Double Crossed(24)

I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared through the window’s wavy glass. The red velvet curtains were drawn around the tiny alcove, and I was enveloped by an odd sense of peace, knowing that in twenty minutes, the halls were going to be crowded; music was going to be blaring; and I was going to go from being an only child to one of a hundred sisters, so I knew to savor the silence while it lasted. Then, as if to prove my point, a loud blast and the smell of burning hair came floating up the main stairs from the second-floor Hall of History, followed by Professor Buckingham’s distinguished voice crying, “Girls! I told you not to touch that!” The smell got worse, and one of the seventh graders was probably still on fire, because Professor Buckingham yelled, “Stand still. Stand still, I say!”

Then Professor Buckingham said some French swear words that the seventh graders probably wouldn’t understand for three semesters, and I remembered how every year during new student orientation one of the newbies will get cocky and try to show off by grabbing the sword Gillian Gallagher used to slay the guy who was going to kill Abraham Lincoln—the first guy, that is. The one you never hear about.

But what the newbies aren’t told on their campus tour is that Gilly’s sword is charged with enough electricity to…well…light your hair on fire.

I just love the start of school.

I think our room used to be an attic, once upon a time. It has these cool dormers and oddly shaped windows and lots of little nooks and crannies, where a girl can sit with her back against the wall and listen to the thundering feet and squeals of hello that are probably pretty standard at boarding schools everywhere on the first day after summer break (but they probably stop being standard when they take place in Portuguese and Farsi). Out in the hall, Kim Lee was talking about her summer in Singapore; and Tina Walters was declaring that “Cairo was super cool. Johannesburg—not so much,” which is exactly what my mom had said when I’d complained about how Tina’s parents were taking her to Africa over the summer whereas I was going to have to visit my dad’s parents on their ranch in Nebraska—an experience I’m fairly sure will never help me break out of an enemy interrogation facility or disarm a dirty bomb.

“Hey, where’s Cammie?” Tina asked, but I wasn’t about to leave my room until I could come up with a fish story to match the international exploits of my classmates, seventy percent of whom are the daughters of current or former government operatives—aka spies. Even Courtney Bauer had spent a week in Paris, and her parents are both optometrists, so you can see why I wasn’t especially eager to admit that I’d spent three months plopped down right in the middle of North America, cleaning fish.

I’d finally decided to tell them about the time I was experimenting with average household items that can be used as weapons and accidentally decapitated a scarecrow (who knew knitting needles could do that kind of damage?), when I heard the distinctive thud of luggage crashing into a wall and a soft, Southern, “Oh, Cammie…come out, come out, wherever you are.”

I peered around the corner and saw Liz posing in the doorway, trying to look like Miss Alabama, but bearing a greater resemblance to a toothpick in capri pants and flip-flops. A very red toothpick.

She smiled and said, “Did you miss me?”

Well, I did miss her, but I was totally afraid to hug her.

“What happened to you?”

Liz rolled her eyes and just said, “Don’t fall asleep by a pool in Alabama,” as if she should have known better—which she totally should have. I mean, we’re all technically geniuses and everything, but at age nine, Liz had the highest score on the third-grade achievement tests ever. The government keeps track of that kind of thing, so the summer before seventh grade, her parents got a visit from some big guys in dark suits and three months later, Liz was a Gallagher Girl—just not the kill-a-man-with-her-bare-hands variety. If I’m ever on a mission, I want Bex beside me and Liz far, far away, with about a dozen computers and a chessboard—a fact I couldn’t help but remember when Liz tried to fling her suitcase onto the bed, but missed and ended up knocking over a bookcase, demolishing my stereo and flattening a perfectly-scaled replica of DNA that I’d made out of papier-mâché in eighth grade.

“Oopsy daisy,” Liz said, throwing her hand to her mouth.

Sure, she knows cuss words in fourteen different languages, but when faced with a minor catastrophe, Liz says oopsy daisy. At that point I didn’t care how sunburned she was—I had to hug my friend.

At six thirty exactly, we were in our uniforms, sliding our hands over the smooth mahogany banisters, and descending down the staircases that spiral gracefully to the foyer floor. Everyone was laughing (turns out my knitting needle story was a big hit), but Liz and I kept looking toward the door in the center of the atrium below.