Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

by Ally Carter

  A track circled around the football field. On the other side lay the opposing stands, the opposing team. Macey and I started walking in that direction, past the concession stand, and ran right into Tina Walters.

  "Excuse me," Tina said, stumbling a little. And then she looked at Macey. She looked at me. She opened her mouth to speak, but then, just as quickly, she shook her head as if dismissing some crazy thought.

  "Ummm…sorry." I grabbed Macey and bolted away.

  Macey looked at me, her contact-colored eyes wide as we both silently mouthed, Pop quiz!

  Near the bathrooms we saw Eva Alvarez posing as a member of the other team's flag corps and talking to a middle-aged woman wearing an I [heart] #32 corsage that was as large as her head.

  I heard Courtney Bauer's laughter from under the stands. Now I know, technically speaking, that a crowd full of Gallagher Girls is supposed to make me feel safe, but right then they weren't backup—they were highly trained operatives who could blow our cover at any time.

  Macey and I stayed calm and kept walking, taking in the sights and sounds, until suddenly things felt…different. Again. I sensed the Gallagher Girls in the crowd, but also…something else. The game must have been going well for Roseville, because the home crowd was cheering; but for some reason I found myself thinking about another day and another crowd. But this time I didn't think I was crazy as my mind flashed back to Washington, D.C. This time, I knew what I was looking for.

  "He's here," I muttered as my gaze swept over the crowd, no longer seeing football fans and cheerleaders, band members and aging former jocks.

  "What?" Macey asked over the roar of the crowd.

  "Zach," I whispered back.

  "I don't know why he didn't kiss you!" Macey said with an exasperated sigh, as if she totally wasn't in the mood to debrief again.

  "No." I shook my head. "He's here."

  And that got my roommate's attention. "How do you know?" she asked, turning to take in the crowd. "Is it a pavement artist thing?"

  "No," I said. "It's a girl thing."

  Macey nodded as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. She scanned the bleachers. "Maybe Blackthorne is here for a CoveOps exercise too?" she offered, but I shook my head. "Ooh! Solomon alert!" Macey said then, coming even more alive.

  Our teacher was by the flagpole. Our teacher was looking our way. It would have been easy to spin around, to try to hide. But luckily Macey stayed with me, quiet and still, as Joe Solomon's gaze passed over us.

  Maybe it was instinct or training that made me freeze. Or maybe it was the sight of the boy standing forty feet behind my teacher, in the middle of the track, staring right at me.

  Being recognized during a covert operation is bad. We're talking democracy (not to mention life) as you know it may cease to exist…bad. Enemy agents might try to kill you. Friends who don't have a clue that you're posing as a United Nations translator and using the name Tiffany St. James might totally blow your cover. But until that moment,

  I didn't realize just how dangerous it is to be recognized by…

  Your ex-boyfriend.

  "Isn't that.,." Macey started, but I couldn't wait for her to finish.

  "Josh."

  My mind raced with all the reasons I shouldn't panic. After all, it was homecoming and it seemed like the entire town of Roseville had come out for the show. And not only that, but at that moment I looked more like Macey than like me as I stood there in my long black wig and blue contacts, and jeans that the real me would never wear for fun on a Friday night. But the hope I clung to the hardest, as I stood twenty feet away from my first boyfriend, was simple: I was still the girl nobody sees.

  But there had always been one exception to that rule. And he was standing right in front of me.

  "Has he…filled out a little?" Macey asked, squinting her eyes to see better through her fake glasses. "He seems…hotter," she added, as if she totally approved.

  I wanted to say no. I wanted to pretend it didn't matter. But when he turned and started walking away from us, I did what any spy (not to mention ex-girlfriend) would do: I followed him.

  I should have waited for Macey, but instead I found myself pushing through the marching band, which was lining up to take the field at halftime. I headed after the boy who was walking freely through the crowd—not hiding. No disguise. I marveled at the fact that there are boys in the world who are exactly what they seem.

  From a pavement artist standpoint, following a boy like Josh Abrams is about as easy as it gets. After all, he's untrained, unaware, and utterly unconcerned about the Essentials of Elementary Countersurveillance (my favorite book when I was seven). And yet, something about that mission was harder than anything I'd done in a long time. Maybe it was the fact that I was on totally unfamiliar ground. Maybe it was the way the crowds crushed around me, making it difficult to follow against the current. Or maybe it was the sight of another boy who had come from nowhere and now stood blocking my path.

  "What are you doing here, Gallagher Girl?" Zach's voice was low but strong. He gripped my forearm and ushered me out of the way of a convertible that was driving the freshman homecoming attendant around the track.

  "CoveOps assignment," I lied. "You?"

  "I thought you weren't supposed to leave school," he told me.

  "Yeah, because you're so into sticking around campus these days. Seriously, Zach, do you ever stay at Blackthorne?"

  But he didn't answer (which, Macey tells me, is a typical reaction for both boys and spies, so I don't know which he was being then).

  "I had a feeling you might try something like this." It sounded like the most truthful thing he'd said to me in ages.

  "Just tell me …" Zach started, and for the first time his anger seemed to fade. "Just tell me you didn't do this to see Jimmy."

  "Josh," I corrected Zach for about the millionth time, but he didn't smile, and somehow I knew that the joke was long since over. "No," I said, meaning it. "I'm just…here."

  I didn't look for him, but somehow I knew that Josh was standing with a group of friends ten feet away. Zach was right in front of me. There I was, caught between two boys who couldn't have been more different. If I'd been another girl with another cover, I don't know what I would have done; but right then, only one thing mattered.

  "Why were you in Boston, Zach?" The air was crisp and cool around us. Soft music started on the loudspeaker as the homecoming court made their way to the center of the field. I felt more than a new season blowing in the breeze, so maybe that's why I looked at the boy I hadn't really seen in months and said, "Why are you here, Zach?"

  I stepped closer to him, waiting for him to reach out, to tease, to smile. And more than anything, I wanted him to say I am here for you.

  The space between us shrank, but as I took another step forward, Zach took a step back. Last spring, he'd teased me, he'd flirted with me—I'd been the one who was hard to get. But standing under those bright lights, I could see that somehow, in the last few months, Zach and I had changed places. I didn't like the game from that side of the field.

  "Come on," he said, taking my hand (but not in a nice, romantic way). "We're taking Macey home."

  "We're not doing anything."

  "Fine," he said, starting away. "I'll go find Solomon, get his opinion."

  "Zach," I started, cutting him off, but he wheeled on me.

  "Do you even know who's out there?" he snapped louder now, and then just as quickly he stepped closer. "Do you even care?"

  "The Circle of Cavan is after my sisterhood, Zach. Not yours. They're hunting my friends. They're sending Gallagher Girls down laundry chutes, so don't show up here and lecture me about what's at stake." He drew a breath as if to speak, but I knew better than to let him. "If Joseph Cavan's followers want to settle the score with Gillian Gallagher's great-great-grand- daughter, then they're going to deal with all of us, and that doesn't necessarily include you."

  The announcer was talking over the loudspeaker, saying somet
hing about the homecoming queen and her deep love of puppies or something, but I just looked at Zach, trying to shake the feeling that I hadn't really seen him in months. If ever. "Why do I feel like I can't trust you anymore?"

  I wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to fight, to protest, to argue—to do anything but look deeper into my eyes and say, "Because the Gallagher Academy doesn't admit fools."

  Hundreds of people filled the stands around us. They were teachers and accountants, stay-at-home moms and men who worked at the toilet paper factory—regular people doing their best to live regular lives. They couldn't have been farther from Macey McHenry (both the spy and the girl) if they'd tried.

  And yet she was right there beside them.

  Beside us.

  And she'd heard everything we'd said.

  "The family tie to Roseville," Macey softly repeated what the man on the street had said.

  "Macey," I said, stepping closer.

  "Does this mean …" she started, and I knew there were a dozen ways that sentence could have ended. If I had just discovered that I was related to Gillian Gallagher, I would have been ecstatic. Bex would have thought it was the coolest thing ever. Liz might have decided to conduct some serious DNA experiments to determine if covertness was hereditary.

  But it didn't matter what we would have done. What really mattered was what Macey did.

  "You knew about this?" she asked me. Her voice was cracking. Her lip was shaking. "How long have you known about this?"

  I could have lied, I guess. But I didn't. Maybe because Macey had lived with me for over a year and would see through it. Maybe because we hadn't covered lying to a trained operative yet in CoveOps. Or maybe I just thought Macey had the right to know that of the thousands of Gallagher Girls in the world, she was the only one who carried Gilly's blood in her veins.

  "Yeah, my mom told us last—"

  "Us!" Macey snapped. "Does the whole school know?"

  "No! Just Bex and Liz and me. Mom explained all that after you got accepted. She—"

  "So I'm Gillian Gallagher's descendant?" The fire seemed to be fading from her, so I reached out, still half afraid that when I touched her she would turn to ash. "So that's why they let me in."

  "Macey, it's not—"

  "True?" she said, staring at me, but for once in my life I couldn't lie—couldn't hide. I could only watch as she pushed away without another word, through the red-clad members of the Pride of Roseville Marching Band, who were exiting the field.

  "Macey!" I called after her, but then Zach's hand was in mine.

  "Cam—" he started.

  "Not now, Zach." I jerked away. Maybe I wanted to find Macey. Or maybe I just wanted to be anywhere but there.

  I set off through the crowd, pushing through the band and out into open space—seeing potential threats everywhere I turned.

  Twenty feet to my right and up three rows, there was a guy in a red cap who jumped to his feet to cheer a split second too late, as if his attention had been elsewhere. On the track between the cheerleaders and the bleachers, two women stood together scanning the crowd while wearing

  shoes that no small-town housewife would be caught dead in.

  I wanted to scream into my comms unit and call for backup, but I had no comms. There was no backup. And Macey was already gone.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The road from Roseville had never felt so long. In the hours that passed, the mansion had never felt so big. And I had never felt so stupid as when Bex and Liz and I went room to room, floor to floor, searching for Macey.

  Covert Operations Report 0500 hours

  Operatives Morgan, Baxter, and Sutton conducted a detailed search of the Gallagher Mansion, following the textbook grid pattern of detection. (They were sure about this because Operative Sutton brought along the actual textbook.)

  "I know she made it back," I said for what must have been the hundredth time, but I had to keep saying the words. It didn't matter that neither Bex nor Liz needed to hear

  them. "I tracked her footprints down the tunnel…She came back that way—I'm sure of it. She left her wig by the door with the rest of her disguise, so I dropped mine there too and went looking for her. …" I looked at Bex and Liz, not even trying to hide my panic as I begged them to believe me. "I know she made it back!"

  I wanted Liz to cite the incredible odds in our favor that Macey was fine. I expected Bex to tell me that everything was going to be okay, but instead she just stared at me and asked, "Scale of one to ten, how mad was she?"

  We were in the library, but there were no girls among the stacks. The clock in my head was telling me it was almost five in the morning. The fire in the fireplace was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers—the only light in the room. I thought about Bex's question, slowly realizing that mad wasn't the word. Mad could be handled by challenging Bex to a good sparring match in the P&E barn. Mad goes away with a good night's sleep.

  "Not mad," I said, shaking my head. "It was more like she was—"

  "Heartbroken." Liz's voice was so soft I barely heard it, and even now I'm not sure if she knew she'd said the word aloud. We'd been looking for Macey for hours, but something in the way she sank onto the spiraling staircase made me realize that, somewhere along the way, Liz had gone missing too.

  "When Macey found out, she was heartbroken," Liz said again, and I knew she was right.

  "Yeah," I said, turning to her. "Heartbroken."

  "Oh, I'll break something when we find her…" Bex's accent was coming back in waves. "She's gonna get herself snatched right up if she keeps acting this bloody stupid. Running about the country on her own …"

  "You don't get it, do you?" It was the first time I'd ever heard Liz raise her voice, the first time I'd seen her skin so deathly white. Even Bex stopped and stared. "I mean, look at you—look at both of you! You don't know what it's like. You…belong," Liz said, as if Bex and I were at the core of an ancient secret and didn't realize it. And I guess, in a way, we were.

  "You." Liz turned to Bex. "You go all over the world with your mom and dad, tracking down arms dealers and staking out terrorists during summer break."

  Bex started to protest until she realized that what Liz was saying wasn't an insult and, furthermore, it was absolutely true.

  "And you," Liz said, spinning on me. "Cam, your mom is the headmistress…Your aunt's a living legend…" For some reason I felt my cheeks flush red. "You guys don't have any idea what it's like to be…normal. And then one day someone tells you that the toughest, most elite, most amazing school in the world is in Roseville, Virginia"—Liz's voice had taken on a very dreamy quality, but as she settled her gaze on us, her words turned to steel—"and they want you."

  I thought about what she'd said and realized that there'd never been a moment in my life when I'd doubted whether or not I could become a Gallagher Girl. For Bex, the toughest barrier was geography.

  "Yeah," Liz said, reading our expressions. "I'd always been pretty good at school." It was probably the understatement of the century, but I didn't dare interrupt. "People always told me I was smart—people always said that I was special. But Macey…" Liz's voice cracked. My eyes were going blurry, and even Bex looked as if she were about to cry. "What have people always told her?"

  I didn't want to think about the answer to that question—not then. Not ever. So the three of us sat surrounded by books and secrets and the light of a dying fire, finally realizing that we were the only people in Macey's life who knew not to judge a girl by her cover.

  "We've got to find her," Bex said, starting for the door. "Now."

  But I was already way ahead of her, pushing forward, riding a wave of exhaustion and terror; instinct driving me forward as I prayed that I was wrong.

  I could hear them following behind me, their footsteps echoing on the old stone floors while Bex called, "We've looked down there already."

  But I just ran faster through the abandoned halls, past empty classrooms and dark windows and, finally,
down the stairs that led to the long basement corridor—to the place where, in a way, it had all begun.

  There were no windows there. The corridor was dark, the stone floors were rough, but still I ran toward the place where my mother had brought us more than a year ago and told us the truth about Macey.

  As I stopped in front of the tapestry that showed the entire Gallagher Family tree, I tried to imagine how many times I'd disappeared behind it, but I knew that our trip that night had been the most important journey that that passageway had ever witnessed.

  I was breathing heavily, almost afraid of what I'd find, as Bex and Liz appeared beside me.

  "She's here somewhere," Liz said. "She's got to be. She's…"

  But I wasn't really listening as I pulled the tapestry aside and turned the tiny sword in the Gallagher Academy crest, which lay embedded in the stone wall.

  "She might be in the ninth-grade common room," Liz was saying in the manner of someone who has to keep talking or else she'll fall asleep. "They have those really comfy chairs…"

  But I just watched the wall slide aside to reveal the empty corridor. I listened to the sounds of silence echo through the shaft. I looked down at the place where Macey and I had left our disguises earlier that night—at the place where no wigs, no glasses, no trace of the girls we'd been earlier that night remained.

  "She's here," Liz said. "She can't be…"

  "Gone."

  Chapter Twenty-five

  "Tell me." Mr. Solomon's voice was steady as he sat on the coffee table in front of the leather couch in my mother's office. I didn't look around the room. I didn't listen as my mother spoke on one phone and my aunt on another. I didn't watch Liz and Bex as they sat in the window seat, answering questions from Buckingham and Mr. Smith. It was the quietest chaos I'd ever seen or heard, so I just sat there, trying to keep my tired mind from drifting too far down that empty passageway, chasing after Macey.