"It's just… I just… I can't look up right now."
I knew the car was stopped, probably at a traffic light— one of only two in the town, so Josh had to be getting close.
"What?" Bex asked in a whisper. "What's going on?" She shifted into spy-mode, sat up, and looked around. "There's nothing out there. Oh, well, you are missing a real hottie at three o'clock."
Liz craned her neck around to look. "Ooh, yeah, he's pretty skinny but worth checking out." Then she shrugged and said, "Oh. Never mind. He's giving us the Gallagher Glare."
I have no idea who came up with that name, but it's what we always call the look that people in town give us whenever they figure out where we go to school. It's the only time I ever hate our cover story—when people look at me as if I must be privileged, as if I must be spoiled. As if I must be like Macey McHenry. I want to tell them that I spent my summer cleaning fish and canning vegetables—but that's just one of a thousand things that the good people of Roseville will never know about me. Still, when people like Josh look at you like you're a cross between Charles Manson and Paris Hilton, it hurts a little—even for a spy.
"Yeah, but he's still a boy," Bex said longingly. "Hey, Cam, come take a peek."
"I am not going to look at some boy!" I snapped. "I don't care how wavy his hair is."
"Who said anything about wavy hair?" Oh, Bex is good.
"I can't believe this!" Liz said, pacing. She hadn't sat down once since we got back to the mansion—she just kept going back and forth—trying to make sense of it all. I couldn't really blame her. Liz's belief system is pretty natural for scientific geniuses. She wants life to be something that can be tested in a lab or referenced in a book. She'd thought she'd known me. I'd thought I'd known myself. Now both of our hypotheses had been thrown out the window, and we hated to start from scratch.
I couldn't let her see how shaken I was, so I did the next best thing: I got angry.
"Exactly what is so unbelievable?" I asked. "That a boy looked at me?" Sure, I'd never be an exotic beauty like Bex or a pixyish waif like Liz, but I had yet to grow boils all over my body. Mirrors don't crack when I walk by them. My Grandfather calls me Angel. Was I that unworthy of being noticed?
"Cam!" Bex ordered. "Of course that's not it."
Liz threw her hands into the air and said, "I can't believe you didn't tell us! I can't believe you didn't tell someone."
Liz's definition of someone didn't mean someone. Liz's someone meant a teacher.
"So what?" I said, trying to brush the whole thing aside.
"So what?" Liz said. "So, he saw you! Cammie, no one sees you when you don't want to be seen." She eased onto the bed beside me. "When we were trailing Smith and I had to keep you in sight, it was almost impossible, and I could hear you through the comms unit. And I knew what you were wearing. And …" She threw her hands into the air. "So what?"
I turned to look at Bex, my eyebrows raised as if to ask Are you freaked out, too?
"You really are amazing, Cam," Bex said in a perfectly serious tone, so I knew it must be true.
"Something isn't right, here," Liz said as I went into the bathroom and started brushing my teeth. (It's hard to say things that will do lasting damage to a lifelong friendship when you're foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.) "Mr. Solomon wants summaries of our mission, so we've got to include him. He could very well be trying to infiltrate the school through Cammie. He could be a honeypot!"
I nearly gagged on my own toothbrush. The technical definition of a honeypot is a female agent using romance to compromise a target. The practical definition is anyone with cle**age. (Rumor has it Gilly kind of inspired the term.) The thought that Josh could be the male equivalent made my stomach flip.
"No!" I cried. "No. No. No. He is not a honeypot."
"How do you know?" Bex asked, playing devil's advocate.
"I just do!" I replied.
But Liz was shrugging, saying, "We've got to include him in the reports, Cam."
But reports lead to reviews. Reviews lead to protocol. Protocol would lead to two weeks of the security department tailing him through town while they track down his birth certificate and find out if his mom drinks or his dad gambles—they've done far more for fewer reasons. After all, the Gallagher Academy hasn't remained a well-kept secret for more than a hundred years by taking chances.
I thought about Josh, how sweet and normal he had seemed. I didn't want strangers looking at him beneath a microscope. I didn't want there to be a file in Langley with his name on it. But mostly, I didn't want to sit in a room and explain why he'd approached me, when the town square had been full of far prettier girls.
I looked down at the floor, shaking off the thought. "No, Liz, I can't do it. That is way too high a price to pay for talking to a girl."
Then Bex crossed her arms and grinned deviously in my direction. "I think there's something more to this story," she said with her usual flair. The rush of blood to my cheeks must have been enough to betray me, because she leaned down and said, "Spill it."
So I told them about the trash can and the dropped Dr Pepper bottle and, finally, Tell Suzie she's a lucky cat, which, even if it hadn't been for the whole genius thing, I still would have been able to remember verbatim, because sentences like that are like peanut butter on a girl's mind. When I finished, Bex was staring at me as if she wondered whether or not I had been replaced by a genetically engineered clone, and Liz had a starry-eyed gaze very similar to the one Snow White wore while those birds fluttered above her head.