by Carter, Ally
“Oh, bollocks!” Bex exclaimed, and Liz dropped her note cards.
“Smith!” I cried. “You expect us to recon Professor Smith?”
I couldn’t believe it! Not only was it our first mission ever, but he honestly expected us to tail a man who had thirty years of experience, and who had seen us every school day since seventh grade, and who, worst of all, was the single most paranoid human being on the planet! (Seriously. I mean, he’s got the plastic surgery bills to prove it.)
A team of CIA all-stars would probably get made within twenty minutes. Three Gallagher Girls didn’t stand a chance. After all, once a guy’s heard you give a report on the trade routes of Northern Africa, he’s probably gonna wonder why you’re sitting behind him on the merry-go-round!
“But . . . but . . . but . . . he never leaves the grounds,” I protested, finally finding my words. “He would never enter an unsecured area on a whim.” Oooh, good one, I thought, as I struggled to recall Liz’s flash cards. “This goes against the subject’s pattern of behavior!”
But Mr. Solomon only smiled. He knew it was an impossible mission—that was why he’d given it to us. “Trust me, ladies,” he said with somber respect, “no one knows Mr. Smith’s patterns of behavior.” He tossed a thick file folder toward us. “The one thing we do know is that tonight is the Roseville town carnival, and Mr. Smith, for good or bad, is a man who loves his funnel cakes.”
“Well, have fun!” My mother’s voice came blaring through the speakers. I imagined her waving at her colleague as he turned at the edge of town. I heard her breathing become deeper, almost felt her cross trainers as they struck the dark pavement.
“Your mission,” Mr. Solomon said, “is to find out what he drinks with those funnel cakes.”
I’d been waiting my whole life for my first mission and it all came down to what? Carbonated beverages?!
“Subject’s at the firehouse, Wise Guy,” Mom whispered. “He’s all yours.” And then, just like that, my mother and her watchful eyes were gone, leaving us alone in the dark with Joe “Wise Guy” Solomon and a mathematician in a bright orange cap.
Mr. Solomon thrust the necklace toward me and said, “In or out?”
I grabbed the cross, knowing I would need it.
I love Bex and Liz. Seriously, I do. But when your mission is to go unnoticed at the Roseville town carnival while trailing an operative who’s as good as Mr. Smith, a genius in Jackie O shades and a girl who could totally be Miss America (even though she’s British) are not exactly what I’d call ideal backup.
“I have eyeball,” Bex said, as I lurked across the town square by the dunking booth. Every minute or so, I’d hear a splash and applause behind me. People kept walking by carrying corn dogs and caramel apples—lots of calories on sticks—and I suddenly remembered that while our chef makes an awesome crème brûlée, his corn dogs really do leave something to be desired.
So I bought one—a corn dog, that is. Now, here’s where you might start thinking—Hey, who is she to eat during a mission? Or, isn’t it careless to stand there smearing mustard all over a deep-fried weenie when there are operatives to tail?
But that’s the thing about being a pavement artist (a term first used to describe me when I was nine and successfully tailed my father through the mall to find out what he was going to buy me for Christmas), you can’t be ducking behind Dumpsters and dodging into doorways all the time. Seriously, how covert is that? Real pavement artists don’t hide—they blend. So when you start craving a corn dog because every third person you see is eating one, then bring on the mustard! (Besides, even spies have to eat.)
Bex was on the far side of the square, milling around outside the library while the Pride of Roseville marching band warmed up. Liz was supposed to be behind me, but I couldn’t see her. (Please tell me she didn’t bring her molecular regeneration homework. . . .) Mr. Smith was probably thirty feet in front of Bex, being Joe Ordinary, which was totally creeping me out. Every few moments I’d catch a flash of his black jacket as he strolled along the streets, looking like a soccer dad who was worried about the mortgage, and I remembered that of all the false facades at the Gallagher Academy, the best belonged to its people.
“How you doing up there, Duchess?” I asked, and Bex shot back, “I hate that bloody code name.”
“Okay, Princess,” I said.
“Cam—” Bex started, but before she could finish her threat, I heard Liz’s voice in my ear.
“Chameleon, where are you?” Liz complained. “I lost you again.”
“I’m over by the dunk tank, Bookworm.”
“Wave your arms or something.” I could almost hear Liz standing on tiptoes, peering through the crowd.
“That kind of defeats the purpose now, doesn’t it?” Bex noted.
“But how am I supposed to follow you, following Smith if I can’t— Oh, never mind,” Liz said. “I see you.”
I looked around and thought, Oh, yeah, I can see why I’d be tough to spot. I was sitting on a bench in plain sight. Seriously. I couldn’t have been more out in the open if I’d had a big neon sign over my head. But that’s the thing most people don’t get about surveillance. No one—not even one of my best friends—was going to look twice at an ordinary-looking girl in last year’s clothes sitting on a park bench eating a corn dog. If you can be still enough, and common enough, then it’s really easy to be invisible.
“He’s flipping,” Bex said softly, and I knew it was show-time. Roseville might look like Mayberry, but Professor Smith wasn’t taking any chances. He was doubling back, so I got off my bench and eased toward the sidewalk, knowing Smith was heading toward me on the opposite side of the square, past Bex, who managed to duck her head and act nonchalant. That’s when a lot of people would have lost it. An amateur would have looked at her watch and spun around as if she’d just remembered some place she needed to be, but not Bex—she just kept walking.
Half the town must have turned out for the carnival, so there was lots of pedestrian cover on the sidewalk between Mr. Smith and me (a very good thing). People don’t see things nearly as quickly as they see motion, so when Professor Smith turned, I stayed perfectly still. When he moved, I waited five seconds, then followed. But mostly, I remembered what my dad always said about how a tail isn’t a string—it’s a rubber band, stretching back and forth, in and out, moving independently of The Subject. When something interested me, I stopped. When someone said something funny, I laughed. When I passed an ice-cream stand, I bought some, all the while keeping Mr. Smith at the edge of my vision.
But that’s not to say it was easy. No way. In all the times I’d imagined my first mission, I’d always thought I’d be retrieving top secret files or something. Never once did I imagine that I’d be asked to tail my COW professor through a carnival and find out what he drinks with his funnel cakes. The crazy thing was that this was SO MUCH HARDER! Professor Smith was acting as if those KGB hitmen were already on their way to Roseville—using every countersurveillance technique in the book (or at least the books I’ve seen), and I realized how exhausting it must be to be him. He couldn’t even go out for funnel cakes without “flipping” and “corner clearing” and “breadcrumbing” all the time.
Once, things got really toasty, and I thought for sure he was going to make me, but I fell in behind a group of little old women. But then one of the women stumbled at the curb, and, instinctively, I reached out to help her. Ahead of us, Professor Smith stopped in front of a darkened storefront, staring at the reflection in the glass, but I was twenty feet behind him and shrouded by a sea of gray hair and poly-ester—which was a good thing. But then the women all turned to face me—which was a bad thing.
“Thank you, young lady,” the older woman said. She squinted at me. “Do I know you?”
But just then, a voice blared in my ear. “Did we rotate?” Liz sounded close to panic. “Did we rotate the eyeball?”
Professor Smith was getting away, heading back in Bex’s direction, so I ans
wered, “Yes,” but that only made the woman cock her eyebrow and stare harder.
“I don’t remember seeing you before,” the old woman said.
“Sure you do, Betty,” one of the other women said, patting her friend on the arm. “She’s that Jackson girl.”
And that’s why I’m the chameleon. I am the girl next door (it’s just that our doors have fingerprint-reading sensors and are bulletproof and all . . .).
“Oh! Is your grandmother out of the hospital yet?” the more fragile of the women asked.
Okay, so I didn’t know the Jacksons, much less how Granny was feeling, but Grandma Morgan had taught me that Chinese Water Torture is nothing compared to a grandmother who really wants to know something. I saw Professor Smith nearing Bex, but over my comms unit, Bex was laughing, saying, “Yeah, man. Go, Pirates!” as if she lived for Friday night football. Sure, Bex’s definition of football might have been soccer, but boys were always boys, and a crowd of jersey-clad testosterone was assembling across the street. I didn’t need surveillance photos to know who was at the center of the mob.
The old women were staring at me as if I were a needle they were trying to thread, and I said the only thing I could think of. “Dr. Smith says she needs to go south—that she needs to be toasty.” I looked past the mob surrounding me and toward the one surrounding Bex, hoping she’d heard and understood that trouble was heading her way.
My hopes dwindled, though, when I heard her say, “Yeah, I love tight ends.”
“Isn’t that nice?” the old woman said. “Does she know where she’s going?”
I saw Mr. Smith’s dark jacket disappear past the pillars of the library’s main entrance and then out of sight.
“You know she’s such a bookworm,” I said, hoping Liz was listening. “She can’t wait to be near the library, just around the corner from the library, in fact,” I said through gritted teeth, just as static and chaos filled my ears.
I heard Bex mutter, “Oh, no!”
Ahead of me, the football boys were heading in a pack down the street, but Bex wasn’t with them. As far as I could see, Bex wasn’t anywhere, and neither was Smith.
“Sorry, ladies. Gotta go,” I snapped and hurried away. “Bookworm,” I said, “do you have them? I have lost visual with The Subject and the eyeball. I repeat. I have lost visual with The Subject and the . . .”
I reached the library and looked in the direction where I’d last seen Mr. Smith, but all I saw was a long line of yellow streetlights. I weaved back through the crowd, circling the entire square, until I wound up right back where I’d started, in a vacant lot between a shoe store and City Hall, right behind the dunk tank.
I should have been more aware of my surroundings, I know—Spy 101 and all that—but it was too late. We’d been so close . . . soooo close. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but about the time I polished off that ice-cream cone, I’d honestly started imagining what it would feel like to have Joe Solomon say, “Nice job.”
But now they were gone—everyone—Smith, Bex, and Liz. I couldn’t turn tail and run back to school—not then. We’d come too close. So I darted toward the funnel-cake stand, the one place we felt certain Smith would have to visit before the night was through, but I didn’t pay attention to where I was going or how completely the Deputy Chief of Police filled the little seat above the dunk tank. I heard the crack of a baseball hitting metal, sensed movement out of the corner of my eye, but all the P&E training in the world wasn’t enough to help me dodge the tidal wave that crashed over my shoulders.
Yeah, that’s right. My first covert operations mission was also my first wet T-shirt contest, and as I stood there shivering, I knew it would probably be my last of both. People were rushing toward me, offering towels, asking if they could give me a ride home.
Yeah, I’m stealthy, I thought, as I thanked them as unmemorably as possible and darted away. Halfway down the sidewalk, I pulled a soggy twenty-dollar bill from my pocket, bought a Go Pirates! sweatshirt, and pulled it on.
In my ear, the comms unit had gone from crackling static to dense nothing, and I realized with a thud that my little silver cross, though state-of-the-art, wasn’t the waterproof edition. Bex’s band of football jocks strolled by, but not a single eye looked my way. As a girl, I wouldn’t have minded a little corner-of-the-eye checking out, but as a spy, I was totally relieved that the whole drowned-chic look didn’t undermine my covertness too much. I walked toward the funnel-cake stand, knowing that at any minute I could turn the corner on disaster—and I guess in a way, I did.
Bex and Liz were sitting together on a bench as Mr. Smith paced before them, and boy, was he scary just then. His new face had always seemed strong, but I hadn’t appreciated its hard lines until he leaned over Liz and yelled, “Ms. Sutton!”
Liz started shrinking, but Bex crossed her arms and looked totally bored.
“I want to know what you are doing here!” Smith demanded.
“Ms. Baxter”—he turned to Bex—“you are going to tell me why you and Ms. Sutton have left campus. You are going to explain why you’ve been following me for thirty minutes, and . . .” I watched his expression change as something dawned on him. “And you are going to tell me where Joe Solomon is right now.”
Bex and Liz looked at each other for a long time before Bex turned back to Mr. Smith. “I had a craving for a corn dog.”
Well, I have already pointed out the corn dog inadequacy of the Gallagher Academy food service team, but Mr. Smith didn’t buy her argument, which was just as well. He wasn’t supposed to. He’d heard her real message loud and clear—Bex and Liz weren’t talking.
Those are my girls.
Then I remembered that I was probably supposed to be doing something! After all, the mission wasn’t over yet—not really. There was still hope. Surely I could salvage some of it. Surely . . .
I was really starting to hate Joe Solomon. First he sends us out to tail a guy who was almost bound to catch at least one of us, and then he doesn’t teach us what to do when we get caught! Was I supposed to cause a diversion and hope Bex and Liz could slip away? Was I supposed to find a weapon and jump Smith from behind? Or was I simply supposed to stroll across the street and take my rightful place beside them on that bench of shame?
From the corner of my eye, I saw the Overnight Express truck cruise by. It could have stopped and an army could have swarmed in and saved the day, but that didn’t happen; and I instantly knew why. The street was full of people who could never know the power of the girls on the bench. I could have saved the sisters, but not at the risk of the sisterhood.
“Get up,” Mr. Smith told Liz. He tossed a Dr Pepper bottle into a nearby trash can. “We’ll finish this discussion back at school.”
I stayed in the shadows and watched Bex and Liz walk by. You know you’re stealthy if your two best friends in the universe can pass within twenty feet of you and don’t have a clue you’re there. But it was for the best, I figured. After all, I was still a girl on a mission.
I waited until they turned the corner, then I strolled across the street. No one looked twice at me. Not a soul stopped to ask my name or tell me how much I looked like my mother. I didn’t have to see the look of instant, uncomfortable sadness in anyone’s eyes as they realized I was Cammie Morgan—one of the Morgans—that I was the girl with the dead dad. On the streets of Roseville I was just a regular girl, and it felt so good I almost didn’t want to pull a Kleenex from my pocket, reach into the trash can, and carefully retrieve the bottle Mr. Smith had thrown away—but I did it anyway.
“Mission accomplished,” I whispered. Then I turned, knowing it was time to go back to the world where I could be invisible, but never unknown.
And that’s when I saw him—a boy across the street— seeing me.
In shock, I dropped the bottle on the street, but it didn’t break. As it rolled toward the curb, I bolted forward and tried to pick it up, but another hand beat me to it—a hand that was pretty big and decidedly
boylike, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some inadvertent pinkie-brushing, which led to a tingly sensation similar to the one I get when we use Dr. Fibs’s temporary fingerprint modification cream (only way better).
I stood up, and the boy extended the bottle toward me. I took it.
“Hi, there.” He had one hand in the pocket of his baggy jeans, pressing down, as if daring the pants to slide off his hips and gather around his Nikes that had that too-white, first-day-of-school glow about them. “So, do you come here often?” he asked in a slightly self-mocking way. I couldn’t help myself—I smiled. “See, you don’t even have to answer that, because I know all the trash cans in town, and while this is a very nice trash can, it doesn’t look like the kind of trash can a girl like you would normally scavenge from.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he went on. “Now, the trash cans on Seventh Street, those are some very nice trash cans.”
Mr. Solomon’s lesson from the first day of class came back to me, so I noted the details: the boy was about five foot ten, and he had wavy brown hair, and eyes that would put even Mr. Solomon’s to shame. But the thing I noticed most was how easily he smiled. I wouldn’t even mention it except it seemed to define his entire face—eyes, lips, cheeks. It wasn’t especially toothy or anything. It was just easy and smooth, like melting butter. But then again, I wasn’t the most impartial judge of such things. After all, he was smiling at me.
“That must not be an ordinary bottle,” he said (while smiling, of course).
I realized how ridiculous it must have looked. Under the warmth of that smile, I forgot my legend, my mission— everything—and I blurted the first thing that popped into my mind, “I have a cat!”
He raised his eyebrows, and I imagined him whipping out a cell phone to notify the nearest mental institution that I was on the loose in Roseville.
“She likes to play with bottles,” I rambled on, speaking ninety miles an hour. “But her last one broke, and then she got glass in her paw. Suzie! That’s my cat’s name—the one with the glass in her paw—not that I have any other ones— cats, I mean, not bottles. That’s why I needed this bottle. I’m not even sure she’ll want another bottle, what with the—”
