by Ally Carter
"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?"
Chapter Twelve
"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 shrugged. "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?
Before me stood a person who was capable of cracking the Y chromosome code, and I wasn't going to let her get away that easily.
"Come on!" I said.
"Yeah, well tell it to someone who isn't the freaking mascot of the seventh-freaking-grade!" She eased onto her bed and crossed her legs. "So there is only one way that I am going to care about your boy problems."
Work brain, work, I urged my mind, but it was like a car stuck in the mud.
"I'm getting out of the newbie classes," Macey said. "And you're going to help me."
I really didn't like the sound of this, but I still managed to ask, "What's in it for me?"
"For starters, I don't have a conversation with our friend Jessica Boden about an early morning trip to the labs with an old Dr Pepper bottle, or a late-night trip outside the grounds, where someone came home with leaves in her hair." She smirked at Liz. "Or a certain Driver's Ed incident."
For the first time, I didn't doubt that Macey was a Gallagher Girl, too. The looks Liz and Bex were giving me said that they agreed.
"Did you know Jessica's mother is a trustee?" Macey said, her voice dripping with sarcastic irony. "See, Jessica's mentioned that fact to me about a hundred and fifty times now and—"
"Okay, already," I said, stopping her. "What else do I get?"
"A soul mate."
"Ladies, this is a business of alliances," Mr. Solomon said as he stood in front of our class the next morning. "You may not like these people. You may hate these people. These people may represent everything you hate, but all it takes is one thing, ladies—one thread of commonality to form a bond in our lives." He strolled back to his desk. "To make an ally."
So that's what I had with Macey—an alliance. We weren't friends; we weren't enemies. I wasn't exactly blocking off Fourth of July weekend to spend at her place in the Hamptons, but I planned on playing nice just the same.
When lunchtime rolled around, Macey strolled over to our table, and I braced myself for what was going to happen. If the Communists and the Capitalists could fight together to take down the Nazis … I told myself. If Spike could fight alongside Buffy to rid the world of demons … If lemon could join forces with lime to create something as delicious and refreshing as Sprite, then surely I can work alongside Macey McHenry for the cause of true love!
She was sitting beside me. She was eating pie. I had to look again. Macey's eating pie?! And then she actually spoke, but I couldn't hear her over the roar of a nearby debate (in Korean) about whether Jason Bourne could take James Bond, and if it mattered whether it was Sean-Connery-Bond or Pierce-Brosnan-Bond.
"Did you say something, Macey?" I asked, but she cut me a look that could kill. She reached into her bag, ripped off a sliver of Evapopaper, and scribbled:
Can we study tonight? (Tell anyone, and I'll kill you in your sleep!)
"Seven o'clock?" I asked her. She nodded. We had a date.
The pie had looked pretty good, so I got up to go get some, and when I did, I glanced at the Vogue Macey had been reading, but I couldn't learn much about fashion, because Macey's organic chemistry notes were taped inside, covering that month's salute to silk.
Sitting on the floor of our suite that night with Macey's homework scattered around us, I wasn't really sure how this alliance business was sup
posed to work. Luckily, Liz had been giving it some thought
"You can start by explaining what this means." She held DeeDee's note up to Macey's face.
"Ew!" Macey cried, turning her head and holding her nose as she pushed the paper away.
But what Liz lacked in strength, she made up for in tenacity. She shoved the note back in Macey's direction despite Macey's complaint of, "I thought you got rid of all that trash!"
"Well, not this. This is evidence," Liz said, stating what, in her mind, was the obvious.
"Ugh! Gross."
I saw Bex shift. She'd been doing a better than average job of ignoring us, but I knew all of her sensors were on full alert. Her eyes never left her notebook, but she saw everything. (Bex is super sleuthy that way.)
"What does it mean?" Liz asked again, inching closer and closer to Macey McHenry, our new professor of boys.
Macey looked back at her notebook, and must have come to the conclusion that she'd studied enough for one night, because she tossed her notes aside. She marched to her bed, glanced at the scrap of paper once more, then dropped it to the floor.
"It means he's in demand." She nodded at me. "Good choosing."
"But does he like her back?" Liz wanted to know. "This DeeDee person?"
Macey shrugged and stretched out on her bed. "Hard to say."
That's when Liz pulled out a notebook I'd seen her carrying around for the past week. I'd thought it was for an extra project—little did I know it was our extra project. She threw the binder open with a thunk, and a hundred pieces of paper ruffled with the sudden waft of air. I looked at the headers of each piece as Liz rifled through them. "See …" She pointed to a highlighted portion of one page. "…in this e-mail he used the word 'bro' in reference to his friend Dillon. As in, and I quote, 'chill out, bro. It will be okay.' He doesn't have a brother. What is it about boys that makes them refer to each other in that way? I don't call Cam or Bex sis. Why?" she demanded, as if her life depended upon her understanding this fact. "WHY?"