Double Crossed(29)
My skin burned red. Tears filled my eyes. Before I even knew what was happening, my throat was so tight I could barely breathe as Joe Solomon stared at me. Then, as soon as my eyes locked with his, he glanced away.
“The lucky ones come home, even if it is in a box.”
Although he hadn’t mentioned me by name, I felt my classmates watching me. They all know what happened to my dad—that he went on a mission, that he didn’t come home. I’ll probably never know any more than those two simple facts, but that those two facts were all that mattered. People call me The Chameleon here—if you go to spy school, I guess that’s a pretty good nickname. I wonder sometimes what made me that way, what keeps me still and quiet when Liz is jabbering and Bex is, well, Bexing. Am I good at going unnoticed because of my spy genetics or because I’ve always been shy? Or am I just the girl people would rather not see—lest they realize how easily it could happen to them.
Mr. Solomon took another step, and my classmates pulled their gazes away just that quickly—everyone but Bex, that is. She was inching toward the edge of her chair, ready to keep me from tearing out the gorgeous green eyes of our new hot teacher as he said, “Get good, ladies. Or get dead.”
A part of me wanted to run straight to my mother’s office and tell her what he’d said, that he was talking about Dad, implying that it had been his fault—that he wasn’t good enough. But I stayed seated, possibly out of paralyzing anger but more probably because I feared, somewhere inside me, that Mr. Solomon was right and I didn’t want my mother to say so.
Just then, Anna Fetterman pushed through the frosted-glass doors and stood panting in front of the class. “I’m sorry,” she said to Mr. Solomon, still gasping for breath. “The stupid scanners didn’t recognize me, so the elevator locked me in, and I had to listen to a five-minute prerecorded lecture about trying to sneak out of bounds, and…” Her voice trailed off as she studied the teacher and his very unimpressed expression, which I thought was a little hypocritical coming from a man who had been five minutes late himself.
“Don’t bother taking a seat,” Mr. Solomon said as Anna started toward a desk in the back of the room. “Your classmates were just leaving.”
We all looked at our recently synchronized watches, which showed the exact same thing—we had forty-five minutes of class time left. Forty-five valuable and never-wasted minutes. After what seemed like forever, Liz’s hand shot into the air.
“Yes?” Joe Solomon sounded like someone with far better things to do.
“Is there any homework?” she asked, and the class turned instantly from shocked to irritated. (Never ask that question in a room full of girls who are all black belts in karate.)
“Yes,” Solomon said, holding the door in the universal signal for get out. “Notice things.”
As I headed down the slick white hallway to the elevator that had brought me there, I heard my classmates walking in the opposite direction, toward the elevator closest to our rooms. After what had just happened, I was glad to hear their footsteps going the other way. I wasn’t surprised when Bex came to stand beside me.
“You okay?” she asked, because that’s a best friend’s job.
“Yes,” I lied, because that’s what spies do.
We rode the elevator to the narrow first-floor hallway, and as the doors slid open, I was seriously considering going to see my mother (and not just for the M&M’s), when I stepped into the dim corridor and heard a voice cry, “Cameron Morgan!”
Professor Buckingham was rushing down the hall, and I couldn’t imagine what would make the genteel British lady speak in such a way, when, above us, a red light began to whirl, and a screaming buzzer pierced our ears so that we could barely hear the cries of the electronic voice that pulsed with the light, “CODE RED. CODE RED. CODE RED.”
“Cameron Morgan!” Buckingham bellowed again, grabbing Bex and me by our arms. “Your mother needs you. NOW!”