And just when I'd thought I'd never see Macey McHenry smile…
Chapter Five
By the third week of school, my backpack was heavier than me (well, maybe not me, but probably Liz), I had a mountain of homework, and the sign above the Grand Hall was announcing that we'd all better dust off our French if we intended to make small talk over lunch. Plus, it was almost a full-time job keeping rumors separated from facts. (No big surprise who the rumors were all about.)
Macey McHenry had gotten kicked out of her last school because she was pregnant with the headmaster's baby. RUMOR. At her first P&E class, Macey kicked a seventh grader so hard she was out cold for an hour. FACT. (And also the reason Macey's now taking P&E with the eighth graders.) Macey told a seventh grader that her glasses make her face look fat, a senior that her hair looks like a wig (which it is, thanks to a very unfortunate plutonium incident), and Professor Buckingham that she really should try control-top panty hose. FACT. FACT. FACT.
As we walked between Madame Dabney's tea room and the elevator to Sublevel One, Tina Walters told me for about the tenth time, "Cammie, you don't even have to steal the file…Just take a little—"
"Tina!" I snapped, then whispered because a crowded hallway full of future spies isn't the best place to have a covert conversation, "I'm not going to steal Macey's permanent record just to see if she really set the gym on fire at her last school."
"Borrow," Tina reminded me. "Borrow the permanent record. Just a peek."
"No!" I said again, just as we turned into the small, dark corridor. I saw Liz standing there, staring into the mirror that concealed the elevator as if she didn't recognize her own reflection. "What's wrong with …" Then I saw the little slip of yellow paper. "What? Is it out of order or—"
And then I read the little slip of yellow paper.
SOPHOMORE C.O. CLASS CANCELED.
MEET OUTSIDE TONIGHT. 7:00,
DON'T WEAR YOUR UNIFORMS!
-SOLOMON
Bex's reflection appeared beside mine, and our eyes locked. I started to rip the note from the mirror, to save it as a piece of Gallagher Academy history, because two things were extraordinary about it. First, I'd never even heard of a class being canceled, much less witnessed it myself. Second, Joe Solomon had just invited fourteen girls to go on what amounted to a moonlight stroll.
Things were about to get interesting.
I've seen Liz freak out about assignments before, but that day at lunch, she was as white as the salt in the shaker as she went over every tiny, perfectly punctuated line of her CoveOps notes—stopping occasionally to cinch her eyes together as if she were trying to read the answers on the top of her head. (Maybe she was. With Liz's head, anything is possible.)
"Liz, est-ce qu-il-y-a une épreuve de CoveOps dont je ne connais pas?" I asked, thinking that if there was a CoveOps test I didn't know about, someone should really bring me into the loop. But Liz thought I was trying to be funny.
"Tu ne la considéras pas sérieuse?" she nearly yelled. "Tu sais ques Ke qui se passe ce soir!"
Of course I was taking it seriously, but Liz wasn't about to believe that, so I abandoned our French assignment and whispered, "No, Liz, I don't know what's going to happen tonight."
"Exactement!" she cried, leaning closer. "Anything in these books could be out there!" she said, as if we were dropping into an actual war zone and not our own backyard. "Or it could be something"—she looked around and then leaned closer—"not in the books!"
I seriously thought she might throw up, especially when Bex leaned over and said, "I bet we're going to bust up a drug cartel that's operating out of a nightclub." (Because she saw that once on an episode of Alias.)
Liz gulped, and her knuckles went white as she gripped a flash card. "It won't be anything like that, Liz," I whispered. But by this time the entire sophomore class was staring.
"Why?" Tina demanded. "What do you know? Did your mother tell you something?"
"No!" I said, wishing I hadn't gotten them started. "I don't know anything."
"So Solomon didn't ask your mother for two helicopters, three stun guns, and a dozen Brazilian passports?"
But before I could respond to Tina's ridiculous question, the main doors opened, and the seventh-grade class came in, doing a lot of bon jouring—"hello" being one of the few phrases they knew—and the sophomore class forgot about me and went back to doing what it had been doing for a week—watching Macey McHenry.
She was the first person to ever combine black fingernail polish with a Peter Pan-collared white blouse (that's not verified or anything—just a guess), and her diamond nose ring looked like a twenty-thousand-dollar zit, but to an outsider, Macey McHenry might have seemed like one of us. She walked through the Grand Hall like she owned the place (as usual), picked up a plain green salad with no dressing (as usual), and walked to our table. Then she plopped down next to Bex and said, "The munchkins annoy," which was totally not usual.
Up to that point, I'd mainly heard Macey say things like "You're in my light," and "If you're gonna have plastic surgery, you might want to try my mother's guy in Palm Springs." (Needless to say, Mr. Smith didn't write down the number.) But there she was, sitting with us, talking with us. Acting like one of us!