Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

"Cam," Macey whispered. She was growing paler. Her left arm had swollen to twice its normal size, but still she managed to point with her right toward a square hole in

the wall—a shaft or chute of some kind.

I didn't know what it was or where it led. And I didn't have time to ask. I just dove, pushing Macey ahead of me.

One of the men lunged forward. I heard a cry of "no" reverberating down the shaft, but it was too late. Gravity had taken over, and I was hurtling toward the unknown, praying that it would be better than the place I had just left.

Free-falling, I felt my head bang against the metal shaft. Something hot and wet oozed into my eyes, and still I felt…grateful…hopeful. Dizzy.

There was a soft thump. The ground beneath me seemed to roll, but at least there was ground.

I turned and squinted through dizziness and pain to see a red drop fall onto white sheets. Macey lay unconscious beside me.

I lay my head back and felt the world begin to spin. In the distance, someone yelled, "United States Secret Service, open up!"

And through a hazy fog, my mind drifted back to the last time the world had gone upside down. A boy was dipping me in the center of my school and kissing me. For a moment, I could almost see his face leaning toward me, as if my life were flashing before my eyes.

And then the whole world faded to black.

Chapter Four

Not all sleep is equal, of that much I am sure. After all, I've experienced many varieties of it firsthand. There's Bex-challenged-me-to-a-round-of-kickboxing sleep, where exhaustion is matched only by the aching of your body. There's Grandma-Morgan-made-a-huge-dinner-and-there's- nowhere-I-have-to-be-for-three-weeks sleep that only comes in places where you feel utterly safe. And then there's the other kind—the worst kind—when your body goes someplace your mind can't follow: the Mom-just-told-me-Dad's- never-coming-home-again sleep. Your body rests, but your heart… it has other things to do, and you wake up the next morning praying, hoping, willing the night before to have been a terrible dream.

I'd never known it was possible to have all three kinds at once. But it is. I know that now. "Don't move," a deep voice said.

I felt the light first, burning through my closed eyes,

forcing me to turn my head away from the glare. As I moved, a rush of white-hot pain seared through me, and a deep voice chuckled.

"I know you're not big on following rules, Ms. Morgan, but when I tell you to stay still, you might want to do as I say.

I blinked and swallowed, but my mouth felt as if it were full of sand, my eyes like burning embers. I tried to sit upright, but a hand eased me back down onto soft pillows. I looked up at the blurry face of my mother—my headmistress—and the best spy I've ever known.

And then somehow I found the strength to say, "That wasn't a test, was it?"

I didn't know where I was, or even the day or the time, but I knew my mother's face, and that was enough to tell me the answer to my question.

"Welcome back," I heard the deep voice say, and I turned to see Joe Solomon standing at the foot of my bed; but for the first time since I'd met him, I wasn't worried about what my hair looked like in his presence.

"Mr.—" I started, my voice rough.

"Here." My mother brought a glass of water to my lips, but I couldn't drink.

"Macey," I cried, sitting up too quickly. My head swam and my throat burned, but nothing could stop me. A thousand questions came to mind, but right then only one really mattered. "Macey! Is she—"

"She's fine," Mom said soothingly.

"Better than you, actually," Mr. Solomon said. "A broken arm isn't quite as scary as…" He trailed off but tapped his temple, and for the first time I felt the bandage that covered my head. I remembered the fall through the shaft, the blood in my eyes, and then, spy training or not, I felt a little woozy and lay back down on the pillow.

"Where am I?" I asked, noticing that instead of the skirt I'd been wearing in Boston, I had on my oldest and softest pair of pajamas. Instead of the soreness of fresh bruises, my body ached as if I hadn't moved in years, so then I knew to modify my question. "When am I?"

"You've been out for a little more than a day," Mr. Solomon said. "We brought you here as soon as we could."

"Here?" I looked around. The log wall beside my bed was rough beneath my fingers. The floors were solid wood. I was in a cabin, I realized, probably belonging to the school or the CIA. "Is this a safe house?"

I didn't have a clue how safe it was until I heard my teacher say, "It had better be. I own it."

Mr. Solomon owned a house. Mr. Solomon owned this house. On any other day I might have absorbed every detail of the place—the patchwork quilt, the tackle box, the smell of fresh pine and old mothballs. I might have marveled that Mr. Solomon lived anywhere, that he had roots.

"I don't use it much," Mr. Solomon said, as if reading my mind. "But it has come in handy"—he seemed to be considering his words—"on occasion."

I didn't stop to think about the "occasions" of Mr. Solomon's life. I knew my imagination could never do them justice, so instead I just sat there trying to summon the courage to say, "Charlie?"

Mom smiled. She smoothed my hair. "He's going to make it, Cam. He's going to be fine."

It should have calmed me, but it didn't. The sun broke through the heavy trees outside, and rays fell across the bed. I sat up a little straighter. "Is Macey here too?"

My teacher nodded. "Outside. It took a little doing to get her away from the Secret Service after everything, but"— he trailed off, glanced at my mother then back to me— "we've done harder."

Sometimes it seems like we Gallagher Girls spend half our time wondering about the things that our teachers have seen and done. But that day I didn't ask for details. That day, I had seen enough to know that maybe I didn't want to hear the stories.

"What happened?" I asked. I didn't look at my mother or my teacher. My fingers traced the pattern of the quilt. I was the one who had been there, and yet all I could do was say, "I mean, was it…"

"A kidnapping attempt?" Mr. Solomon finished for me, and I nodded, trying to act as professional as my teacher sounded. "These things, they happen—or almost happen— more than you'd think." I tried to nod and smile. After all, the true measure of covert operations lies in how much nobody ever knows. But people were going to know about this. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it doesn't get that far, but—"

"They were good," I said, almost shaking with the memory.

Mr. Solomon nodded. "Yeah," he said, as if a part of him couldn't help but be impressed. "They were. Secret Service and FBI are going to have some questions for you. Ms. Morgan, these agents will have Level Six clearance at the most—so you know what you're going to have to tell them?"

I nodded. "My roommate invited me to the convention. We were attacked on the roof. We got away." I felt myself reciting the cover story I'd have to tell; I found myself remembering that I know fourteen different languages and yet my life is ruled by the things I cannot say.

I glanced out the window, saw the trees that surrounded us, a clearing, and in the distance a sparkling lake. Macey stood on the end of a long pier, looking out at the water.

"We got lucky," I added softly, and at that moment my cover story didn't feel like a lie at all.

My mother's cell phone rang and she rushed to take it. I heard her whispering to someone she called Sir. I turned and looked out the window at the girl on the pier, and then I got up slowly and stepped toward an old-fashioned screened door.

"There's nothing wrong up there," Mr. Solomon said. I stopped and turned to see him pointing toward my groggy head. "Trust me, Cammie, everything's gonna be fine." He touched a faded scar on his temple. "I know a little something about these things."

Mr. Solomon was the best teacher I'd ever had, and I didn't want to disappoint him. So I lied and said, "I know."

"Hey," I said as I reached the end of the pier. Macey was still standing there, staring out at the still, quiet lake. Scrapes ran down her left cheek. Her right eye was rimmed with black, and her left arm dangled from a totally unflattering sling. As I walked toward her, I couldn't help but think that if that was what Macey looked like, then I probably never wanted to see a mirror again.

"Welcome back," she said.

"Thanks."

"How's the head?"

"Hurts. How's the arm?" My roommate didn't answer. She didn't comment on my hideous hair or the bruises on our faces that no amount of concealer could hide.

There were too many things to say, so I didn't press her. Instead I shifted and listened to the boards creak beneath my feet and thought about how our school had taught us how to get off that roof, but nothing in our exceptional education had told us what we were supposed to do next.

I wanted to sit in the CoveOps classroom and listen while Mr. Solomon dissected every move, every clue, every punch.

And I wanted to block it from my mind and never think about it again.

I wanted to know who had done this and why and how.

And I wanted to believe that it was over, and those

were the kinds of details that didn't matter now.

I wanted to take the greatest training I had ever received and learn from it, and be better because of it.

And I wanted it to stop being real.

I wanted a thousand different things as we stood there, but most of all, I wanted the girl who had been beside me in Boston to turn and realize that I was beside her now.

"I heard Charlie is going to make it," I said, but Macey didn't smile.

"Have you talked to Preston?" I tried, but her gaze never wavered.

"Macey, do you want to talk about it?" I asked, but her breathing stayed steady, her gaze didn't move.

"Macey," I tried, "please say something. Please say—"

"It's nice," she said as the late-summer breeze blew through the trees. "I like this. I like the water."

"Don't you have a house on Martha's Vineyard?" I asked, wondering how a rickety shack on a quiet lake could ever compare; but Macey kept staring at the stillness and said, "This is better."

"We're going to have to answer questions. We're going to have to be very careful about what we say. We're—"

"They briefed me already," Macey said, her eyes never leaving the horizon. "This feels like a safe house." She finally turned to look at me. "Doesn't it feel safe, Cam?"

"Yeah, Macey," I said softly. "It does."

It was getting late. My internal clock had rebooted, and something in the way the sun dipped behind the tree- covered hills that surrounded us on all sides told me it was nearly eight o'clock.

"It's almost time," Macey said as if she'd read my mind. "They're coming. My parents want me with them—"

"Of course," I blurted.

"—on the campaign trail," Macey finished. I stared at her, forgetting my aching head and sore muscles for a moment. She forced a smile. "We're up ten points in the polls."