Chapter Four
Evie's Notes: Hope you enjoy the new chapter! Let me know your favorite part in the comments!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in bold, only my OCs
"I'll read next" offered Alyssa. She ran up to the staff table to grab the book from the Cove Ops teacher before returning to her spot with the ninth graders.
"Not all sleep is equal, of that much I am sure. After all, I've experienced many varieties of it firsthand. There's Bex-challenged-me-to-a-round-of-kickboxing sleep, where exhaustion is matched only by the aching of your body.
"Hell yeah" cheered Bex, as the girls around her groaned.
There's Grandma-Morgan-made-a-huge-dinner-and-there's-nowhere-I-have-to-be-for-three-weeks sleep that only comes in places where you feel utterly safe.
"I love that sleep" sighed Cammie
And then there's the other kind—the worst kind—when your body goes someplace your mind can't follow: the Mom-just-told-me-Dad's-never-coming-home-again sleep. Your body rests, but your heart… it has other things to do, and you wake up the next morning praying, hoping, willing the night before to have been a terrible dream. I'd never known it was possible to have all three kinds at once. But it is. I know that now.
Headmistress Morgan had a stricken look, she never wanted her daughter to be able to know that sleep. Her heart broke at the pain her young daughter had been exposed to.
"Don't move," a deep voice said. I felt the light first, burning through my closed eyes, forcing me to turn my head away from the glare. As I moved, a rush of white-hot pain seared through me, and a deep voice chuckled. "I know you're not big on following rules, Ms. Morgan, but when I tell you to stay still, you might want to do as I say." I blinked and swallowed, but my mouth felt as if it were full of sand, my eyes like burning embers. I tried to sit upright, but a hand eased me back down onto soft pillows. I looked up at the blurry face of my mother—my headmistress—and the best spy I've ever known. And then somehow I found the strength to say, "That wasn't a test, was it?"
This caused the students to laugh, even after hearing the bad condition Cammie was in.
I didn't know where I was, or even the day or the time, but I knew my mother's face, and that was enough to tell me the answer to my question. "Welcome back," I heard the deep voice say, and I turned to see Joe Solomon standing at the foot of my bed; but for the first time since I'd met him, I wasn't worried about what my hair looked like in his presence.
The girls all laughed but self consciously fixed their hair, Mr. Solomon just looked uncomfortable.
"Mr.—" I started, my voice rough. "Here." My mother brought a glass of water to my lips, but I couldn't drink. "Macey," I cried, sitting up too quickly. My head swam and my throat burned, but nothing could stop me. A thousand questions came to mind, but right then only one really mattered. "Macey! Is she—" "
"Awww… you do care" mocked Macey, but she still squeezed Cammie's hand gratefully.
She's fine," Mom said soothingly. "Better than you, actually," Mr. Solomon said. "A broken arm isn't quite as scary as…" He trailed off but tapped his temple, and for the first time I felt the bandage that covered my head. I remembered the fall through the shaft, the blood in my eyes, and then, spy training or not, I felt a little woozy and lay back down on the pillow.
The girls all winced at the description of her injuries.
"Where am I?" I asked, noticing that instead of the skirt I'd been wearing in Boston, I had on my oldest and softest pair of pajamas. Instead of the soreness of fresh bruises, my body ached as if I hadn't moved in years, so then I knew to modify my question. "When am I?" "You've been out for a little more than a day,"
Everyone who had taken the school's first aid course winced in sympathy, knowing just how hard she would have had to have hit her head to be out that long.
Mr. Solomon said. "We brought you here as soon as we could." "Here?" I looked around. The log wall beside my bed was rough beneath my fingers. The floors were solid wood. I was in a cabin, I realized, probably belonging to the school or the CIA. "Is this a safe house?" I didn't have a clue how safe it was until I heard my teacher say, "It had better be. I own it."
All the girls sat up straighter, excited to hear more about their mysterious teacher's personal life!
Mr. Solomon owned a house. Mr. Solomon owned this house. On any other day I might have absorbed every detail of the place—the patchwork quilt, the tackle box, the smell of fresh pine and old mothballs. I might have marveled that Mr. Solomon lived anywhere, that he had roots. "I don't use it much," Mr. Solomon said, as if reading my mind. "But it has come in handy"—he seemed to be considering his words—" on occasion." I didn't stop to think about the "occasions" of Mr. Solomon's life. I knew my imagination could never do them justice, so instead I just sat there trying to summon the courage to say, "Charlie?" Mom smiled. She smoothed my hair. "He's going to make it, Cam. He's going to be fine." It should have calmed me, but it didn't. The sun broke through the heavy trees outside, and rays fell across the bed. I sat up a little straighter. "Is Macey here too?" My teacher nodded
"Oh yeah… where is she?" asked Casey.
"Outside. It took a little doing to get her away from the Secret Service after everything, but"—he trailed off, glanced at my mother then back to me—" we've done harder."
"Like that one time in Paris" remembered Mom.
Sometimes it seems like we Gallagher Girls spend half our time wondering about the things that our teachers have seen and done. But that day I didn't ask for details. That day, I had seen enough to know that maybe I didn't want to hear the stories. "What happened?" I asked. I didn't look at my mother or my teacher. My fingers traced the pattern of the quilt. I was the one who had been there, and yet all I could do was say, "I mean, was it…" "A kidnapping attempt?" Mr. Solomon finished for me, and I nodded, trying to act as professional as my teacher sounded. "These things, they happen—or almost happen—more than you'd think." I tried to nod and smile. After all, the true measure of covert operations lies in how much nobody ever knows. But people were going to know about this. "
"Unfortunately, yes. Macey will be even more high profile than she is even now" sighed Madame Dabney.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it doesn't get that far, but—" "They were good," I said, almost shaking with the memory. Mr. Solomon nodded. "Yeah," he said, as if a part of him couldn't help but be impressed. "They were. Secret Service and FBI are going to have some questions for you. Ms. Morgan, these agents will have Level Six clearance at the most—so you know what you're going to have to tell them?" I nodded. "My roommate invited me to the convention. We were attacked on the roof. We got away." I felt myself reciting the cover story I'd have to tell; I found myself remembering that I know fourteen different languages and yet my life is ruled by the things I cannot say.
"That's a good way to put it," remarked Lexi.
I glanced out the window, saw the trees that surrounded us, a clearing, and in the distance a sparkling lake. Macey stood on the end of a long pier, looking out at the water. "We got lucky," I added softly, and at that moment my cover story didn't feel like a lie at all
"Oh sweetie" sighed Liz.
My mother's cell phone rang and she rushed to take it. I heard her whispering to someone she called Sir. I turned and looked out the window at the girl on the pier, and then I got up slowly and stepped toward an old-fashioned screened door. "There's nothing wrong up there," Mr. Solomon said. I stopped and turned to see him pointing toward my groggy head. "Trust me, Cammie, everything's gonna be fine." He touched a faded scar on his temple. "I know a little something about these things." Mr. Solomon was the best teacher I'd ever had, and I didn't want to disappoint him. So I lied and said, "I know."
"Know that I am proud of all of you" assured Mr. Solomon seriously.
"Hey," I said as I reached the end of the pier. Macey was still standing there, staring out at the still, quiet lake. Scrapes ran down her left cheek. Her right eye was rimmed with black, and her left arm dangled from a totally unflattering sling. As I walked toward her, I couldn't help but think that if that was what Macey looked like, then I probably never wanted to see a mirror again
The room laughed at the way that Cammie always brought a little levity to the intense situations.
"Welcome back," she said. "Thanks." "How's the head?" "Hurts. How's the arm?" My roommate didn't answer. She didn't comment on my hideous hair or the bruises on our faces that no amount of concealer could hide. There were too many things to say, so I didn't press her. Instead I shifted and listened to the boards creak beneath my feet and thought about how our school had taught us how to get off that roof, but nothing in our exceptional education had told us what we were supposed to do next.
"That's one of the topics covered in the senior year curriculum girls" revealed Madame Dabney. "Maybe we should move it up though…".
I wanted to sit in the CoveOps classroom and listen while Mr. Solomon dissected every move, every clue, every punch. And I wanted to block it from my mind and never think about it again. I wanted to know who had done this and why and how. And I wanted to believe that it was over, and those were the kinds of details that didn't matter now. I wanted to take the greatest training I had ever received and learn from it, and be better because of it. And I wanted it to stop being real. I wanted a thousand different things as we stood there, but most of all, I wanted the girl who had been beside me in Boston to turn and realize that I was beside her now.
"I heard Charlie is going to make it," I said, but Macey didn't smile. "Have you talked to Preston?" I tried, but her gaze never wavered. "Macey, do you want to talk about it?" I asked, but her breathing stayed steady, her gaze didn't move. "Macey," I tried, "please say something. Please say—" "It's nice," she said as the late-summer breeze blew through the trees. "I like this. I like the water." "Don't you have a house on Martha's Vineyard?" I asked, wondering how a rickety shack on a quiet lake could ever compare; but Macey kept staring at the stillness and said, "This is better."
"We're going to have to answer questions. We're going to have to be very careful about what we say. We're—" "They briefed me already," Macey said, her eyes never leaving the horizon. "This feels like a safe house." She finally turned to look at me. "Doesn't it feel safe, Cam?" "Yeah, Macey," I said softly. "It does."
Most of the girls were trying to catch glances of Macey sneakily out of the corner of their eyes. Macey was a spy too though, so she just sent an angry glare back at their pity.
It was getting late. My internal clock had rebooted, and something in the way the sun dipped behind the tree-covered hills that surrounded us on all sides told me it was nearly eight o'clock. "It's almost time," Macey said as if she'd read my mind. "They're coming. My parents want me with them—" "Of course," I blurted. "—on the campaign trail," Macey finished
"No! You can't leave us!" protested Liz.
"I obviously don't want to Lizzie. But they are my parents so I have to do what they say".
I stared at her, forgetting my aching head and sore muscles for a moment. She forced a smile. "We're up ten points in the polls." I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say a thing.
Instead, we stood there until we heard the screen door behind us screech and slam. A minute later a helicopter appeared on the horizon and dipped, its whirling blades sending ripples across the quiet lake before landing somewhere in the forest. The wind grew cooler. Macey wrapped her good arm around herself and shivered in the breeze, but she didn't move from the end of the dock. Her name was probably on every newscast in America. It wasn't hard to imagine that, back in Boston, a room full of interns was buzzing about speeches that had to be rewritten and commercials that had to be recut. The campaign had a new star—a new angle. But all of that felt like another world, so I just stood by my friend and thought for the first time ever that Joe Solomon was wrong about something. I hadn't come away in worse shape than Macey McHenry. Not by a long shot."
Alysa closed the book with a snap that echoed audibly in the heavy silence of the grand hall.
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