased in closer. “I might even bug their rooms if I got the chance.”
“Hahahahaha!” (Yeah, that’s th
e sound of a highly trained secret agent forcing laughter.)
“But you wouldn’t do any of that,” he said, standing. “Would you, Gallagher Girl?”
“Of course I—”
Then Zach reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wire that I had last seen disappearing inside an electrical outlet in the boys’ rooms. He dropped the bug on the table, then leaned close to my ear and whispered, “I’m not all bad, Gallagher Girl.”
He pulled his jacket from the back of the chair and turned to walk away. “Of course, I’m not all good, either.”
I sat staring at the bug, thinking about what it meant, as Zach turned the corner and called, “Thanks for the date!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Liz demanded, but I didn’t know which part of my horrendous night she was referring to—the part where Zach had said he wasn’t all good or all bad, or how he had routinely employed countersurveillance measures (a sign of the truly cautious and/or guilty), or that he’d thought we’d had a date! To tell you the truth, they all made me want to throw up.
Our observation post was dusty and cramped, so we sat on the floor, surrounded by candy wrappers and half-eaten bags of microwave popcorn, notebooks, and charts; and the only thing that was clear was that no matter how much it seemed like normal boys played mind games—going to school with boys who have had actual classes on the subject is infinitely harder.
“So did he think it was a real date?” Liz asked Macey. “Because he didn’t buy her anything. Or was it just a study date? Or did he see it as some kind of date with destiny or—”
“Shhh,” Bex said, holding an earpiece to her ear. “We’ve got audio!” she said, bright eyes shining.
21:08 hours: Audio surveillance captured a conversation in which many of The Subjects agreed that Headmistress Morgan is a “smokin’ babe,” even though The Operatives know for a fact that Rachel Morgan opposes all forms of nicotine use.
“So he didn’t get all the bugs?” Liz asked.
“Or he left some,” I said, running through all the possible scenarios. “Maybe he wants us to keep listening so they can feed us false information. Or maybe he really did miss some bugs. Or maybe he left some in the other boys’ rooms because he wants us to suspect them. Or maybe those other boys really did breach security, but Zach just can’t say so because he’s bound by some kind of freaky blood-oathbrotherhood pact that—”
“Cam!” Macey snapped, jerking me back to reality. (I fully admit the blood oath thing was a little out there, but the other options were totally viable.) “He gave you the bug either to show you he’s on to you, or to mess with your head, and . . . it’s working.”
Spying is a game, and so is dating, I guess. It’s all about strategy and playing to your strengths. People think espionage is all fun and games—that everything we do is cat and mouse, but that night I learned a CoveOps lesson as valuable as anything Joe Solomon had taught me. Real life in the clandestine services isn’t cat and mouse—it’s cat and cat.
“Lies,” Mr. Solomon said the next morning as he walked into the classroom. “We tell them to our friends,” he said. “We tell them to our enemies. And eventually . . . we tell them to ourselves.” He turned to write on the board.
“A lie is typically accompanied by what physical symptoms, Ms. Lee?” Mr. Solomon prompted.
“Dilated pupils, increased pulse, and atypical mannerisms,” Kim said as I racked my brain, trying to remember if any of those things had been true with Zach the night before. If anything he’d ever said had been true.
“Spies tell lies, ladies and gentlemen, but that’s not what today is about. Today,” Mr. Solomon said, “is about how to spot them. Now, a seasoned operative will know how to control their pulse and voice, but for the purpose of today’s lesson, I think these will come in handy.”
He handed each of us something that looked like the mood rings Bex and Liz and I had bought in Roseville in the eighth grade. “Dr. Fibs has been kind enough to share these prototypes of a new portable voice-stress analyzer he’s developing,” Solomon continued. “It’s equipped with a microchip that will monitor a person’s voice, and if they are lying, it will vibrate very softly, alerting the wearer to the lie.”
The piece of plastic in my hands looked cheap— practically worthless—but like most things at the Gallagher Academy, there was a lot more to it than met the eye.
“You have to be close to your subject,” Mr. Solomon explained as he walked to Tina Walters’s desk. “And the rings can be fooled, with training. For example, ask me a question, Ms. Walters—any question.”
Tina hesitated a second or two before exclaiming, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Half the class giggled and the other sat silently in semi-horror. Joe Solomon bit back a smile and said, “No.”
Tina’s eyes were glued to the ring on her right hand as she said, “Nothing. It didn’t do anything. So it’s true?”
“Ask me again,” Mr. Solomon said.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
This time Mr. Solomon said, “Yes.” A moment later Tina was shaking her hand like it had fallen asleep or something. “It’s not broken, Ms. Walters,” Mr. Solomon said knowingly. “It’s just not as good at detecting lies as I am at telling them.”
I couldn’t help myself; I glanced at Zach, who caught me looking.
“Partner with the person across from you,” Mr. Solomon said, and an uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. “Watch their eyes, pay attention to their voice. And see if you can guess who’s lying.”
I know I’m not the first girl in history who’d ever had that mission, but I felt like there’d never been so much riding on it. “Oh,” Zach said with a quick raise of his eyebrows, “this should be fun.” I didn’t need the ring on my finger to tell me he totally wasn’t lying.
I started coming up with reasons I could be excused from the lecture, but no one had been exposed to plutonium since the mid-1990s, so I was stuck. With Zach. And my fibbing ability was about to be tested more than it ever had been before.
“What is your name?” I asked, thinking back to that cold, sterile room beneath the mall in D.C. and the way a professional had gone about looking for the truth.
“Zach,” he said.
“What’s your full name?”
“That’s a pretty boring question, Gallagher Girl.”
“Zach!”
“Yes, that’s correct.” He held up my right hand. “See— not lying.”
“Where were you during the Code Black?”
Zach broke out into a broad smile. “That’s better.”
“Answer the—”
“I was with you,” he said. “Remember?” Then he leaned on the desk between us. “My turn,” he said, grinning like an idiot. “Did you have fun last night?”
“Zach, I really don’t think that’s what Mr. Solomon is going for with this particular exercise.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Zach said. “We should really do it again sometime.”
I looked at the ring on my hand, but it didn’t do a thing. He was telling the truth. But I still didn’t know what it meant.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“The Blackthorne Institute for Boys,” he replied in a sing-song tune.
“What do your parents do?” I asked, and for the first time he didn’t respond. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t joke.
He just straightened the notebook on his desk and asked, “What do you think they do?”
I could hear Tina Walters asking Grant, “So what’s your idea of a perfect date?” On the far side of the room, Courtney wanted to know what Eva really thought of Courtney’s new haircut, but none of it seemed funny or interesting or cool at the moment.
If the Gallagher Academy were to sell truth rings on the black market, every girl in America would line up to have one, but I didn’t need the ring on my finger to tell me that Zach wasn’t acting or lying or living out some legend then. There was a lot more to the story.
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“They were CIA?” I whispered.
“Used to be.”
But I didn’t ask for details, because I knew they were classified; and I knew they were sad; and, most of all, now I knew Zach Goode was a little bit like me.
It should have gone in the reports, of course. I should have told my friends. We’d been searching for weeks for any clue, any sign, that these boys had pasts and histories—that they even existed at all. For one brief moment I had seen the real Zach—no covers, no legends, no lies. But as I walked through the dim, quiet corridors on Sunday night, I carried Zach’s secret with me. I couldn’t bring myself to set it down.
“Hey, kiddo,” Mom called when she heard me enter the office. Smoke and steam rose from a small electric skillet behind her desk while the microwave hummed. When she came to hug me, I saw that she was wearing thick wool socks that were far too big for her—Dad’s socks. She had on an old fraying sweatshirt that was rolled up at the sleeves—Dad’s sweatshirt. And even though I’d seen my mother in everything from ball gowns to business suits, I don’t think I’d ever seen her look more beautiful.
“Tonight,” Mom announced happily, “is taco night!” I had to wonder if that was the same woman who had sat in this very room while the world went black around us, shrouded in shadows and the red glow of emergency lights. I knew I would never know all my mother’s legends.
“How are your classes?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Fine.”
“How are the girls?” she asked, as if she never saw them.
“They’re great. Macey’s getting bumped up to the ninth grade sciences classes.”
Mom smiled. “I know.”
Everything was normal. Everything was good. Even the tacos looked halfway edible, but still I picked at my fingernails and shifted around on the couch. I watched my mother, who had wrapped herself in the last traces of my father, and said, “How did you meet Dad?”