Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy (Gallagher Girls)

by Ally Carter

  “Come on in, kiddo,” Mom called as I reached the Hall of History the next morning—long before she could have seen me coming, because . . . well . . . my mother’s kind of amazing like that.

  Her office looked the same as always. Bright sunlight streamed through the windows. The mahogany bookshelves gleamed. And my mother didn’t look at all like a woman who had been up hours into the night. There were no bags under her eyes, no telltale traces of yesterday’s makeup as she sat in the window seat, a file in her lap. “Are you mad?”

  I don’t know why the question stumped me, but it did. Though not nearly as much as the answer. “No.”

  I don’t go to a normal school, and I’ve chosen not to have a normal life—normal tests aren’t going to teach me the things I have to know, and the woman in front of me knew that better than anyone.

  Mom scooted to the corner of the window seat, and I eased down beside her. “Was any of it real?” I resisted the temptation to ask what I really wanted to know: Were they real? Was Zach real?

  I had begun that semester by sitting in the tower room, thinking about how spies don’t tell lies—we live them—so it wasn’t any wonder that I came to my mother’s office that morning looking for some truth. I shouldn’t have been surprised when the question I had carried with me the longest finally found a way to seep free.

  “What happened to Dad?”

  My mother’s hand stopped running through my hair. The folder in her lap seemed to slip an inch or two, and I knew I’d broken one of the unwritten rules of the Gallagher Academy: I had asked to hear the story.

  “You know what happened to Dad, sweetie.”

  But I don’t know—and that’s the problem. Give me a code and I can crack it; tell me a joke in Swahili and I’ll know when to laugh. I know a million different facts in more than a dozen different languages . . . Just don’t ask me when or where my father died.

  I started to say all this, to ask the questions I need answered, but Mom straightened in the window seat. I felt her pull away. I found myself whispering Zach’s words, “Someone knows.”

  Around us, the school was waking up. I heard laughter through the Hall of History. So I asked the other question that, so far, didn’t have an answer. “Why this year?” I asked. “Why now?”

  “I think you know the answer to that, sweetie.”

  And I guess I probably did because I said, “Josh.”

  “I don’t know if you realize it, Cam, but what happened last semester . . . what happened between you and Josh . . . it scared a lot of people. It made us reexamine a lot of things.”

  “Do you mean security?” I asked. “Because I could really point out a blind spot or two they’ve missed.”

  “No, sweetie. Something bigger. We’ve spent millions training you girls with the best curriculum in the world. And yet you don’t know much about half of the world’s population.” Which was true. “The trustees and I felt it was important that Gallagher Girls learn how to communicate with, and trust the men you’ll have to work with some day.”

  Trust. We stake our lives on it, but it’s a subject that not even the Gallagher Academy can teach. When do you let your guard down? Who do you let in? And I knew at that moment, as I sat beside my mother, bathing in the warm spring light, that those were the questions a good spy never stops asking.

  Mom looked at me—and I could have sworn she was seeing straight through me. “If you hurry, you can catch him.”

  “Catch who?”

  “Zach,” Mom said. “The boys . . . the Blackthorne trustees want them to take finals with their classmates.” My mother must have sensed my confusion, because she said, “They’re leaving.”

  “You’re already packed,” I said when I reached him, because, really, there wasn’t anything else to say—or too much—I’m not sure.

  He smiled. “We’ve all got baggage.”

  A crisp, clean breeze blew through the open doors. Breakfast was waiting. And classes. And finals. But the entire school seemed to be frozen in space and time. The boys carried suitcases and backpacks, while our world got ready to return to normal—whatever that’s supposed to be.

  I pointed to the bruise on his face. “That looks bad.”

  But Zach shook his head. “It isn’t. He—”

  “Hits like a girl?” I teased.

  But Zach didn’t smile; he didn’t laugh. Something else hung in the air between us as he said, “Not the girls I know.”

  I thought about the boy I’d met in D.C.—the kid who’d teased me all semester—and I tried to reconcile those images with the boy who stood before me.

  Zach was still cocky; he was still tough. But on the other hand, he’d offered me candy once when I was hungry, and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe that made him sort of knightlike after all. That maybe it wasn’t his fault his armor was kind of tarnished.

  A semester was gone, so I didn’t let myself think about what might have happened if things had been different. After all, trust is a hard thing for any girl—especially a Gallagher Girl—and this is the life I’ve chosen. These are questions and doubts that will probably follow me for the rest of my life.

  I turned slowly, started to walk away—toward my friends and my future and whatever was supposed to come next.

  “Oh, and Cammie.” At the sound of his voice I spun around, expecting to hear him crack a joke or call me Gallagher Girl. The last thing I expected was to feel his arms sliding around me, to sense the whole world turning upside down as Zach dipped me in the middle of the foyer and pressed his lips to mine.

  Then he smiled that smile I’d come to know. “I always finish what I start.”

  He stepped toward the open door and the warm spring sun that was just waiting to burst into summer, a new season. Another clean slate.

  “So this is good-bye?” I asked.

  “Come on, Gallagher Girl.” Zach turned to me. He winked. “What would be the odds of that?”

  He walked outside and got in the van, and as far as I could tell, he never looked back—

  Because neither did I.

  I didn’t think about the rules we’d broken or the time we’d wasted. I didn’t dwell on the questions that had seemed so important once and were now fading like a long-lost note in a heavy rain.

  There are secrets in my world. They stack side by side like dominoes, and last September they’d started to fall—all because I’d said hello to a boy. Now I was saying good-bye to another one. But now, at least in Zach’s case, I finally knew the truth. Well . . . most of the truth.

  And it had set me free.

  The whole summer lay ahead of us—time to rest, time to wait. And when the future comes—no matter what comes with it—I’ll be smarter. I’ll be stronger. I’ll be ready.

  For your eyes only:

  Here’s a sneak peek of the next book in the Gallagher Girls series!

  “We’re moving.” The man beside me spoke into the microphone in his sleeve, and I knew the words weren’t for me.

  The August air was hot and thick with the smell of sea salt and bus exhaust. The roads were packed for miles, and everywhere I looked I saw shades of red, white, and blue. Everywhere I turned I felt eyes staring, seeing, recording every word, analyzing every glance within a dozen miles.

  Part of me wanted to break free of the big men in the dark suits who flanked me on either side; another part wanted to marvel at the bomb-sniffing dogs who were examining boxes twenty meters away. But most of all, I wanted to lie when another man, with a clipboard and an earpiece, asked for my name.

  After all, I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to whip out false IDs and recite perfectly crafted cover stories in situations just like these, so it was harder than I thought to say, “Cammie. Cammie Morgan.”

  It was weirder than I would have guessed as I waited for him to scan the clipboard and say, “You can go right in.”

  As if I were simply a sixteen-year-old girl.

  As if I couldn’t possibly be a threat. />
  As if I didn’t go to a school for spies.

  Walking through the hotel lobby, I couldn’t help but remember the first instruction my covert operations teacher ever gave me: Notice things. Lights and cameras shone from every angle. A massive net full of red, white, and blue balloons snaked through the cavernous space like a patriotic python. Up in the mezzanine level the Texas delegation was singing about yellow roses, while a woman walked by wearing a big foam hat shaped like a Georgia peach.

  I scanned the masses of old women and young girls. Husbands and wives. College kids and senior citizens. The last time I’d been in a crowd like this was in a different season and a different city, so maybe it was the hotel’s frigid air-conditioning or just a memory of a chilly day in D.C., but for some reason I shivered and fought against a serious case of déjà vu as I scanned the crowd and said the name I hadn’t spoken in weeks. “Zach.”

  Then I blinked and wondered if a part of me would always worry that he might be on my tail.

  “This way,” the man beside me said, but we didn’t stop at the end of the line, which twisted and turned in front of the marble-covered registration desk. We didn’t even slow down as we passed between two rows of elevators. Instead we turned down a narrow hall that seemed half a world away from the bright lights and tall ceiling of the lobby. Plush carpeting gave way to chipped linoleum tiles until finally we were standing before an elevator I’m pretty sure guests were never intended to see.

  “So, you’re a friend of peacocks?” the Secret Service agent asked as we waited for the doors to open.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, because while I’d never been in a really nice hotel, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have exotic birds on the penthouse level.

  “Peacock,” the agent said again as we stepped into the service car that was soon carrying us, nonstop, to the top floor. “See, we use code names,” he explained as if I were . . . a sixteen-year-old girl, “when we talk about the protectee. So you and Peacock, you’re . . . friends?” he asked, and I realized that he wasn’t looking at me like a well-trained, well-armed security professional looks at a potential threat (because I know a thing or two about well-trained and well-armed security professionals!). Nope. He was looking at me like I was. . . a Gallagher Girl.

  Of course, if you’re reading this you must already know that there are two types of people in this world—those who know the truth about what goes on inside the walls of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, and those who don’t. Something in the way the agent was trying to weigh my slightly out-of-style clothes against the snooty reputation of my school told me that he was definitely the second type—that he assumed we were all supposed to be rich; that he assumed we were all spoiled; and that he had no idea what it really meant to be a Gallagher Girl.

  And that was before I heard the screaming.

  As the elevator doors slid open, a high-pitched “I am going to kill someone!” echoed from behind the double doors at the end of the hall.

  And then I was one hundred percent certain that the man beside me didn’t know the truth about my sisterhood, because he didn’t draw his weapon; he didn’t even flinch as a second Secret Service agent opened the double doors and whispered, “Peacock is angry.”

  Instead he walked toward the screaming girl—even though she was a Gallagher Girl.

  Even though her name was Macey McHenry.

  Before that day, I’d never been to Boston. I’d never had a Secret Service escort. And I’d definitely never been a VIP (or the friend/roommate/guest of a VIP) at a national political convention. But walking into what I’m pretty sure was the hotel’s second-nicest suite, I added another first to the list: I’d never seen Macey McHenry as mad as she was then.

  “Really, Macey, I think it’s an adorable little puff piece.” Cynthia McHenry’s cool, mannered tone could not have been more different from her daughter’s. “He’s the only son of a future president. . . . You’re the only daughter of a future vice president. . . . If people want to read about the possibility of a White House wedding eight years from now, I don’t see any reason to stop them. Really, I don’t know why you have to be so dramatic.”

  Right then I made a mental note that if Mrs. McHenry thought Macey was too dramatic then she should probably never be left alone with the better part of our junior class.

  “If that boy—”

  “That boy,” her mother corrected, “is Governor Winters’s son—”

  “Tries to flirt with me—” Macey went on, but Mrs. McHenry talked over her.

  “And if appearing with that boy is going to give us a two-percent bump in Ohio, then you will appear with that boy.”

  “Percentages.” Macey gave an exasperated sigh. “You know I don’t do math.”

  Well, I have personally seen Macey McHenry do linear algebra without a calculator (after mastering our roommate Liz’s system, of course), but the girl in front of me wasn’t the Macey I knew. She wasn’t the girl on the suite’s TV either, smiling and waving and holding hands with her father on the national news. Instead she was the other kind of Gallagher Girl—the kind the agent had been expecting: the snobby kind, the spoiled kind, the kind who had crawled out of her parents’ limousine and into our school the year before with combat boots and a diamond nose stud.

  “This was the scene this morning as Senator James McHenry his family arrived here in Boston to join Governor Winters and officially accept the vice presidential nomination,” the TV anchor was saying. But I doubt Macey or her mother even heard as they stared daggers at each other. (Not that that’s literally possible or anything— I know because our other roommate, Bex, has totally tried.)

  “You will do this, Macey,” her mother said. “You will—”

  But then my escort cleared his throat, and Mrs. McHenry turned. I expected her to gush like she had on the phone when Macey had called to invite me but instead she waved in my direction and said, “There, your little friend is here.”

  Something in the way her mother spoke about me made Macey draw a breath. But I doubt anyone else noticed how my roommate’s fists clenched tighter for just a moment before she spun around and snapped, “We’re going for a walk.”

  “Don’t forget the rehearsal!” her mother called, but Macey was already pulling me through the double doors.

  I caught the agent’s eye one final time as he tried to figure out what I could possibly have in common with the girl who was pulling me along. On the TV, someone said, “Cynthia McHenry is a well-known businesswoman and philanthropist. The couple has one daughter, Macey, a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, in Roseville, Virginia.”

  Our school.

  National television.

  A thousand thoughts could have filled my mind—but just as quickly, Macey slammed the doors behind us, as if blocking out the worries on the other side. She smiled a very mischievous smile, and for the first time that day, I recognized my friend in the girl who stood before me as she asked, “So, how do you like my cover?”