4. Where had Aunt Abby worked? (Because I didn't know.)
5. What had Aunt Abby done? (Because I couldn't even guess.)
6. Why would an operative in the prime of her career come out of the field to take over Macey's security detail when there had to be a lot more senior operatives who would have dropped everything to keep one of their own safe? (Because I didn't want to think about it.)
"Come on, Cam," Liz pleaded the next morning, the lack of significant intel finally weighing on her. "She's your aunt. You've got to know something."
I just shrugged. "Liz, she's a deep-cover covert operative—you know how it is."
Liz stared at me blankly, but Bex nodded. After all, her parents were with MI6, so she did know. Better than anyone.
"Do you think she'll be teaching a class?" Liz gripped her extra-credit project for Mr. Mosckowitz as if her life depended on it (because, when you're Liz, your life kinda does). "I tried hacking into Langley, and everything about her was classified. I mean, seriously classi—Ow!" Liz cried.
I'm not sure how she did it, but Elizabeth Sutton, the smartest Gallagher Girl in perhaps the history of Gallagher Girls, had just managed to cut her chin with a paper clip.
Bex laughed. Liz bled (but only a little). My stomach growled, and I felt the clock inside of me ticking again, telling me that it was time, so I grabbed my bag and called, "Come on. We don't want to be late."
I was already in the hall before I noticed someone was missing.
"Macey!" I yelled, pushing open the bathroom door. "We're heading down to—" But I couldn't finish. Because Macey McHenry, the girl with the physical appearance so perfect a supermodel might feel inferior, was changing her clothes in the bathroom. And then I saw why.
A bruise covered her entire side, green tinges bleeding into purple. Her elbow was still swollen to twice its normal size. I didn't have to hear her wince to know how much it hurt, and yet the look on her face said that having me witness her vulnerability was the most painful thing of all. Macey's pride was the one thing that had come away unscathed, and she was going to protect it if it killed her.
"Cam!" Bex yelled from outside. "We're hungry!"
"Go on," I called, my eyes still locked with Macey's in the mirror. "Macey's not letting me go without eyeliner." It must have been a believable cover story, because the door closed. The suite grew quiet, and Macey turned around.
Wordlessly, she held her arm out to me, and I eased her shirtsleeve over her cast. She turned back to the mirror but no longer met my eyes as she said, "Nobody finds out."
Bex would have thought it was cool. Liz would have calculated the exact amount of force it would have taken to do that kind of damage. Bruises like that usually earn you a week's worth of extra credit in P&E. But Macey didn't want to hear those things.
And it was just as well, because I didn't want to say them.
So I helped her into her school sweater wondering:
7. Did I think Macey was okay? (Because I was the only one who seemed to be asking it.)
Sometime in the night our school had reversed itself. The Code Red was over. The Senator and his entourage were gone. Bookshelves and paintings had spun around again, and in the Hall of History, Gilly's sword was gleaming in its protective case.
Everything seemed right. Everything seemed normal. Then I heard a voice I hadn't heard in a very long time say, "Hey, squirt."
My mom calls me kiddo. My friends call me Cam. Zach called me Gallagher Girl. But no nickname in history has ever had the same effect on me as "Squirt." I suddenly had the urge to spin around really, really fast and eat cotton candy until I was sick. But instead I just said, "Hi."
"Someone grew up."
"I'm sixteen," I said, which was about the dumbest thing ever, but I couldn't help it. Even geniuses have the right to be dumb sometimes. I felt Bex and Liz come from the Grand Hall to stand beside me. "Everyone, this is"—I gazed up at her, wondering how she could look almost exactly the same when almost everything in my life was different—"Aunt Abby?" It came out like a question, but it wasn't.
"Don't tell me," my aunt said as she turned to Bex, "you must be a Baxter."
Bex beamed. It didn't matter that the two of them had never met before. My aunt didn't wait on introductions. Which was just as well—Bex never waited on anything. "So how's your dad?"
"He's great," Bex said with a grin.
Abby winked. "Do me a favor and tell him Dubai at Christmas is no fun without him,"
Beside me, I could practically feel Bex's mind spinning out of control, wondering about Dubai in December. But Abby didn't offer details; instead she just turned to Liz.
"Oooh," Abby said as she examined the fresh cut on her chin. "Paper clip?" she asked.
Liz's eyes got even wider. "How did you know that?"
Abby shrugged. "I've seen things."
I thought back to Mr. Solomon's cabin. Whenever he and my mother spoke about the things they'd seen and done, I wanted to hide from the details of their lives. But as Abby spoke, we hung on every word.
"Does Fibs still have that stash of the SkinAgain prototype in the lab?" my aunt asked.
"Isn't that a little"—Liz started—"strong?" (Which might have been a bit of an understatement, since I know for a fact the Gallagher Academy developed SkinAgain after an eighth grader fell into a vat of liquid nitrogen.)