Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (5 page)

I
didn't know what to say, so I didn't say a thing. Instead, we stood there until
we heard the screen door behind us screech and slam. A minute later a
helicopter appeared on the horizon and dipped, its whirling blades sending
ripples across the quiet lake before landing somewhere in the forest.

The
wind grew cooler. Macey wrapped her good arm around herself and shivered in the
breeze, but she didn't move from the end of the dock.

Her
name was probably on every newscast in America. It wasn't hard to imagine that,
back in Boston, a room full of interns was buzzing about speeches that had to
be rewritten and commercials that had to be recut. The campaign had a new
star—a new angle. But all of that felt like another world, so I just stood by
my friend and thought for the first time ever that Joe Solomon was wrong about
something.

I
hadn't come away in worse shape than Macey McHenry.

Not by a long shot.

I know
the sounds my school makes—the squeaky steps and creaking doors, the hushed
voices during finals week, the noisy chaos of the Grand Hall before dinner. The
first day of a new year has a sound all its own, as limos turn down the winding
lane and car doors slam, suitcases bang against banisters, and girls squeal and
hug hello.

But
the first semester of my junior year…That semester started with a whisper so
quiet I almost didn't hear it.

"Is
Macey taking the semester off?" one senior asked another as they stood
huddled in the hall outside the library.

"I
heard they had to amputate Macey's arm and replace it with a bionic limb that
Dr. Fibs made in his lab," an eighth grader said when I passed by the door
to their common room.

Gallagher
Girls spend their free time scattered throughout the four corners of the
world, but that year every girl who returned from summer break brought back the
same questions. So I kept moving, roaming the quiet halls like a shadow, right
up until the point when I turned the corner and ran into Tina Walters.

"Cammie!"
Tina cried, and in the newfound quiet of our school, the word echoed. She threw
her arms around me. "You're okay!" she proclaimed, and then she
reconsidered. "You are okay, aren't you?"

"Yeah, Tina, I'm—"

"Because
I heard you killed one of them with a campaign button?"

Tina
is a teenage girl, and a spy-in-training, and the only daughter of one of the
country's premiere gossip columnists, so it's not surprising that she has crazy
theories. A lot of them. All the time. But in that second, my mind flashed back
to the sunny roof. I saw the shadows of the spinning blades, felt the hands
that gripped my shoulders, and
then heard
the pained cry as I jabbed the
Winters-McHenry button into a hand wearing a ring that I was sure I'd seen
before.

"Cam?" Tina asked, but
I just nodded.

"Yeah,
Tina." My throat felt strange, as I said it. "Something like
that."

And then I walked away.

When
you're known as the Chameleon, sometimes it can feel like your whole life is
just an elaborate game of hide-and- seek. Fortunately, I am very good at
hiding. Unfortunately, my best friends are very good at seeking.

"Cam!"
someone called through the shadows. "We know you're in here." The
voice was soft and Southern, the footsteps so dainty that I knew there could
only be one person tiny enough to creep over those particular floorboards
without making a sound.

"Oh, Cammie,"
Liz practically sang, as she
crept down the ancient corridor that (I think) had once been a pretty important
part of the Underground Railroad, and had more recently served a far less noble
covert purpose.

"I
thought we'd find you here," another voice said. My second roommate pushed
her way out of the shadows.

If
possible, I think Liz had gotten even tinier and Bex had gotten even prettier
over the summer break. Liz's blond hair was almost totally white from spending
all summer in the sun. Bex's accent was stronger, like it always is after
spending months with her parents in England. (Of course, Bex swore that she'd
spent a good portion of that time actually doing surveillance with MI6 in an
African nation that shall remain nameless.) Her dark skin glowed and her hair
was longer than it had been at the start of the summer.

"Isn't
it a tad early in the semester for hiding, darling?" Bex tried to tease. I
tried to smile.

"What gave me away?" I
asked.

"Irregular
dust patterns outside the entrance," Bex said. "You're getting sloppy."
And then she stopped. Strong Bex, brave Bex, seemed to recoil when she realized
what she'd said- "I didn't mean…"

"It's okay, Bex," I
told her.

"You
weren't
sloppy!" Bex blurted again.

Then
Liz jumped in. "Everyone's talking about how great you were—about how, if
you hadn't been there …" But she didn't finish, which was just as well. No
one wanted to think about how that sentence had to end.

Bex
eased onto one of the overturned crates and boxes that filled the room.
"Have you seen her?"

"Not
since the day after. They brought us to Mr. Solomon's lake house, but then they
took her back to her parents."

"She
is
coming
back," Liz asked. "Isn't she?"

"I don't know," I said
with a shrug.

"I
mean … they wouldn't want her to stay with them all the time, would they?
They'd want her here, where she's safe?"

"I
don't know, Liz," I said, sharper than I'd meant. "I mean … I don't
know if she's coming," I said, more softly. "I don't know who tried
to do this or why or … I just don't know," I whispered again, then turned
to look out the tiny circular window.

"She
invited me." Bex's voice cut through the silence. "Before the
convention, she called our flat and asked me to come, but my mum and dad were
home, and I…" Bex trailed off, not knowing, I guess, that wanting to be
with your parents isn't actually a sign of weakness. "I should have been
there." She didn't sound envious about missing out on a good fight.
Instead, she sounded guilty.

"Me
too," Liz said, sinking to the dusty floor. "When she called, my mom
said I could go, but I only had a few days left with my parents, so I said
no."

I
nodded. We all thought we'd have the better part of a year to spend together,
hut in any life—especially a spy's life—tomorrow is never guaranteed.

And
there you have it—the most important thing any of us had learned over our
summer vacation.

"Tina
Walters says Macey's parents have hired an ex- Navy SEAL to pose as a Sherpa
and hide Macey out in the Himalayas until the election is over," Liz
offered.

"Yeah,
well Tina Walters says a lot of things. Tina Walters is usually wrong,"
Bex replied. But I thought about how close Tina had been with her campaign
button theory; I remembered that Tina had been saying for years that there was
an elite boys' school for spies, and we'd all thought that was a crazy rumor
until last semester when a delegation from the Blackthorne Institute had moved
into the East Wing, just a few feet from where we now sat.

So
I looked around the empty dusty space and said, "Not always."

Last
spring, finding out who those boys were and whether or not they could be
trusted had seemed like the most important mission of our lives. Charts of
surveillance summaries and patterns of behaviors still lined the walls of our
former operation headquarters, but the tape was starting to lose its hold. The
wires still ran to the East Wing, a reminder of the days when boys from the
Blackthorne Institute had seemed like a mission—back when missions had been
about getting us ready for the real world; before the real world cornered us on
a rooftop in Massachusetts.

Liz
must have followed my gaze and read my mind, because I heard her say,
"Have you heard from…you know…Zach?"

I
thought back to the swirling images that had filled my mind before I'd blacked
out, and almost asked, "Do hallucinations after a head injury count?"
But I didn't because A) I may very well have been going crazy. And B) for a
Gallagher Girl, "Boy crazy" might be the most dangerous kind of crazy
there is.

So
instead I turned to look out the window and watched the long line of limousines
winding down Highway 10, carrying my classmates back to the safety of our
walls.

It
was the same scene I'd witnessed for years—the same cars, the same girls. But
in the next instant the scene totally changed. Vans—dozens of them—sped down
the highway, skidding into ditches on the side of the road. People bolted out
and started adjusting satellite dishes and equipment. Helicopters swarmed
around the school.

"Oh.
My. Gosh," I mumbled, still staring, feeling Bex and Liz crowd around the
window on either side of me. I looked at my best friends as sirens began
screeching through the still, quiet air: "CODE RED CODE RED CODE
RED."

"What
does it mean?" Liz screamed. Bex and I just smiled.

"Macey's coming home."

It
doesn't take a genius to know that the whole world can change in an instant,
and as soon as I hurried out of the secret passageway and into the second-floor
corridor I could see and hear and feel the difference. For days the halls had
felt like a tomb. But now, instead of stone silence, the whole school was on
fire (without actually burning, of course).

Red
lights flashed and blurred. To my right, a poster advertising the chance to
spend a semester in Paris slid down over a display of secret writing techniques
used through the ages (which wasn't entirely necessary since, this month, it
was featuring invisible ink).

As
we ran past the Encryption and Encoding department, I saw the plaque on the
door flipping over to read Ivy League Liaison Office.

Our
school was going undercover, pulling on its disguises as deftly as any
seasoned operative can do, and as Bex, Liz, and I ran against a current of
eighth graders on their way to stand guard outside the Protection and
Enforcement barn, I couldn't help but smile. After all, it had been three hundred
and sixty-four days since Macey had come to us during a Code Red. It seemed
only fitting that she would come back to us in one.

But
as we ran through the Hall of History, I watched Gillian Gallagher's sword
disappear into the case that holds our deepest treasure, and something hit me:
we wouldn't have a Code Red for Macey,

We
were having a Code Red for Macey
and whoever was coming with her.

The
door to my mother's office eased open. Inside, I saw our headmistress, wearing
her best suit and a grim expression. "I guess we're ready for our
close-ups?" she was saying.

As soon as we stepped into the
office I heard more voices.

"Now
America waits for its first glimpse of Macey McHenry, the brave young woman who
has so recently been thrust into the spotlight—and into danger."

(Evidently,
one of the Code Red precautions for making the headmistress's office look like
a regular school is to add a TV.)

Bex
flipped through channel after channel until we came to the image that made us
all freeze.

"And
here we are," a tall correspondent said into a microphone as she strolled
down a familiar stretch of Highway 10, "outside the gates of the Gallagher
Academy for Exceptional Young Women, where one exceptional young woman will be
returning shortly, after the most traumatic incident of her life. And the
question remains: Will these walls be enough to keep Macey McHenry safe?"

The
sirens finally stopped. My mother said, "It's time."

Okay,
here's the thing you need to know about spy schools— it's not about hiding them.
Nope. Because, let's face it, spy schools have students, and students have
parents, and parents are going to ask questions. According to Liz, non-spy
parents are really big on obvious questions like "so where exactly
is
your
school?"
(Spy
parents are far more likely to hack into a government database or put a GPS
unit in your tooth or something.) In any case, you kinda need an actual school
to present to the world; but like everything else about my life, my school
wasn't exactly what it seemed.

Following
my mother down the sweeping Grand Stairs, I couldn't help but think that our
first line of defense was about to be put to the test, because even though the
Gallagher Academy has never exactly hidden (it is a big, honking mansion, after
all), my school has never gone looking for the spotlight.