For Max and Katie
Chapter 1
New York City. Eight Months Ago. Where Things Take a Turn for the Weird.
Dear Abigail Hunter,
It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to the Smith School for Children’s class of 2019. We are confident you will contribute many amazing things to our school and community. Here at Smith we take our motto very seriously: Non tamen ad reddet. Not to take, but to give back. We strive each day to make the world a better place for our fellow human beings because this is what matters most.
Attached please find details regarding the start of the school year. Our travel office will be contacting you shortly to arrange transportation for you and your belongings to our beautiful Connecticut campus. We look forward to an exciting and rewarding year!
Sincerely,
Lola Smith
Headmaster, The Smith School for Children
The Smith School for Children? What? There has to be a mistake, because I go to Sweetbriar Montessori with Rowan and Ainsley and Blake and Alec, and we have plans. Next year, in eighth grade, there’s the epic three-day field trip to Washington, DC. And Blake and I trade lunch every day because he likes the kale chips and other inedible green things my mother packs for me. Speaking of my mother, “Mom! Get in here right now!” I yell.
My mother, the smart yet apparently forgetful Jennifer Hunter, appears in my bedroom doorway. She has a towel wrapped around her hair and one covering her torso. Her mouth is full of toothpaste.
“What?” she mumbles through the foam. “Are you on fire?”
I hold up the letter high so she is sure to get a good look at the Smith School crest and coat of arms, bright red and blue. (Also, why does a school for kids have a coat of arms?)
Mom squints. She’s vain, so she avoids wearing her reading glasses unless the situation calls for splinter removal. I clear my throat.
“Does the Smith School for Children ring a bell?” I shout. Mom freezes, a look of shock clouding her face. Toothpaste rolls down her chin. My stomach sinks. This letter is no mistake.
“Hold on,” my mother says. “I gotta spit.” She turns on her heel and leaves. She could have swallowed the toothpaste, but she’s angling for time. She needs a minute to determine the best way to tell me she’s sending me to boarding school and just kind of forgot to mention it.
I sit cross-legged on my bed. In my free hand, I hold a ceramic box I made in pottery this year. It’s glazed purple and orange and fits perfectly in my palm like a grenade. Not that I plan on throwing it or anything.
My mother returns in a white T-shirt, her long, wet hair dripping on the floor, a totally inappropriate smile plastered on her face. She eyes my pottery. The smile falters.
“Don’t you even think about throwing that at me,” she says, taking a seat on the end of my bed. “I’ll duck, it’ll smash on the wall, and what will you get?”
I put down the ceramic box. “Nothing,” I mutter.
“Exactly,” she says. “No upside. Just like when you ditched school with Ainsley to liberate the lemurs at the Central Park Zoo. There were police involved. No upside.”
“The lemurs were not happy,” I mumble. “And you’re dripping all over my bed.”
“I’m sorry you got the letter,” she says, frowning. “But since when do you pick up the mail?”
“I was trying to be helpful,” I say. “Didn’t you say it would be nice if I was more helpful? Besides, it was addressed to me.”
“The Smith School is the most prestigious boarding school in the country,” she says.
“I don’t care,” I say indignantly. “I’m not going.”
“You can wear skirts with little whales on them and polo shirts and things,” she says. “It’ll be a good fit. Lots of smart kids. Accomplished. You know.”
This is a ridiculous answer, even by Mom standards. I mean, how much can any kid accomplish by age twelve? The correct answer is . . . not much.
“Are you mad?” I ask. “I’ve never seen this place! I’ve never even heard of it until right now! I go to Sweetbriar Montessori. I have friends! I have plans!”
“The Smith School is really nice,” my mother offers. I pick up the ceramic box again. She shakes her head ever-so-slightly. I put it down.
“I don’t care if it’s nice,” I whine. “I’m not going.”
“You are.” Mom takes me by the shoulders and looks deep into my eyes. I hate when she does this. It’s mesmerizing, like she’s some kind of snake charmer, and although I’ve been her daughter for my whole life, I’m still powerless against it.
“You’re smart, Abigail,” she says. “But you need focus and discipline, and it’s my responsibility to find the place where that focusing and disciplining can happen. I need you to be safe.”
It’s true I sometimes get into trouble. For example, two months ago I rigged the student council elections and got caught mid-ballot-box-stuffing, but that was out of loyalty to Josh, who really wanted to win and probably wasn’t going to. So is loyalty bad? I think not.
The Sweetbriar principal has called me a chronic user of poor judgment. Usually he’s red in the face when he’s saying this, and my mother is sighing loudly in a chair in front of his desk.
“Boarding school?” I say again. For someone with a sharp tongue, I have a pathetically monosyllabic argument against boarding school. But to my credit, I’m in a state of shock, having just learned not five minutes ago that I will soon be disappeared into the green Connecticut landscape. I shake the letter at my mother.
“I will die in this prison,” I say. “I will shrivel up and disappear just like the Wicked Witch of the West. My creative self will be forever silenced. I cannot possibly go.”
Mom sits back and looks at me, a slight arch to one of her professionally engineered eyebrows.
“Plus, I hate polo shirts,” I add. “When have you ever seen me wear a polo shirt? And what sort of person wears marine life on her skirts? Wicked Witch of the West, Mom. Poof! Gone in a puff of smoke. The end of Abigail Hunter as you know her.”
“Steam,” Mom says.
“What?”
“The Wicked Witch didn’t burn. She steamed.”
Whatever. I hug my knees to my chest, the defensive posture of a hedgehog under attack. Mom looks me up and down.
“Listen,” she says with a sigh. “This is going to be a complicated year. There are places I have to be and things that . . . need doing. I can’t be watching over you every second, pulling you back from the edge, intervening every time you take a wrong step. It just won’t work. Smith will challenge you and keep you focused. Give it a try. Please? For me?”
Mom has the most amazing violet eyes, and right now they tell me I ought to give in. This is the closest she will ever come to begging, and it doesn’t happen very often.
I love my mother. She’s fun and funny and treats me with respect even when I mess up, which is frequently. But she also failed to mention she was sending me to boarding school in September. So I wait to see what else she’s going to put on the table.
Mom stands up. She paces the short length of my narrow bedroom, thinking.
“Okay, how about winter break in Switzerland?” she says. “We can ski or build snowmen or, I don’t know, drink hot chocolate.”
I shake my head. I hate the snow. Besides, Mom drives on icy roads the same way she drives on not-icy roads: fast and terrifying.
“Tahiti?” she offers. “St. Barts? Galapagos? The Costa Rican cloud forest?”
Now she’s talking. “I’ll take Galapagos an
d that art history camp in Rome you said I was too young for.”
She eyes me. My heart races. The elusive victory is close, I can feel it. Mom puts her hands on her hips. A trickle of sweat runs down my back.
“Done,” she says finally. We shake hands. And while I’m ecstatically happy (I won!), I also know I’ve been had. Because just like that, I’m off to the Smith School for Children.
Chapter 2
The Smith School for Children. Now. Where I’m About to Mess Up Big-Time.
SHE IS NOT MRS. SMITH.
I know this because if I stand at one end of Main Hall and shout her name, there is a lengthy pause before she responds, as if she’s thinking about who this Mrs. Smith person actually is before realizing, Oh right, that’s me—I’d better turn around. And if you throw out a Hey, Mrs. Stein! or Mrs. James! or any old random name, she does the same thing. A pause, a slow pirouette, and a smile so icy I can almost see my breath. Plus, if she’s really Mrs. Smith, where is Mr. Smith? Why have we never seen him? Or even heard him mentioned in polite conversation? What did she do with him? All of which raises the question, who is this lady in charge of the Smith School?
Of course, we have theories, me and my best friends Charlotte Cavendish and Izumi Sato. But we lack evidence, which is why at two a.m., rather than sleeping snugly, I’m dangling out the window of my first-floor McKinsey House dorm room on a sheet tied to the leg of my desk. My best friends lean out and watch.
“Are you down yet?” Charlotte whispers. But really it’s more of a yell.
“Be quiet!” I yell back.
“You two are hopeless,” Izumi groans. I’d argue but I’m clinging to a sheet in the middle of the night, still a few too many feet from solid ground for comfort. I ease down slowly until my feet hit the earth. I exhale sharply. My shoulder muscles burn.
“She made it!” More yelling from Charlotte. She’d make a terrible ninja. I give my friends a thumbs-up and they high-five. Now for the fun part.
I experience a thrill as I slip into the Smith School Main Hall through a side door I left wedged open earlier. I can’t believe it actually worked! I’m pretty good at this espionage stuff.
Once inside, I pick up the trail of Mrs. Smith, or whoever she is. She’s headed down Main Hall to her office at the north end of the building. My bare feet are silent on the polished wood floor, and if I stay in the shadows, I’m sure she won’t see me. Besides, my black Batman pajamas render me practically invisible. Better than invisible. I’m unexpected.
Mrs. Smith pulls a key from around her neck and unlocks her massive office suite door. She is never without the key. If you misbehave and wind up standing before her desk, she will hit you with that icy smile, twirling the key in her fingers all the while. Are you in trouble? Does she even know you’re there? After a moment or two, her gaze will fix upon you and you’ll confess to crimes you didn’t even commit.
Mrs. Smith glides inside to the secretary’s area, leaving the door ajar. She then proceeds to the inner sanctum with a heavy wooden door all its own, which, naturally, begins to close behind her. No! Don’t close! No, no, no! I can’t very well dive for the door without giving myself away, so instead I squeeze my eyes shut and will the door to stay open. It does, but just barely.
However, “just barely” works for me. I ease forward into the empty secretary’s chamber and pause for a moment to see if I’m noticed. Nope. I slip by the desk and flatten myself against the dark paneling, just to the left of the inner door.
Through the two-inch gap, I see Mrs. Smith standing in front of her desk, looking at a person seated in one of the two exceptionally deep and fluffy chairs facing her desk. I cannot see who it is, but she wrinkles her nose as if her guest smells bad.
“We’ve talked about you making an appointment,” she says coldly. “This two a.m. business is growing old.”
“Considering the circumstances,” comes a man’s voice, “I’d think you’d be happy to get my advice whatever the time.” The voice is low and menacing, but from this position I can’t see the source.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Smith says in a tone reserved for turning mere mortals to quivering jelly, “but I don’t need your help.”
“Are you sure about that?” Mystery Man replies.
There’s a lot of tension in that room. I need a better view. Who’s in the chair? Who dragged Mrs. Smith out of bed at two a.m.? He doesn’t sound familiar. I want to see his face. I wedge a toe in the just barely open office door and give it a shove. It’s a massive slab, eight inches thick at least, and my slight shove creates enough momentum to swing the door wide so it crashes into the interior wall.
This was definitely not part of my plan.
I leap out of view as Mrs. Smith reels around.
“What was that?” Mystery Man asks. Mrs. Smith strides toward the door. She’s going to slam it shut and my herculean efforts will have been for naught! I will not slip into her office undetected. I will not dive under the big brown leather sofa and quietly listen as she confesses all I need to know. I will not return to McKinsey House a hero. Except that . . .
. . . the phone rings, the big old one on her desk with the curly cord and all the buttons. And she clearly doesn’t want to miss this call because she forgets all about the door and practically throws herself at the phone.
I’m so lucky. I might be the luckiest Batman-pajama-wearing, stealthy ninja girl on the planet! Before I lose my nerve, I get down low and army-crawl into the office. I keep the big brown leather sofa between her and me. I’m as silent as . . . well, I’m really quiet, anyway, and neither Mrs. Smith nor Mystery Man seems any the wiser.
Now all I have to do is listen as Mrs. Smith reveals what happened to Veronica Brooks, a senior with white-blond hair and a mean lacrosse game who seems to have vanished into thin air. My friends and I agree that if anyone knows the truth, it’s Mrs. Smith, and spying on her might help us uncover it. Of course, I volunteered. It didn’t seem so different from that time in Morocco when I snuck out of my room at midnight, through the fancy hotel gardens, and into the bar to free the caged parrots hanging in the corner. (Although on that night my mother caught me. Tonight is going better already!)
Hidden behind the sofa, still flat on my belly, I take a chance and peer around the edge. I can see Mrs. Smith from my position on the floor but only parts of the man. In one hand, he holds a piece of paper with a frayed edge. It’s creased and folded, like someone was practicing origami but couldn’t commit. I can also see his feet, clad in boat shoes and no socks despite the freezing February temperatures. The rest of him is swallowed up by the enormous chair.
But despite my good luck so far, Mrs. Smith does not reveal all. Instead, she murmurs into the phone while Mystery Man grows increasingly impatient. He taps a pencil on the arm of the chair in a frantic staccato until it flies out of his hand and lands mere inches from my face. I hold my breath. If he reaches for it, we will be nose to nose. But Mystery Man hails from the lazy school of picking things up. He reaches out a boat shoe and slides the pencil back toward him. As he does, his pant leg rides up and I get a glimpse of something colorful on his pale white calf: a triangle-shaped bruise maybe? Hard to tell in the low light. Mrs. Smith murmurs for a bit more before replacing the receiver and returning her attention to the man.
“Can we get back to this now?” he asks, waving the paper around. Doesn’t he know who he’s dealing with here? Mrs. Smith doesn’t appreciate emotions like impatience. Actually, she has little tolerance for the display of any emotions. This guy is clearly an idiot. She snatches the paper from his hands.
“I don’t know what it is,” she hisses. “I’ve said that already. Several times.”
“Here we are, on the verge of finally determining the Ghost’s identity, and suddenly, for the first time, you can’t decipher the clue? Is that a coincidence?”
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“Should I be?”
“How dare you,” she says. “I’ve given my life to this job and you know it.”
“You were best friends!” the man shouts. “You’re supposed to know what the clues mean. That’s how this works.”
“That was a long time ago,” Mrs. Smith says quietly. “Things change.”
“You do understand that if this evidence falls into the wrong hands, your career is over?”
Mrs. Smith sighs. “We don’t even know what she found, if anything. You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“The government people believe it,” Mystery Man says. “They’re breathing down my neck. They want results. They want the Ghost.”
I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I try and memorize the exact words anyway so I can report back to the girls later. Mrs. Smith takes a deep breath. She balls her hands into tight fists. I wonder for a second if she plans on punching this guy in the face. That would be a story. I’d be famous just for telling it!
“Listen to me, old friend,” she fumes. “I haven’t worked with Teflon in a decade. We don’t even trade holiday cards. To expect me to be able to get inside her head after all that time and figure out what she’s doing is insane.”
Teflon? A code name? The intrigue deepens. The girls are going to love this.
“So we’re going to lose this opportunity to get the Ghost because you two had a disagreement ten bloody years ago?”
“Enough!” Mrs. Smith shouts, making me flinch. “I run things now, not you. And I don’t like the idea of using the girl on some wild-goose chase. It’s dangerous!”
“Teflon is deep under and no one knows where the evidence is except for her. So unless you can figure out the clue she left you, I don’t see that you have a choice about using the girl. Get a line on Teflon and send her out. I won’t have everything fall apart because of your incompetence.”
Mrs. Smith levels a menacing gaze in his direction. He’s gone too far.
Mrs. Smith's Spy School for Girls Page 1
