"What?" I asked, needing them to say something—anything.
"Sounds like I could snap his neck with one hand," Bex said, and she was probably right. "But if you go in for that sort of thing…"
"…he's amazing," Liz finished for her.
"It doesn't matter what he is or isn't. He's…" I struggled.
Liz shot upright and finished for me. "…still got to go in the reports!"
"Liz!" I cried, but Bex's hand was on my arm.
"Why don't we do it?" Her most devious expression flashed across her face. "We'll check him out, and if he's an ordinary boy, we forget about it. If something's strange, we'll turn him in."
I knew instantly what the arguments against it should have been: we were too busy; it was against about a million rules; if we got caught, we could be risking our careers forever. But in the silence of the room, we looked at each other, our mutual agreement settling down upon us in the way of people who have known each other too well and too long.
"Okay," I said finally. "We'll do the basics, and no one has to know."
Bex smiled. "Agreed."
We both looked at Liz, who shrugged. "Let's face it—he's either an enemy agent trying to infiltrate the Gallagher Girls through Cammie …"
Liz stopped midsentence, prompting me to say, "Or… ?"
Her entire face lit up. "He's your soul mate."
Chapter Ten
Okay, from this point on, if you are related to me or in a position to add things to my "permanent record" (which I'm assuming at the Gallagher Academy is a little more detailed than what they keep at Roseville High), you might want to stop reading. Seriously. Go ahead and skip the next hundred pages. It won't hurt my feelings at all
In other words, I'm not proud of what comes next, but I'm not exactly ashamed of it either, if that makes any sense. Sometimes I think my whole life has been that kind of contradiction. I mean, all I've heard for the last three years has been Don't hesitate, but be patient. Be logical—trust your instincts. Follow protocol—improvise. Never let your guard down—always look at ease.
So, see, if you give a bunch of teenage girls those kinds of messages, then, yeah, eventually things are going to get interesting.
The rest of the week staggered on, our unspoken mission looming in the back of our minds like a silent but ever-present charge that filled the air, so that every time one of us reached for the doorknob, I half expected to see sparks.
We were up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning, which was definitely not my idea. Thanks to Tina Walters's annual Dirty Dancing extravaganza, where we watched the "nobody puts Baby in a corner" scene a dozen times, I was really needing a good "lie-in," as Bex calls it. But even though Liz might have been at the bottom of our class in P&E, she is the best person I've ever seen at getting me out of bed, which is saying something, considering the woman who raised me.
Macey was asleep in her headphones, so Liz felt free to yell, "We're doing this for you!" as she pulled on my left leg and Bex went in search of breakfast. Liz put her foot against the mattress for leverage as she tugged. "Come on, Cam. GET. UP."
"No!" I said, burrowing deeper into the covers. "Five more minutes."
Then she grabbed my hair, which is totally a low blow, since everyone knows I'm tender-headed. "He's a honeypot."
"He'll still be one in an hour," I pleaded.
Then Liz dropped down beside me. She leaned close. She whispered, "Tell Suzie she's a lucky cat."
I threw the covers aside. "I'm up!"
Ten minutes later Bex was falling into step beside me, handing me a Pop-Tart, as Liz led the way to the basement. The halls were empty; the mansion silent. It was almost like summer, except a chill had settled into the stone walls, and my best friends were beside me. When we reached the vending machines outside Dr. Fibs's office, I took a bite out of my breakfast and felt the sugar kick in.
"Ready, then?" Bex asked, and Liz nodded.
They both looked at me. I took another bite and figured that if we'd come this far (and since I was already out of bed), we might as well go all the way.
I pulled a quarter from my pocket and held it toward the slot, but Liz stopped me.
"Wait." She reached for the coin. "If anyone looks at the logs, my name will send up fewer red flags," she said, even though nothing we were doing was against school rules. (I know—I checked.) In fact, we are encouraged to do as many "special projects" for "independent study" as we'd like, and no one ever said we couldn't make a project out of studying special boys independently. Still, it seemed like a good idea to hand the quarter over to Liz and have her be the one to press her thumbprint onto George Washington's head, drop it into the vending machine, and order item A-19.
Two seconds later, the vending machine popped open, revealing a corridor to the most state-of-the-art forensics laboratory outside the CIA. (If Liz had ordered B-14, a ladder would have dropped down out of the mahogany paneling behind us.)
As we walked into the forensics lab, Liz was already pulling Mr. Smith's pop bottle from her bag and placing it in the center of a table. The broken shards were pieced together, and I could almost forget why I had dropped it—almost.
"We'll just run it through the system and see what we've got," Liz said, sounding very official and far too wide-awake for SEVEN A.M. on a SATURDAY MORNING! Besides, I could have told her what we were going to find— nothing. Nada. That Dr Pepper bottle was going to yield the fingerprints of a Gallagher Academy student (me), a nonexistent-as-far-as-technology-is-concerned-because-every-year-he-gets-new-fingerprints-to-go-with-his-face Gallagher Academy instructor (Smith), and a perfectly innocent bystander whose only crime was being concerned for teenage girls who are forced to pilfer from trash cans (Josh).