Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (23 page)

"Why
were you in Boston, Zach?" The air was crisp and cool around us. Soft
music started on the loudspeaker as the homecoming court made their way to the
center of the field. I felt more than a new season blowing in the breeze, so
maybe that's why I looked at the boy I hadn't really seen in months and said,
"Why are you here, Zach?"

I
stepped closer to him, waiting for him to reach out, to tease, to smile. And
more than anything, I wanted him to say I
am
here for you.

The
space between us shrank, but as I took another step forward, Zach took a step
back. Last spring, he'd teased me, he'd flirted with me—I'd been the one who
was hard to get. But standing under those bright lights, I could see that somehow,
in the last few months, Zach and I had changed places. I didn't like the game
from that side of the field.

"Come
on," he said, taking my hand (but not in a nice, romantic way).
"We're taking Macey home."

"We're not doing
anything."

"Fine,"
he said, starting away.
"I'll
go find Solomon, get his
opinion."

"Zach,"
I started, cutting him off, but he wheeled on me.

"Do
you even know who's out there?" he snapped louder now, and then just as
quickly he stepped closer. "Do you even care?"

"The
Circle of Cavan is after my sisterhood, Zach. Not yours. They're hunting my
friends. They're sending Gallagher Girls down laundry chutes, so don't show up
here and lecture me about what's at stake." He drew a breath as if to
speak, but I knew better than to let him. "If Joseph Cavan's followers
want to settle the score with Gillian Gallagher's great-great-grand- daughter,
then they're going to deal with all of us, and that doesn't necessarily include
you."

The
announcer was talking over the loudspeaker, saying something about the
homecoming queen and her deep love of puppies or something, but I just looked
at Zach, trying to shake the feeling that I hadn't really seen him in months.
If ever. "Why do I feel like I can't trust you anymore?"

I
wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to fight, to protest, to argue—to do
anything but look deeper into my eyes and say, "Because the Gallagher
Academy doesn't admit fools."

Hundreds
of people filled the stands around us. They were teachers and accountants,
stay-at-home moms and men who worked at the toilet paper factory—regular people
doing their best to live regular lives. They couldn't have been farther from
Macey McHenry (both the spy and the girl) if they'd tried.

And yet she was right there
beside them.

Beside us.

And she'd heard everything we'd
said.

"The
family tie to Roseville," Macey softly repeated what the man on the street
had said.

"Macey," I said,
stepping closer.

"Does
this mean …" she started, and I knew there were a dozen ways that sentence
could have ended. If I had just discovered that I was related to Gillian
Gallagher, I would have been ecstatic. Bex would have thought it was the
coolest thing ever. Liz might have decided to conduct some serious DNA
experiments to determine if covertness was hereditary.

But
it didn't matter what
we
would have done. What really
mattered was what Macey
did.

"You
knew about this?" she asked me. Her voice was cracking. Her lip was
shaking. "How long have you known about this?"

I
could have lied, I guess. But I didn't. Maybe because Macey had lived with me
for over a year and would see through it. Maybe because we hadn't covered lying
to a trained operative yet in CoveOps. Or maybe I just thought Macey had the
right to know that of the thousands of Gallagher Girls in the world, she was the
only one who carried Gilly's blood in her veins.

"Yeah, my mom told us
last—"

"Us!"
Macey snapped. "Does the whole school know?"

"No!
Just Bex and Liz and me. Mom explained all that after you got accepted.
She—"

"So
I'm Gillian Gallagher's descendant?" The fire seemed to be fading from
her, so I reached out, still half afraid that when I touched her she would turn
to ash. "So
that's
why they let me in."

"Macey, it's not—"

"True?"
she said, staring at me, but for once in my life I couldn't lie—couldn't hide.
I could only watch as she pushed away without another word, through the
red-clad members of the Pride of Roseville Marching Band, who were exiting the
field.

"Macey!"
I called after her, but then Zach's hand was in mine.

"Cam—" he started.

"Not
now, Zach." I jerked away. Maybe I wanted to find Macey. Or maybe I just
wanted to be anywhere but there.

I
set off through the crowd, pushing through the band and out into open
space—seeing potential threats everywhere I turned.

Twenty
feet to my right and up three rows, there was a guy in a red cap who jumped to
his feet to cheer a split second too late, as if his attention had been
elsewhere. On the track between the cheerleaders and the bleachers, two women
stood together scanning the crowd while wearing

shoes that no small-town
housewife would be caught dead in.

I
wanted to scream into my comms unit and call for backup, but I had no comms.
There was no backup. And Macey was already gone.

T
he road from Roseville had never felt so long. In the hours
that passed, the mansion had never felt so big. And I had never felt so stupid
as when Bex and Liz and I went room to room, floor to floor, searching for
Macey.

Covert
Operations Report 0500 hours

Operatives
Morgan, Baxter, and Sutton conducted a detailed search of the Gallagher
Mansion, following the textbook grid pattern of detection. (They were sure
about this because Operative Sutton brought along the actual textbook.)

"I
know she made it back," I said for what must have been the hundredth time,
but I had to keep saying the words. It didn't matter that neither Bex nor Liz
needed to hear

them.
"I tracked her footprints down the tunnel…She came back that way—I'm sure
of it. She left her wig by the door with the rest of her disguise, so I dropped
mine there too and went looking for her. …" I looked at Bex and Liz, not
even trying to hide my panic as I begged them to believe me. "I know she
made it back!"

I
wanted Liz to cite the incredible odds in our favor that Macey was fine. I
expected Bex to tell me that everything was going to be okay, but instead she
just stared at me and asked, "Scale of one to ten, how mad was she?"

We
were in the library, but there were no girls among the stacks. The clock in my
head was telling me it was almost five in the morning. The fire in the
fireplace was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers—the only light in the
room. I thought about Bex's question, slowly realizing that mad wasn't the
word. Mad could be handled by challenging Bex to a good sparring match in the
P&E barn. Mad goes away with a good night's sleep.

"Not
mad," I said, shaking my head. "It was more like she was—"

"Heartbroken."
Liz's voice was so soft I barely heard it, and even now I'm not sure if she
knew she'd said the word aloud. We'd been looking for Macey for hours, but
something in the way she sank onto the spiraling staircase made me realize
that, somewhere along the way, Liz had gone missing too.

"When
Macey found out, she was heartbroken," Liz said again, and I knew she was
right.

"Yeah," I said, turning
to her. "Heartbroken."

"Oh,
I'll break something when we find her…" Bex's accent was coming back in
waves. "She's gonna get herself snatched right up if she keeps acting this
bloody stupid. Running about the country on her own …"

"You
don't get it, do you?" It was the first time I'd ever heard Liz raise her
voice, the first time I'd seen her skin so deathly white. Even Bex stopped and
stared. "I mean, look at you—look at both of you! You don't know what it's
like. You…
belong,"
Liz said, as if Bex and I were
at the core of an ancient secret and didn't realize it. And I guess, in a way,
we were.

"You."
Liz turned to Bex. "You go all over the world with your mom and dad,
tracking down arms dealers and staking out terrorists during summer break."

Bex
started to protest until she realized that what Liz was saying wasn't an insult
and, furthermore, it was absolutely true.

"And
you," Liz said, spinning on me. "Cam, your mom is the headmistress…Your
aunt's a living legend…" For some reason I felt my cheeks flush red.
"You guys don't have any idea what it's like to be…normal. And then one
day someone tells you that the toughest, most elite, most amazing school in the
world is in Roseville, Virginia"—Liz's voice had taken on a very dreamy
quality, but as she settled her gaze on us, her words turned to steel—"and
they want
you."

I
thought about what she'd said and realized that there'd never been a moment in
my life when I'd doubted whether or not I could become a Gallagher Girl. For
Bex, the toughest barrier was geography.

"Yeah,"
Liz said, reading our expressions. "I'd always been pretty good at
school." It was probably the understatement of the century, but I didn't
dare interrupt. "People always told
me
I was smart—people always said
that
I
was special.
But Macey…" Liz's voice cracked. My eyes were going blurry, and even Bex
looked as if she were about to cry. "What have people always told
her?"

I
didn't want to think about the answer to that question—not then. Not ever. So
the three of us sat surrounded by books and secrets and the light of a dying
fire, finally realizing that we were the only people in Macey's life who knew
not to judge a girl by her cover.

"We've
got to find her," Bex said, starting for the door. "Now."

But
I was already way ahead of her, pushing forward, riding a wave of exhaustion
and terror; instinct driving me forward as I prayed that I was wrong.

I
could hear them following behind me, their footsteps echoing on the old stone
floors while Bex called, "We've looked down there already."

But
I just ran faster through the abandoned halls, past empty classrooms and dark
windows and, finally, down the stairs that led to the long basement corridor—to
the place where, in a way, it had all begun.

There
were no windows there. The corridor was dark, the stone floors were rough, but
still I ran toward the place where my mother had brought us more than a year
ago and told us the truth about Macey.

As
I stopped in front of the tapestry that showed the entire Gallagher Family
tree, I tried to imagine how many times I'd disappeared behind it, but I knew
that our trip that night had been the most important journey that that passageway
had ever witnessed.

I
was breathing heavily, almost afraid of what I'd find, as Bex and Liz appeared
beside me.

"She's
here somewhere," Liz said. "She's got to be. She's…"

But
I wasn't really listening as I pulled the tapestry aside and turned the tiny
sword in the Gallagher Academy crest, which lay embedded in the stone wall.

"She
might be in the ninth-grade common room," Liz was saying in the manner of
someone who has to keep talking or else she'll fall asleep. "They have
those really comfy chairs…"

But
I just watched the wall slide aside to reveal the empty corridor. I listened to
the sounds of silence echo through the shaft. I looked down at the place where
Macey and I had left our disguises earlier that night—at the place where no
wigs, no glasses, no trace of the girls we'd been earlier that night remained.

"She's here," Liz said.
"She can't be…"

"Gone."

"Tell
me." Mr. Solomon's voice was steady as he sat on the coffee table in front
of the leather couch in my mother's office. I didn't look around the room. I
didn't listen as my mother spoke on one phone and my aunt on another. I didn't
watch Liz and Bex as they sat in the window seat, answering questions from
Buckingham and Mr. Smith. It was the quietest chaos I'd ever seen or heard, so
I just sat there, trying to keep my tired mind from drifting too far down that
empty passageway, chasing after Macey.

One
floor below us, girls were gathering for Saturday morning breakfast; up in the
suites, half the junior class was probably sleeping in. The news about Macey
hadn't spread yet, but it would…and I knew it was up to the people in my
mother's office to make sure it didn't spread too far; so maybe that's why Joe
Solomon looked at me as if we were the only two people in the room—the school.
His world wasn't falling apart. He was going to hold it together—I could hold
it together. I just had to…