"That's okay," he said, and pushed the bottles back onto the shelf.
I turned back toward the window, but Liz was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-four
A cold front blew in that night—in a lot of ways.
Fires burned in all the lounges. We traded our knee-socks for tights. Every window we passed was covered with frost, blocking our view of the world outside. But nothing made me shiver quite as much as the look on Liz's face. For days, it was as if we were still separated by the pharmacy windows. It was as if she hardly knew me.
When I went to the chem lab after supper Tuesday night, Liz was already there.
"Well, fancy seeing you here," I said, trying to sound chipper as I gathered my things and moved to the lab table across from her.
Her eyes were shielded behind her protective goggles. She didn't even look up.
"Earth to Liz," I tried again, but she turned away.
"I don't have time to help you with your homework, Cammie," she said, and it might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn all the beakers frosted over.
"That's okay," I said. "I think I've got it under control."
We worked in silence for a long time before Liz said, "He was Josh's friend—wasn't he?"
I didn't have to ask who she was talking about. "Yeah, they're neighbors. I'd met him before, that's why I couldn't compromise—"
"Nice friend," Liz snapped.
"He's all talk," I said, repeating Josh's words to me. "He's harmless."
But Liz's voice was shaking when she said, "Go ask Anna how harmless he is." Of course, word of Anna's encounter in the pharmacy had spread like crazy, and Anna was now something of a hero—thanks to the fact that Bex and Macey insisted that Anna had the situation well under control when they got there.
But I couldn't share this with Liz. We both knew the truth. "If things had gotten out of hand I could have—"
"Could have or would have?" Liz asked.
The difference between those two words had never seemed so huge. "Would," I said. "I would have stopped it."
"Even if it meant losing Josh?" Liz said, not asking what she really wanted to know—that if it had been her instead of Anna in Dillon's sights, would I have saved her; if it came down to a fight between the real me and my legend, which one would I choose?
The glass doors at the back of the lab slid open, and Macey walked in. "Hey, I thought I might find you two—"
"It's gone too far, Cammie," Liz said, shaking ingredients wildly into the mix until the whole thing started to bubble and change colors like something in a witch's caldron. "You've gone too far."
"I've gone too far?" I said. "I wasn't the one blowing up Driver's Ed cars!"
"Hey," Liz snapped. "We thought he was a honeypot!"
"No." I shook my head. "We thought he was a boy." I gathered my things. "We thought he was worth it. And, you know what? He was."
"Yeah," Liz called after me. "Well, I never thought you were someone who'd choose a boy over her friends!"
"Hey, cool it," Macey said.
"Well, I never thought I had friends who'd make me choose!"
As I neared the door, I heard Liz start to speak, but Macey cut her off, saying, "Hey, genius girl, you don't have any idea what kinds of sacrifices she's willing to make for her friends."
"What are you—" Liz started, then her voice softened slightly as she asked, "Why? What do you know?"
When Macey spoke, she left no room for doubt. "Enough to say, back off."
The glass doors slid open and I darted through them just as Liz said, "Okay," but I couldn't stop moving, didn't dare break my pace until I reached the supply closet in the east corridor, where I slid aside a stack of long fluorescent light-bulbs, grabbed a flashlight from the top shelf, and found the loose stone that I had discovered one day during my seventh-grade year while looking for Onyx, Buckingham's cat.
The stone was cold beneath my hand when I pushed against it and felt the rush of air as the wall slid aside. A small sliver of light slipped beneath the door behind me, but it faded into nothing in the deep expanse of black.
An hour later I was standing in the shadows of Bellis Street, shivering in the dark.
What did I intend to accomplish by sneaking through a secret tunnel, climbing over a fence, and literally staking out Josh's house in the dark? I didn't have a clue. Instead, I just stood there like an idiot (and even an idiot who is very good at not being seen while standing around can feel pretty silly while doing it).
This is probably a pretty good time to point out that while it may appear that I was lurking—I wasn't. Lurking is what creepy guys with random facial hair and stains on their shirts do. Geniuses with three years of top secret spy training don't lurk—we surveil.
(Okay, I might have been lurking—a little.)
White eyelet curtains were pushed back from a kitchen window where Josh's mother was washing dishes. When Josh walked through the kitchen, his mother blew soapsuds at him, and he laughed. I thought about Bex, who was probably laughing right then, too. I thought about my mother, whose tears only came in secret. I thought about my life—the one I had and the one I wanted, so all I did was stand shivering in the cold, watching Josh laugh, as I started to cry.
But that's a girl's right—isn't it? To cry sometimes for no reason? Really, when you think about it, that ought to be in the Constitution. Maybe I'll break into the National Archives sometime and write that in. Bex would totally help me. Somehow, I don't think the Founding Fathers would mind.
Chapter Twenty-five
With finals and the stress that comes with them, I didn't really see Liz again until supper the following night when she brought her slice of pizza and came to sit beside me. "So, where did you go last night?" she asked. But before I could answer, she said, "To see Josh?"
I nodded.
"You didn't break up with him, did you?" She sounded genuinely concerned.
"No," I said, shocked.
"Good." Then she must have sensed my confusion because she said, "He's good to you, and you deserve that." She looked around the Grand Hall at the hundred other girls who were like us. "We all deserve that."
Yeah, I realized, I think we do.
I stole a glance at Bex who sat beside me, laughing. We all deserve laughter and love and the kinds of friends I had beside me, but as I watched her, I couldn't help but wonder if she'd still find life so funny if she knew all I knew. I wondered if our fathers' fates had been reversed, would our personalities have switched, too? Would I be the one standing in the Grand Hall allowing Anna Fetterman to demonstrate how she'd defended herself against a mob of twenty angry townspeople (because, by that time, the mob had grown considerably)? Would Bex, beautiful Bex, be a chameleon, then?
"Ms. Baxter!" I turned to see Professor Buckingham starting toward us. I felt my heart stop—literally. (It can do that—I know, I asked Liz.) She was walking toward us, bearing down like the force of nature she was.
Macey was across the table from me, and we glanced at each other—an unspoken dread lingering between us like the smell of olive oil and melting cheese, but beside me, Bex was unfazed, and I remembered the power of a secret.
As she drew near, I tried to read something in Buckingham's eyes, but they were as cold and blank as stone.
"Miss Baxter, I just had a phone call…" Buckingham started and then, ever so slightly, turned her gaze toward me. "…from your father." Air returned to my lungs. Blood started moving in my veins, and I'm pretty sure Buckingham gave something that resembled a wink in my direction. "He said to tell you hello."
My elbows fell to the table, and across from me, Macey mirrored my relief. It was over.
"Oh," Bex said, but she hadn't even stopped chewing. "That's nice."
She would never know how nice.
I glanced toward the head table, and Mom raised a glass in my direction. Beside me, Bex didn't breathe a sigh of relief. She didn't say a prayer. She didn't do any of the things I felt like doing, but that's okay, I guess. Her father was still on his high wire. It was just as well she'd never looked up.
Almost everyone had gone upstairs twenty minutes later when Bex and I started to leave.
"So, what do you want to do now?" Bex asked.
"I guess we could do anything," I said, and it was true. We were leaving the hall, and it didn't matter where we were going. We were trained and we were young and we had the rest of our lives to carry the worry of grown-ups. Right then, I just wanted to celebrate with my best friend—even if she didn't know why.
"Let's get all the ice cream we can carry and …"
But then I saw Liz running down the spiral staircase, crying, "Cammie!" as if I hadn't already stopped. And then Liz whispered, or at least she tried to whisper, but I swear everyone in the entire mansion must have heard her when she said, "It's Josh!"
Wars have been won and lost, assassination attempts have been thwarted, and women have avoided showing up at the same event in the same dress—all because of really good intel. That's why we have entire classes devoted to this stuff. But as Liz dragged me into our suite, I didn't really appreciate its importance until I saw the screen. "These were here when I got back from supper." Poor Liz. She'd done this amazing job of getting us patched into Josh's system, and I could tell by looking at her that she would have given just about anything to undo it all right then. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But the problem is, for spies, ignorance is usually pretty short-lived.
From D'Man
To JAbrams
Have you come to your senses yet? I'm telling you—I saw her WITH MY OWN EYES. You've got to believe me now. SHE GOES TO THE GALLAGHER ACADEMY!! She's been lying to you!! How can you take HER word over MINE?
From JAbrams
To D'Man
I trust Cammie. I believe her. You probably just thought you saw her walking with a bunch of those girls on Saturday. She doesn't even know them. Trust me. Give it a break.
Dillon's response was a single line.
From D'Man To JAbrams Tonight. 9:00. WE'LL GET PROOF!
Now, at this point I was starting to panic, which isn't very spylike, but is pretty girl-like, so I figured I was well within my feminine rights. The "proof" to which I'd seen teenage boys refer in movies usually involved video equipment and/or feminine undergarments, so I yelled, "Oh my gosh!" and started looking around for Liz's flash cards. Surely somewhere in all that vat of knowledge there had to be instructions on what to do when your cover is completely and irrevocably blown.
Paced with the knowledge that the operation had been severely compromised, The Operatives formed a list of alternatives, which included (but were not limited to) the following:
A. Misdirection: in a variation of the "you must have seen someone who looks like me" approach, one of The Operatives could impersonate Cammie and climb the wall while Cammie looks on with Josh and Dillon and says, "Is that who you saw?" (Which is especially effective when The Subject is nearsighted.)
B. Sympathy: this technique has not only been used successfully by spies for many centuries, but it is also a staple of teenage girls. The conversation would likely resemble the following: