Mrs. Smith's Spy School for Girls

by Beth McMullen

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Chin says. “Give me the year in which the Ming Dynasty began and you can go.”

  All eyes are on me. Do I know the answer to this question? Why, yes I do. I spent an afternoon in the Hong Kong Museum of History, and while Jennifer whispered with some guy, I learned a whole lot about China.

  “The year 1368,” I say. “It ended in 1644.”

  Mr. Chin peers down at me. I sense we’re not quite done. “Who was on the English throne in 1644?” he asks.

  “King Charles the First,” I say. “House of Stuart.” I’ve also been to the Museum of London.

  “Very well, Miss Hunter. You may go.”

  I dash out the door before he can change his mind and start grilling me on which dynasty followed the Ming. I think it’s the Qing, but I could be wrong.

  Main Hall is the original Smith School building, constructed in 1890, when the school was founded. It has high ceilings and old lead-paned windows, and my footsteps echo as I speed toward Mrs. Smith’s office.

  I knock softly, still unsure if this is where I’m supposed to be. Maybe the “office” is down in the catacombs? I’m about to retreat when the door swings open. I step inside. The air in here is thin, as if I’ve gone up ten thousand feet just by crossing the threshold. I gulp a few times.

  “Abigail,” Mrs. Smith says with a tight smile. “What excellent timing. Mr. Roberts was just leaving.”

  From one of the plush chairs facing her desk, Mr. Roberts rises, and for a flash I swear his face is scrunched up in fury. But just as quickly, it passes and he gives me a wink.

  “Miss Hunter,” he says. “Feeling better?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. He pats me on the head as he walks by.

  “Remember,” he says, “without sleep we can all go a little insane.”

  “Mr. Roberts!” Mrs. Smith barks.

  He turns on her and grins. “Have a lovely day, Headmaster.” Does he slam the door as he leaves? Did I walk in on a fight? I can’t imagine being mad at Mr. Roberts. He’s kind of like a giant teddy bear that is always offering tea and sensible advice. Before I can decide what’s really going on here, Mrs. Smith points to one of the fluffy chairs. It’s so deep I sink in to the point where my feet don’t touch the ground. I swing them gently.

  “You’ll be flying to San Francisco tomorrow,” Mrs. Smith says without preamble.

  “What?” Maybe Mr. Roberts is right and my lack of sleep has made me crazy, because I think she just said I’m going to California.

  “We have it on good authority that Jennifer arrived at San Francisco International sometime in the last two days.”

  “Why’d she go to California?” I ask.

  “She’s confusing her pursuers,” Mrs. Smith says. “It’s protocol. And no one is more confusing than Jennifer Hunter.” There’s that tone again, angry and annoyed. Toby said they were partners and that they stopped being partners after I was born. Maybe that didn’t go over well with Mrs. Smith.

  “Great,” I say. “Confusion is great.”

  “You’ll follow her out there,” Mrs. Smith says. “We stick to the bait plan. Bronwyn will meet you in San Francisco. She’s one of our affiliates and will be your contact.” Bronwyn is the preppiest name in the universe. I had never even heard it until I came to Smith. Now I know like seven of them.

  “How will I know who Bronwyn is?” I ask.

  Mrs. Smith passes a photograph over the desk. It’s a girl, definitely older, although I’m terrible at guessing ages, with dark hair and eyes. I can’t tell because the photograph isn’t that great. Her face is angled away from the camera, and her long hair creates a shiny veil halfway to her waist. It’s enviable hair.

  “Bronwyn will wear a black jacket with a red flower in the lapel. She’ll meet you at baggage claim. The code word is ‘turtle.’”

  Red flower. Baggage claim. Turtle. Check.

  Mrs. Smith leans back in her chair. “Understand your job here is minimal, Abigail,” she says. “Do what Bronwyn tells you to do. Don’t improvise. Don’t make your own choices. Got it?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “How was your session with Veronica last night?” she asks. This feels like a trick question because I’m sure Veronica already told her I’m a disaster. So I hedge.

  “It was interesting.” I did learn something, after all. I have no hope of becoming a black-belt kung fu ninja master. I’ve realized I don’t like people hitting me. The reason I never thought about this before is because no one has ever hit me before.

  Mrs. Smith appraises me as if I’m a piece of meat she’s considering for dinner. “I imagine it was,” she says finally. “We’re done here. Toby is waiting for you down in the catacombs. He’s got some items you might find useful on your trip.”

  “But what about Mr. Chin?” I blurt. “He probably thinks I drowned in the toilet.”

  “Don’t worry about Mr. Chin,” she says. “I’ll take care of him.”

  This is so not a normal school in any way, shape, or form. I’m just saying.

  Chapter 13

  The Catacombs. Where I Again Prove My Brilliance.

  I WATCH AS MRS. SMITH flips open the rock keypad and the entire back end of the fireplace slides away, revealing the low, dark tunnel. I may never get used to this.

  “I assume you remember the way?” Mrs. Smith asks, stepping aside with the gracious smile of a perfect host. I nod, hunch down, and squish myself inside.

  “Don’t hit your head,” she says as the door closes.

  Without the aid of a flashlight, I hit my head a number of times on the low ceiling. By the time I reach Toby, I’m feeling concussed. This plus all the fainting cannot be good for my health.

  Toby takes one look at my red forehead and says, “You gotta duck in the low spots, Abby.” He sits at the big table in front of the wall-mounted screens, a laptop open before him.

  “Easy for you to say.” I take a seat next to him. “Don’t you find any of this weird?”

  “What?”

  I gesture to our surroundings. “This!” I shout. “Everything!”

  He looks. He shrugs. “No. It’s not weird. If you’re going to do something undercover, you need a place off the beaten path. This works well.”

  I sigh. “That’s not what I mean.”

  Toby pushes his chair away from the table and pops his feet up beside his laptop. He eyeballs me. “So you really didn’t know about your mother? That wasn’t an act?” I refuse to dignify these questions with a response. I practice the haughty look Charlotte has down cold. “That’s so totally insane,” he says. “I mean, you were living with her! How could you not notice?” Clearly, I need to practice my haughty look. But now Toby’s on a roll. “Dude, Jennifer Hunter was hard-core. She was amazing.”

  “Did you just call me ‘dude’?”

  “Huh?” His eyes blaze. He looks as if he might blast out of his seat on sheer enthusiasm any second now.

  “Never mind,” I say. “What does ‘hard-core’ even mean? Listen, I get she’s a spy and doesn’t like this Ghost guy and all, but why do you guys act so weird whenever you talk about her?”

  “Before you were born, Jennifer was the best,” Toby explains. “When she started here, no one knew what she’d become.”

  “Hey!” I jump to my feet. “Back. Up. When you say Jennifer was here, do you mean here, like Smith ‘here’? The spy school for girls ‘here’?”

  He nods. “Yeah. Duh. She’s a member of the founding class, actually.”

  Of course Jennifer is an alumna of the Smith School for Children. I’m an idiot who didn’t see the very obvious right in front of my face.

  Toby hits a few buttons on his keyboard, and suddenly a photograph pops up on the giant screen. “Check this out,” he says. “The Persephone Club.”

&n
bsp; The photo is from a yearbook, a club picture with about ten girls lined up in two rows, all wearing an old version of the same horrible uniform I wear. They look happy, laughing, arms around each other. One of the girls in the front row holds a sign with the club name: Περσεφόνη. It must be Persephone in Greek, but I’m too stunned to ask, because there, right in the middle, wearing a big grin and terrible 1980s hair, is Jennifer Hunter. My mother.

  I sit down hard. My vision narrows, and my scalp tingles. In the photograph, next to my mother is another girl, also with big hair and a happy smile. This is Mrs. Smith, although sometime in the last thirty years she’s morphed from a smiling student to the Ice Queen. Still. Mrs. Smith and Jennifer with their arms around each other on the quad. My head is going to explode. I warn Toby to stand back and maybe cover his electronics with plastic. I take several deep breaths and sit on my hands to stop them from shaking.

  As I stare at the photo, I realize it’s the first one I’ve ever seen of Jennifer as a teenager. And until this very moment it never occurred to me why that might be. Our family photo library begins with my birth and goes forward from there. These last two days have been an exercise in humility. What sort of person isn’t interested in seeing photos of her own mother when she was young?

  “What?” Toby asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, too embarrassed to reveal my thoughts. Standing beside the girls in the photo is a middle-aged man with big, bushy hair. “Who’s the guy?”

  “You’re not going to believe me,” he says.

  “Try me,” I say, glaring at him.

  “Mr. Roberts,” he says.

  “No way.” Sure, Mr. Roberts is nerd cool, but not cool cool like this guy in the photograph, even if you account for the 1980s glasses and alarmingly plaid pants. Our Mr. Roberts is old. He’s bald and wears musty sweaters with elbow patches. He can literally talk about electric current for hours. This does not compute.

  “Yup,” Toby says. “He was the founding director of the program. The story goes that he ran some secret operation with Jennifer and Mrs. Smith and they got the goods on this art thief that half the world was after. With that success, he was able to get money and full control. All the girls were handpicked by him. He was amazing. Mrs. Smith took over when he retired. Now he just teaches.”

  “He had a lot of hair,” I say. “So what did Jennifer do to make her so famous?”

  “All kinds of stuff,” Toby says. This topic obviously thrills him. He quivers with excitement. “If there was a hot spot in the world, she was there. Russia, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, you name it.”

  “Good for her,” I mutter. I think about the time Jennifer took me to Marrakesh. She moved through that noisy labyrinthine medina like she owned the place. I remember how dazzled I was by the colors and smells, the way the people smiled and spoke, and how little my mother seemed to register any of it. This was familiar to her and no big deal. I’m not doing a very good job keeping my hands steady.

  “Jennifer was the Center’s top agent,” Toby says, his foot tapping hysterically on the floor.

  “You talk about her like she was some kind of superhero.” I sniff.

  “She was,” Toby says without irony. “They called her Teflon because she could walk into the worst situation and come out clean. This country would have been completely screwed without Jennifer on the front lines. Of course, she was only half of the team. Lola, I mean Mrs. Smith, was the other. She was on the ground here when Jennifer was out in the field. They had this crazy system of transferring information that could not be compromised.”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea,” he says with a happy grin, “but they teach their tactics as standard operating procedure at the strategy school in Florida. I hope I get a chance to go when I’m done here.”

  There’s a spy college? Do you send your transcript along with a record of how many bad guys you neutralized junior year? “So, what happened?” I ask, because the Jennifer I know and tell everything to, who obviously tells me nothing, is quite definitely not a superhero.

  Toby looks suddenly wistful. “It’s like Mrs. Smith said. A parent can be compromised. Everything changed after you were born.”

  They’re going to blame me for global warming next. I just know it.

  “You know, the first time I ever saw her for real was when she dropped you off.” Toby leans toward me and whispers, “We were told not to ask you this, but what’s she like?”

  “Jennifer?” He nods, eyes bright and expectant. “I don’t know.” I shrug. “She’s regular. She makes really good brownies, and whenever we go out, she makes me play I Spy, which is totally annoying. She’s just a mom, I guess.” Toby’s expression indicates my answer is less than satisfying. “Well, it’s not like she’s constantly going around beating people up or anything. I mean, come on.”

  “No, you’re right,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

  My eyes drift back to the photo on-screen. I remember the stiff, formal handshake between Jennifer and Mrs. Smith. There was no trace from either woman that they knew each other and, from the looks of the photo, were actually once friends.

  “Oh, shoot,” Toby says, glancing at his watch. “We should hurry. I have class.”

  Okay, Toby. Hurry up and give me my spy gear so you don’t miss Math II or whatever.

  On the far wall, Toby pulls down a panel to reveal a rotating set of shelves stocked with gadgets that look ordinary but—and I’m just guessing here—probably aren’t.

  He pulls off an iPhone, a set of headphones, and a backpack. He places all the items gently on the table. He tells me to sit down. I do. He picks up the iPhone and admires it like he might ask it out on a date. “I love this thing,” he says.

  “I see that,” I say.

  “And I put it in an extraspecial pink leopard-skin case because, you know, you’re a girl.”

  I want to say, Listen up, Toby. I never liked Disney princess dresses, and I never played with dolls. I don’t like makeup, and I brush my hair only because dreadlocks are expressly forbidden at Smith. So how do you think I’m going to feel about a pink leopard-skin iPhone?

  “That’s nice,” I say instead.

  “So,” he says, clearly pleased with himself, “this little guy acts exactly like a normal iPhone, but it has some extra features. It’s protected by a voice recognition program, which, when I turn it on, will recognize only you.” He places the phone in front of me. I pick it up and try to turn it on.

  Toby screams. “Put it down! Don’t aim it at anyone! Are you crazy?”

  I drop the thing like a hot potato. “What’s wrong with you?” I shout. “Don’t give it to me if I’m not supposed to pick it up!”

  “You can pick it up,” Toby says, running a hand through his sweaty hair. He looks like a porcupine. On Quinn, porcupine hair looks good. Toby just looks like a mess. He slides the phone back in front of me, but I have a relatively high IQ and the basic capacity to learn, so I don’t touch it. I barely look at it. “It’s just really new,” he explains. “And I’m not sure I’ve gotten all the bugs out yet.”

  “Great,” I say. “Thanks for sharing that with me. I feel so much better.”

  He gently taps the screen and the Center logo appears in bright orange. He taps again and four app icons replace the logo. A gun. A spray bottle. A whistle. And an old-fashioned-looking radio. I get the feeling these aren’t fun games for me to play on my five-hour flight to California. He picks up the phone and walks to the far side of the room. He turns and aims for the wall behind my head.

  “First, the gun app,” he says. “A high-velocity rubber bullet. It can’t kill a person—you can’t have real weapons until you graduate—but it can slow them down. Buy you a few seconds. Which is sometimes all the difference in the field.” He taps the icon, and I hear a ping behind me. High-velocity indeed. I saw nothing fly by, but now th
ere is a small hole in the wall, and on the ground at my feet rests a tiny rubber bullet. Toby smiles.

  “That’s so cool,” he says. “Anyway, the spray bottle produces a stream of really hot water. That can also buy you a few seconds.”

  “Or sanitize my hands before I eat,” I offer. Toby glares at me.

  “The whistle’s totally awesome too,” he says, throwing me the headphones. “Don’t use it unless you’re wearing these. Okay? If you forget, it’ll really suck. So the whistle emits a sound on a frequency that damages the human ear but only of someone nearby. Again, it could buy you some time.”

  All this talk about buying time is making me nervous.

  “The radio’s a direct link to us here,” he says, tapping the icon. “It’s always connected, no matter where you are. You could talk to me from the middle of the earth. You can see me and I can see you unless the connection is crappy. Or the phone is dead. Then it’s just a brick that I guess you could throw at someone’s head if you needed to . . .”

  “. . . to buy some time?”

  He smiles. “Yeah. But try and keep it charged.”

  “Okay. Got it. Can I use it to text, like, Charlotte?”

  “No. It’s just connected to us here.”

  Well, that’s no fun. Toby’s fingers fly over the phone. “Here,” he says, “voice recognition is on. Start with the prompt ‘Toby is cool’ and then issue your command.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No. What?”

  “‘Toby is cool’?”

  “Well, I am, and you’ll realize how cool I am when you use this puppy . . .”

  “. . . to buy time,” I finish. “I get it, I get it. So if I want to play Solitaire, I say that thing about you being cool and then ‘solitaire’?”

  “Yes. Except don’t play Solitaire.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for some reason the whole thing blows up when you play Solitaire.” He shrugs. “It’s a bug.”

  “You don’t mean the kind of thing you can fix by turning the phone off and on again, do you?”