Also Known As (25 page)

I looked at Roux.

“Okay, probaby not,” she admitted. “But it’s not like you have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice. I just don’t like what I have to choose from.”

“Hi!” Roux chirped when one of the maids answered the door. “We’re here to see Jesse.”

“Roux?” Jesse poked his head out of the kitchen. “Is that you? What are you … doing here?” He stepped into the hallway. “Maggie?”

I waved, not trusting myself to speak.

“We’re here for the group project,” Roux said, loud enough in case Armand was lurking around somewhere and could hear. “You know, for school.”

“The what?”

“Can we come in?” I said, finally finding my voice.

“Um, yeah, sure, okay.” Jesse looked wary, though, and the three of us stood in the foyer and looked at each other. “Is everything okay? You don’t look good.”

“Will people please stop saying that!” I cried. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, okay? Cut a girl some slack!”

“She’s having a rough day,” Roux whispered, patting my arm.

Jesse glanced back and forth between us. “What’s wrong? Are you breaking up with me? Is it because I took you ice skating?”

“Definitely not trying to break up with you,” I said.
“I’m just here so we can work on the school project for English class.”

“Just go with it,” Roux whispered to him. “Trust me.”

“Oh-
kay
,” he said. “You’re here to work on a project. Got it. This isn’t weird or creepy at all, by the way.”

“Can we go to your bedroom? And work on our
project
?”

Jesse led us upstairs into his room, which seemed a lot more normal than the rest of the house. “There’s a
dog
,” Roux said, coming to a full stop in the doorway. “Dogs don’t like me, and, believe me, it’s mutual.”

I grabbed her arm and dragged her into the room before shutting the door. “Start forging a peace accord,” I told her, “because Max isn’t leaving and neither are you.”

Roux eyed Max warily. “This is my dance space, this is your dance space,” she told him as she planted herself next to Jesse’s dresser. As if the dog even cared.

“Will someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?” Jesse said. He was wearing pajama pants and an old T-shirt and there was a history textbook on his bed next to his laptop.

“I’m really sorry,” I started to say.

“Oh my God, you are breaking up with me.” He sighed, and the sadness in his voice nearly broke my heart. “Why did you bring Roux with you?”

“Excuse me?” Roux was offended.

“I’m not breaking up with you,” I interrupted them. “Here, why don’t you sit down?”

Jesse hesitated. “No one tells you to sit down when it’s good news.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “Okay, stand or sit, do whatever you want.”

Jesse crossed his arms over his chest and right then I would have given everything to be back in Gramercy Park with him. “I have something to tell you,” I began, “but you might not believe it. Roux can tell you it’s true, though.”

“It’s true,” Roux said.

Jesse looked from her to me. “Okay, what is it?”

My mouth was trembling but I wasn’t crying. “You were my assignment,” I whispered.

“I was your what?”

“My assignment. My parents and I are spies and your dad’s going to publish an article about us. My job was—
is
—to stop it.”

Jesse started to laugh. “Are you nuts?” he said. “You scared the shit out of me!” He came forward and wrapped his arms around me, kissing the top of my head. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

As much as it killed me to do it, I stepped away from him, taking his hands and holding him at arm’s length. “It’s true,” I told him. “I crack safes and open locks. That’s what I do. And if I don’t find out where that article is, my family and our whole operation will be exposed.”

The smile started to fade from Jesse’s face. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night, when you were telling me about how your dad was upset about that one article? I think that’s the article I need to stop.”

“Wait, so …” Jesse dropped my hands and backed
away from me. “You’re a spy? I don’t believe it. You go to school, you can’t be a spy! You take calculus!”

“Do the passport thing,” Roux piped up. “That’s really effective.”

I went to my purse and started pulling out the passports again. “See these?” I said. “These are all mine. All twelve of them.” I fanned them out on the bed and Jesse picked one up, looking at it with a mixture of disgust and amazement. “Jess, I need your help,” I told him. “I really do.”

“I told you things!” he suddenly exploded. “Do you even care what you do to people?”

He looked so upset that I thought he was going to throw something, but instead he just sank down on the bed next to Max. “I can’t believe I thought you were for real,” he said.

“I was—I
am
—for real!” I protested. “When we were out together, ice skating and talking and sitting in the park, that was all me. I wasn’t lying about that!”

“But you were still lying!”

“You know what?” Roux said. “I’m just going to go use the restroom.”

We both waited for her to leave before even daring to look at each other. “Maggie, what the hell?”

“I didn’t know how this was gonna end,” I said. I wanted to sit next to him, touch his hand, his hair, something to bring him back to me, but I didn’t dare. “You were just an assignment in the beginning. I didn’t realize that I would like you so much.”

“So this whole thing? This whole time? The party, the date, everything?”

I gave him a rundown of the whole assignment, starting from my first morning in New York and leading up to the morning after our first date. “So you broke into my dad’s safe?” he asked at the end, incredulous.

“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s why I was here.”

He cursed under his breath, then stood up and ran his hands through his hair. “I think you need to leave,” he said. “Like, right now.”

But I stayed sitting. “Jesse, I know you don’t believe me and I get it. I do, I swear. And the last thing I want to do is hurt you. But if I don’t stop this article, then everyone in my family will be in jeopardy and our lives ruined. We think it’s going to name names.” I took a deep breath and shoved my hair behind my ears. “And if the Collective thinks that your dad’s going to run this story and I can’t stop it, they’re just going to send someone else to do the job.”

“But you don’t even know if he’s going to run it!”

“That’s why I need your help.” I stood up and went over to him, trying to hold his hands again, but he jerked them away from me. “You can be as pissed at me as you want. That’s fine, I get it. Hate me. But right now, if you don’t help me out, my family and I are going to be destroyed and possibly put in a lot of danger. Then we’ll never be able to be together, you and me.” I swallowed hard, hoping he would still even want to be with me.

Jesse exhaled and dropped his head into his hands, running his fingers through his hair before they got tangled midway. “So this Collective,” he said. “Do you, like, smuggle arms and drugs?”

“More like the complete opposite. We stop it.”

Jesse glanced up at me.

“We do things that make the world better. I was in Iceland all summer, cracking the safe of a human trafficker.”

He froze. “You were?”

I nodded. “We’re not the bad guys. We stop the bad guys. And if we can’t do that anymore, you don’t want to know what the world will look like.”

Jesse looked down at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Which, in a way, he was. “You told me,” he said after a minute, “that we would always be honest with each other. Do you remember that? Because I think about it every damn day.”

I nodded even as my eyes filled with tears. “I remember. I said that we should be as honest as we could. And I was. And now I’m telling you everything because there’s a lot at stake.

“I’ll leave if you want me to,” I continued. “But if you want to help me, then I need your dad’s laptop.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to read his work e-mails.”

“You’re going to hack into my dad’s computer?” Jesse cried. “You can’t do that, that’s illegal!”

“Well, I think we can all agree that bidets are
weird
,” Roux announced as she strolled back into the room. “What’d I miss? Are we fighting evil together or what?”

Jesse and I glanced at one another before looking away at the same time. “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “That’s Jesse’s decision.”

He looked away and started petting Max. “I think you need to leave,” he said again. “Both of you. Right now.”

No one spoke for a few seconds, then Roux tugged at my arm. “C’mon, Maggie,” she said, as serious and somber as I had ever heard her. “Let’s just go. It’s a lot to take in.”

I nodded even as tears swam in my eyes and I gathered up my coat with fingers so nearly numb that they tingled. “I was as honest as I could be,” I told him.

“Mags, c’mon,” Roux whispered.

Jesse was quiet, and for a minute it felt like my life hung in the balance of his silence. And then he spoke.

“I didn’t know that honesty had a gray area.”

The tears in my eyes spilled over. “Neither did I,” I admitted, and then I let Roux guide me out the front door and take me back to her home.

Chapter 29

The next morning I was in study hall, still puffy-eyed and swollen from the night before. Roux had sat next to me in her foyer as I cried and cried about what a terrible girlfriend and horrible spy I was, and she even brought me a small glass of water. However, when I started to sip the water …

“Roux! This is vodka!”

She looked confused. “You don’t want it?”

I wiped my eyes and handed her back the glass. “Water, please.”

“Fine, fine, suit yourself.”

Study hall was a more muted kind of misery. My exhaustion was tempered by the espresso that Roux had somehow managed to produce that morning, but my sadness was still raging and had nowhere to go. I had ruined everything and now it was rubble, unable to be put back together.

I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even hear the library doors open, so when someone dropped a bag on the table
in front of me, I nearly fell out of my chair. “What the—!” I gasped, clutching at my chest, then looked up into Jesse Oliver’s eyes.

“You better hurry,” he said. “I snuck it out while he was at work. I have to get it back before he comes home.”

I blinked at him. “Are you serious?”

“Can I sit here?”

“Um, yeah, of course. Yes, sit, sit.” I shoved a chair toward him and he sank down.

“So, you’re really …?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“My whole life.”

“You realize how crazy this sounds, right?”

“Yes.” I was so scared he would leave again that I could barely form polysyllabic words.

He chewed on his bottom lip. I’ve noticed he does that when he gets upset. “I’m still mad at you, you know.”

“I know. I’m mad at me, too.”

“I’ll help you, but I’m not sure I can get over this.”

“Can I … can I just say one thing?”

Jesse nodded.

“Two things, actually. First, I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t honest with you, but sometimes, it’s literally a matter of life and death. If I could have told you everything from the very beginning, I would have, I swear to God. But I couldn’t.”

“And the second thing?”

The second thing was a lot harder.

“My feelings for you,” I started, and I could feel the tears rising again. “My feelings for you were not part of the assignment. They were real. One hundred percent, honest-to-God, absolutely real. They have been since that night at the party. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m standing here in front of you, risking every single thing that I have, and I’m telling you that I love you. I’d love you even if you’d never come back and hated me for the rest of your life.”

“What about all those other girls on your passports? What would they say?”

“They would say the same thing because they’re all just me.” I wiped at my eyes before a tear could escape and attract a teacher’s attention. “All those girls are me. Different names, same feelings. The same girl who loves the same boy.”

Jesse was silent for a long time, alternately looking out the window and down at the table. My hands were shaking so I tucked them into my lap.

“So,” he finally said. “How are we going to hack this computer, anyway?”

I looked at him. “Are you saying you’ll help me?”

He nodded, his jaw tight.

I flung myself out of my chair and straight into his arms, nearly knocking both of us backward onto the floor. “Um, excuse me!” I heard the librarian protest, but I was too busy clinging to Jesse, and he was too busy hugging me right back.

“I’m still mad,” he whispered.

“I know,” I said. “It’s all right, I know.”

I just held him tighter.

“—but not mad enough to let you go.” Jesse pulled away after a minute, gesturing toward the now-furious-looking librarian. “She might explode.”

“Yeah, okay.” It was hard to let go of him, though, and I kept my hand fisted in the back of his jacket, not ready to lose him again.

“So what do we do now?” he asked, as soon as everyone’s attention was diverted back to their work and the librarian looked a little less red.

“First things first,” I said. “We find Roux.”

Jesse sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”

“
Love connection!!
” Roux yelled when she saw us walking in the hallway hand in hand. “Oh my God, I just knew you two wouldn’t break up! My psychic friend totally called it.”

I held up Armand Oliver’s laptop. “We gotta go.”

Roux’s eyes widened. “Yes. Let’s go.”

Once we were settled at a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan, we opened the laptop and started it up. “Tell me again why we can’t just do this at my house,” Roux said. “We have WiFi and our tables aren’t so small and sticky.”

“Because,” I said, “I don’t want anyone to trace this back to your house. Whereas there’s probably at least a couple thousand people a day who use the WiFi here.”

“Crafty. I like.”