I started coming up with reasons I could be excused from the lecture, but no one had been exposed to plutonium since the mid-1990s, so I was stuck. With Zach. And my fibbing ability was about to be tested more than it ever had been before.
"What is your name?" I asked, thinking back to that cold, sterile room beneath the mall in D.C. and the way a professional had gone about looking for the truth.
"Zach," he said.
"What's your full name?"
"That's a pretty boring question, Gallagher Girl."
"Zach!"
"Yes, that's correct." He held up my right hand. "See— not lying."
"Where were you during the Code Black?"
Zach broke out into a broad smile. "That's better."
"Answer the—"
"I was with you," he said. "Remember?" Then he leaned on the desk between us. "My turn," he said, grinning like an idiot. "Did you have fun last night?"
"Zach, I really don't think that's what Mr. Solomon is going for with this particular exercise."
"I'll take that as a yes," Zach said. "We should really do it again sometime."
I looked at the ring on my hand, but it didn't do a thing. He was telling the truth. But I still didn't know what it meant.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"The Blackthorne Institute for Boys," he replied in a sing-song tune.
"What do your parents do?" I asked, and for the first time he didn't respond. He didn't smirk. He didn't joke.
He just straightened the notebook on his desk and asked, "What do you think they do?"
I could hear Tina Walters asking Grant, "So what's your idea of a perfect date?" On the far side of the room, Courtney wanted to know what Eva really thought of Courtney's new haircut, but none of it seemed funny or interesting or cool at the moment.
If the Gallagher Academy were to sell truth rings on the black market, every girl in America would line up to have one, but I didn't need the ring on my finger to tell me that Zach wasn't acting or lying or living out some legend then. There was a lot more to the story.
"They were CIA?" I whispered.
"Used to be."
But I didn't ask for details, because I knew they were classified; and I knew they were sad; and, most of all, now I knew Zach Goode was a little bit like me.
Chapter Twenty-three
It should have gone in the reports, of course. I should have told my friends. We'd been searching for weeks for any clue, any sign, that these boys had pasts and histories—that they even existed at all. For one brief moment I had seen the real Zach—no covers, no legends, no lies. But as I walked through the dim, quiet corridors on Sunday night, I carried Zach's secret with me. I couldn't bring myself to set it down. "Hey, kiddo," Mom called when she heard me enter the office. Smoke and steam rose from a small electric skillet behind her desk while the microwave hummed. When she came to hug me, I saw that she was wearing thick wool socks that were far too big for her—Dad's socks. She had on an old fraying sweatshirt that was rolled up at the sleeves—Dad's sweatshirt. And even though I'd seen my mother in everything from ball gowns to business suits, I don't think I'd ever seen her look more beautiful.
"Tonight," Mom announced happily, "is taco night!" I had to wonder if that was the same woman who had sat in this very room while the world went black around us, shrouded in shadows and the red glow of emergency lights. I knew I would never know all my mother's legends.
"How are your classes?" she asked, as if she didn't know.
"Fine."
"How are the girls?" she asked, as if she never saw them.
"They're great. Macey's getting bumped up to the ninth grade sciences classes."
Mom smiled. "I know."
Everything was normal. Everything was good. Even the tacos looked halfway edible, but still I picked at my fingernails and shifted around on the couch. I watched my mother, who had wrapped herself in the last traces of my father, and said, "How did you meet Dad?"
Mom stopped stirring whatever it was she'd taken from the microwave. She forced a smile. "What brought that on?"
I guess it was a pretty good question. After all, normal girls probably know their parents' story, but that's not necessarily true for spy girls—spy girls learn early that most things about their parents are classified.
Still, I couldn't stop. "Was it a mission? Did you meet when you were both working at Langley, or was it before that?" I felt myself running out of breath. "Did the Gallagher Academy do an exchange with Blackthorne then, too?"
Mom cocked her head and studied me as if I might be coming down with something. "What makes you think your father went to the Blackthorne Institute?"
I thought about the picture but lied. "I don't know. I guess I just…assumed. I mean, he did go there—didn't he?"
She looked down at the bowl and kept on stirring. "No, sweetie. He had friends who went there. He guest-lectured on occasion. But your dad grew up in Nebraska—you know that."
I did know that, but somehow in the last few months I'd started questioning everything I'd ever known.
"So how did you meet?" I asked again. "How did you know …" I said, biting back the one question I really wanted to know but couldn't ask: How could you trust him?