"Thank you, young lady," the older woman said. She squinted at me. "Do I know you?"
But just then, a voice blared in my ear. "Did we rotate?" Liz sounded close to panic. "Did we rotate the eyeball?"
Professor Smith was getting away, heading back in Bex's direction, so I answered, "Yes," but that only made the woman c**k her eyebrow and stare harder.
"I don't remember seeing you before," the old woman said.
"Sure you do, Betty," one of the other women said, patting her friend on the arm. "She's that Jackson girl."
And that's why I'm the chameleon. I am the girl next door (it's just that our doors have fingerprint-reading sensors and are bulletproof and all…).
"Oh! Is your grandmother out of the hospital yet?" the more fragile of the women asked.
Okay, so I didn't know the Jacksons, much less how Granny was feeling, but Grandma Morgan had taught me that Chinese Water Torture is nothing compared to a grandmother who really wants to know something. I saw Professor Smith nearing Bex, but over my comms unit, Bex was laughing, saying, "Yeah, man. Go, Pirates!" as if she lived for Friday night football. Sure, Bex's definition of football might have been soccer, but boys were always boys, and a crowd of jersey-clad testosterone was assembling across the street. I didn't need surveillance photos to know who was at the center of the mob.
The old women were staring at me as if I were a needle they were trying to thread, and I said the only thing I could think of. "Dr. Smith says she needs to go south—that she needs to be toasty." I looked past the mob surrounding me and toward the one surrounding Bex, hoping she'd heard and understood that trouble was heading her way.
My hopes dwindled, though, when I heard her say, "Yeah, I love tight ends."
"Isn't that nice?" the old woman said. "Does she know where she's going?"
I saw Mr. Smith's dark jacket disappear past the pillars of the library's main entrance and then out of sight.
"You know she's such a bookworm," I said, hoping Liz was listening. "She can't wait to be near the library, just around the corner from the library, in fact," I said through gritted teeth, just as static and chaos filled my ears.
I heard Bex mutter, "Oh, no!"
Ahead of me, the football boys were heading in a pack down the street, but Bex wasn't with them. As far as I could see, Bex wasn't anywhere, and neither was Smith.
"Sorry, ladies. Gotta go," I snapped and hurried away. "Bookworm," I said, "do you have them? I have lost visual with The Subject and the eyeball. I repeat. I have lost visual with The Subject and the…"
I reached the library and looked in the direction where I'd last seen Mr. Smith, but all I saw was a long line of yellow streetlights. I weaved back through the crowd, circling the entire square, until I wound up right back where I'd started, in a vacant lot between a shoe store and City Hall, right behind the dunk tank.
I should have been more aware of my surroundings, I know—Spy 101 and all that—but it was too late. We'd been so close … soooo close. I hadn't wanted to admit it to myself, but about the time I polished off that ice-cream cone, I'd honestly started imagining what it would feel like to have Joe Solomon say, "Nice job."
But now they were gone—everyone—Smith, Bex, and Liz. I couldn't turn tail and run back to school—not then. We'd come too close. So I darted toward the funnel-cake stand, the one place we felt certain Smith would have to visit before the night was through, but I didn't pay attention to where I was going or how completely the Deputy Chief of Police filled the little seat above the dunk tank. I heard the crack of a baseball hitting metal, sensed movement out of the corner of my eye, but all the P&E training in the world wasn't enough to help me dodge the tidal wave that crashed over my shoulders.
Yeah, that's right. My first covert operations mission was also my first wet T-shirt contest, and as I stood there shivering, I knew it would probably be my last of both. People were rushing toward me, offering towels, asking if they could give me a ride home.
Yeah, I'm stealthy, I thought, as I thanked them as unmemorably as possible and darted away. Halfway down the sidewalk, I pulled a soggy twenty-dollar bill from my pocket, bought a Go Pirates! sweatshirt, and pulled it on.
In my ear, the comms unit had gone from crackling static to dense nothing, and I realized with a thud that my little silver cross, though state-of-the-art, wasn't the waterproof edition. Bex's band of football jocks strolled by, but not a single eye looked my way. As a girl, I wouldn't have minded a little corner-of-the-eye checking out, but as a spy, I was totally relieved that the whole drowned-chic look didn't undermine my covertness too much. I walked toward the funnel-cake stand, knowing that at any minute I could turn the corner on disaster—and I guess in a way, I did.
Bex and Liz were sitting together on a bench as Mr. Smith paced before them, and boy, was he scary just then. His new face had always seemed strong, but I hadn't appreciated its hard lines until he leaned over Liz and yelled, "Ms. Sutton!"
Liz started shrinking, but Bex crossed her arms and looked totally bored.
"I want to know what you are doing here!" Smith demanded.
"Ms. Baxter"—he turned to Bex—"you are going to tell me why you and Ms. Sutton have left campus. You are going to explain why you've been following me for thirty minutes, and …" I watched his expression change as something dawned on him. "And you are going to tell me where Joe Solomon is right now."