Spy-in-Training (14 page)

I
have become a person who plays many roles. I am a secret agent (pretty good). I am a student (average). I am a daughter (disappointing). And today, I am a dentist.

It appears that I have unwittingly turned my home into a dentist's waiting room. Everyone's on edge. No one meets anyone else's eyes. Everyone fears the worst. And it's my presence, my dentist-like presence, that is the cause. It's been this way since I got up this morning. Now I am sitting through the longest, quietest breakfast ever. Natalie is last to come into the kitchen. She has her happy morning face on. Then she reads the room. No
one needs her brand of positivity right now. She walks up to me and gives me a big hug.

“You suck,” she whispers, voice cold as ice.

Much of the time I spent not sleeping last night I devoted to thinking about what I would say this morning. What kind of apology or explanation would be sufficient to release me from Disappointment Jail where I currently reside? But from the way Mom and Dad are doing their very best to avoid looking at or talking to me, it doesn't seem as if I'm going to be able to deliver any kind of apology or explanation. Maybe more time needs to elapse before they're ready to let me redeem myself. I know they'll come around. In the meantime, the best thing I can do for them, and for myself, is to go underground and stay out of sight.

I head for my room and, for the first time since last night, start to worry about what people who aren't actually related to me are saying.

I check my phone.

A new Conquest Report group text.

Bridget Wilder: The shoplifting phase. The bed-wetting years. The lizard she killed.

I gasp in shock. I can't believe she'd bring that up. (Yes, okay, it happened. But it was a chameleon. They get stressed out if you handle them a lot. Or forget to
feed them because you can't find them because they're so good at blending into their environment. So it wasn't technically just my fault.)

I'm not freaking out, though. Here's how I see it: my name became mud on Saturday night. There's a whole Sunday to go. By Monday morning, Reindeer Crescent will be whirring with a million fresh shocks and scandals. I'm nothing by comparison.

I drag myself
out of bed Monday morning feeling optimistic. I'm yesterday's mess. Today's a fresh start. I don't see my black-and-gold tracksuit. I grab the pile of clothes on the floor. It doesn't seem to be there but I sort through the pile a few times in case it magically appears. I check my dresser. I check the closet. Not there.

“Mom?”

I hear her voice outside my door. “What?”

“I can't find my tracksuit. My black-and-gold tracksuit.”

“I know. The one you wear every day. The one that's never been washed.”

I groan. Spool. Millions of dollars' worth of nanotechnology. In the washing machine with Dad's socks and Ryan's T-shirts with the mysterious stains that are impossible to remove.

I throw the door open. “You washed it? Why did you wash it? I didn't ask you to wash it.”

Mom is unmoved by my obvious distress. “
It
asked me to wash it. It wanted to feel fresh. It was surprised you didn't want to feel fresh.”

“Stop trying to be funny,” I snap at her. “It's not you.”

Mom's face grows hard. “Don't talk to me like that, Bridget.”

Great. This is the first time we've talked since Saturday night and time has not healed any of the wounds I caused. And keep causing.

Dad ventures out of the bathroom. He sees the expression on Mom's face.

“Remember what you said when we signed the adoption papers?” he asks her.

Mom flinches slightly, like she's angry at Dad for putting her on the spot.

“You said, Bridget's coming home.” He looks at me. “You were part of this family before you even got here. We waited so long for you . . .”

“How you can think we don't want you . . .” Mom can't finish her sentence. Her eyes start to well up. I see Dad caught between trying to console her and trying to talk to me. This is too much. I want to rush into their arms and tell them I'm sorry. I want to tell them
everything.
But it's too big a risk. What if they won't let me be a spy anymore? What if they want me to stay away from Carter Strike? I don't trust myself right now. Even though I know I'm coming across as horrible, selfish, and ungrateful, I hurry back to my room and then head straight for school.

I spend
the long, solo journey to school replaying this morning's events in my head. I know I'm not this awful. Then I hear Joanna's voice behind me. “That's right,” she cackles. “That was just the beginning. I've got a million more Bridget Wilder stories. She's like a malignant growth on the face of Reindeer Crescent.”

I stop and wait for Joanna to catch up. If she wants a confrontation, I'm ready for it. Joanna walks straight past me, still barking malicious rumors about me into her phone. There's probably no one on the other end. It's just her way of letting me know she's still mad at me.

I wait and watch her waddle into the distance.

Splat!

A plastic cup half full of iced coffee hits the sidewalk inches from my feet and soaks my sneakers. I look around and see a white SUV drive past.

C, K & N. Whatever. They're petty and obsessive. The rest of the school will have forgotten by now. To
them, I'm not even old news, I'm no news.

It turns out that I am
not
old news. It turns out my fellow students have long attention spans and even longer memories. The catcalling starts before I even march up the steps to Reindeer Crescent.

“Bed-wetter!”

“Shoplifter!”

“Lizard killer!”

Apparently, people's lives are so boring and empty that they've been waiting all weekend to hurl insults at me. Little do they know, I'm a trained spy. I know how to tune out useless background noise and focus on what matters. Besides, I've been abused by Brendan Chew, a master at the art of getting under my skin. These random nitwits lining the hallway are, by comparison, a pack of clueless chattering monkeys. They won't get to me. I'm too tough for that.

It turns out
that I am
not
too tough. They did get to me. The snickering and whispering and texting and Instagramming and Conquest Reporting followed me into A117 and then through the rest of my morning. By lunch, the rumors had spread so widely and inaccurately that I was being accused of shoplifting lizards and killing them with my own pee. The thought of a whole cafeteria filled
with anti-Bridget sentiment was too much to stomach. So I fled to the library. Which is where I am now. Catching up on my reading. Not hiding.

I'm pretty sure the librarians are talking about me. But maybe that's just my paranoia overwhelming my common sense. I've been trying to get lost in this book I heard was good. It's about a plucky young spy, like myself, and her friendship with a female pilot in World War Two. Every time I turn a page, I realize I have no memory of what I just read and have to go back to the start.

“Miss, uh . . . Miss . . . uh . . .”

Someone's looming over me. I look up. It's that substitute teacher, the chubby, nervous one. I haven't seen him in weeks and I still can't remember his name. Did it start with a B or a D? Whatever. He's giving me this weird look. My hand immediately goes to my mouth. I always think there's stuff stuck between my teeth.

“Is everything all right?”

I stare at him. Is he really talking to me?

“Just, you know, things can be . . . life, school life, can be stressful. If you need someone to talk to, not to judge, just listen, then, you know . . .”

He trails off. My God, this is awkward.

“I'm fine,” I assure him. “Just reading.”

I hold up the book to let him know what I'm doing
and that it is a solitary activity.

“Good. Fine. I'll let you get back to it. Just wanted to check in.”

He gives me this painfully long searching look before finally backing away, and then he walks into one of the librarians, who is just about to put a bunch of books back on the shelves. The books, obviously, fall all over the floor. Mr. B-or-D tries to help the librarian scoop them up. She's even more freaked out by his close proximity than I was.

It's funny but it's not funny. That clown was the only person in my entire life who has been even remotely nice to me today. I cannot take another twenty-four hours of this.

T
he Spool-phone vibrates at five twenty in the a.m. If this had happened a few days ago, I would have either ignored it or berated Spool for being unaware of the basic rules of decent human behavior. But, as I did not sleep for more than thirty consecutive seconds last night, I'm grateful for something to distract me from staring at the ceiling and wondering who I'm going to upset or alienate over the course of the coming day.

“Hey,” I grunt at Spool.

His face does not fill the screen. Instead I see footage taken from school. From the gym corridor in my school.
I see myself high-fiving the massive hand of athletic phenomenon Pru Quarles.

The image freezes, then fades, to be replaced by the nonathletic features of Spool.

“She's on the radar,” he says.

“What?”

“That girl.”

“Pru Quarles?”

“Let me tell you something about being a spy: no one trusts anybody ever. Rumors are circulating among our enemies that
you
are the misdirection and
she
is the secret spy working undercover for Section 23 in Reindeer Crescent.”

I'm stung by this. “Wait, why would they think I'm the misdirection?”

“Look at her,” says Spool. “And look at you.”

“She's the genetic freak,” I say. “I'm the normal one.”

“The point is, she's been noticed by people who do not have her best interests at heart. We have intel an approach is going to be made.”

I sit up in bed, completely alert and completely nervous. “What sort of approach?”

“They're going to try to turn her, make her one of theirs. If that fails, they're going to pump her for information on Section 23.”

“But she doesn't know anything about Section 23. She doesn't know anything about
anything
except running fast and hitting things.” That's actually untrue. Pru Quarles is also an excellent student. Don't you love people who are good at everything? I know I do.

“You need to keep her safe,” says Spool. “Be her best friend, her shadow, her study buddy. Whatever you have to do.”

“Got it.”

I jump out of bed. My hand still aches from my one and only contact with Pru Quarles, but I have a mission to keep her from the evil clutches of the enemy and that is what I'm going to do. Truthfully, I'm also glad for the excuse to not have to endure another awkward breakfast with my family. The part I'm looking forward to less is doing laps around the track with Pru, which even the least sports-aware student at Reindeer Crescent knows she does every morning from six o'clock till the first bell rings.

My superfast sneakers shoot me through the early morning streets of Reindeer Crescent. These little nanomiracles on my feet are how I'm going to make human tornado Pru Quarles my instant best friend. With these sneakers, I'm as fast, if not faster, than her, which makes me a rival running machine. I play out the scenario in my head.

“Hey, you're the girl who broke Big Green,” she'll say.

I won't respond. I'll just nod as I run alongside her and effortlessly keep pace.

She's going to be freaked out. How am I this fast? How does she not know about me? I'll shrug it off. “I don't have your focus,” I'll tell her. “I just like to feel the wind in my hair.”

She'll totally buy something like that and won't feel threatened by me at all. If anything, she'll want to mentor me. “You're a natural,” she'll say. We'll spend more time running together. My casual attitude toward track will loosen her up. Meanwhile, I'll get a little of her ambition and determination. We'll be an odd couple but we'll be best friends.

I've envisaged a whole tears-and-triumph-filled future for me and Pru Quarles by the time I reach Reindeer Crescent's track.
She sprains her ankle just before the Olympics. Everything she's worked for, gone in a second. I step in, even though I've never run competitively, and win gold. “This is for you, Pru,” I tell the world.

There's an orchestra blaring in my head but, now that I'm looking around the track, there's no sign of Pru!
Don't say she's sprained her ankle for real?
Or worse: What if she's been approached already? What if I'm too late?

I hear the faint sound of someone running but there's
no one on the track. I whirl around. I see a figure open a door at the back of the school and disappear inside.

“Pru!” I yell.

My sneakers speed me to the door. It opens into the kitchen behind the cafeteria. I hear faint footsteps. I grab a hardened half bagel and take a bite. Bad decision. I remove the inedible bagel from my mouth, throw it into a white plastic trash can, and run through the cafeteria in search of the footsteps, which are getting fainter. I charge down the gym corridor past the space Big Green used to occupy. I think back fondly to our brief time together. I push open the double doors at the end of the gym corridor. I hear footsteps but I also hear a different kind of echo. Pru's taking the stairs. She's headed for the first floor.

Even with my fast and furious sneakers, I'm still nervous that I might slip on a stair and go down face-first. What if I lost a tooth? Maybe Spool could fit me with a nanotooth? But what would that do? I hear a classroom door slam and my thoughts snap back to the reason I'm here. I hit the top of the stairs, veer right, and follow the trail of locked classroom doors. Then I hit one that isn't locked. The window is open.

Pru?

I push open the door and walk through the empty room. When I get to the window, I see the fire escape ladder.

I hear footsteps from above.

She's climbing the shaky ladder that leads up onto the roof.

I could be eating cereal with my family right about now. But then I think about the averted eyes and long silences my presence would no doubt inspire and I feel a little more comfortable climbing out the window of an empty classroom and following a track star up a rusty ladder that sways and squeaks every time my foot hits a step.

I look up. No sign of Pru, which can only mean one thing for the Young Gazelle.

I'm going all the way up to the roof.

Immediately, I do
not
like the way the steps creak under my feet. I do
not
like how the whole ladder shakes as I make my way to the top. I do
not
like the way the rust has eaten its way through the ladder. If I move too fast or step too hard I feel like the whole thing will crumble to dust.

I climb carefully off the top step of the ancient ladder and land in the gravel that covers the roof of Reindeer
Crescent. I've never been up here. I've heard Ryan tell many,
many
stories about throwing firecrackers and old bicycles off the roof. I've heard Natalie talk about how the choir sometimes practices on the roof because being under the sky brings out a more emotional performance. And now here I am looking for the track star I hope to bamboozle into being my best friend so I can save her from being abducted by an enemy agency. The Wilder siblings, ladies and gentlemen, in all our many colors.

“Pru!” I call out again.

Nothing. Only my voice echoing back at me.

“Bridget?”

That was a man's voice.

I get tense. Where's Pru? Is this an enemy agent? I've only ever faced Doom Patrol and they pretty much fell to pieces when I kicked their hats off.

I hear the sound of footsteps on gravel a few yards away from me.

And Carter Strike walks out from behind a silver heating duct.

Same black leather jacket. Same serious look on his face.

“Agent . . . Carter . . . Dad . . . ,” I babble.

“Where's the girl?”

“Pru? You know about her?” Of course he knows
about her.
She's on the radar.
“I followed her up here but she . . .” I don't want to tell him I lost her.

He nods. “They got her.” I see him make a quick mental calculation. “We've got to move. You don't get airsick, do you?”

Yes.
“No,” I say.

“Good. There's a chopper on the way.”

A chopper, as in helicopter?

“We'll get her back,” he says, giving me a reassuring look.

I should tell him I've got school. I should tell him I need to check with my parents. I don't do any of these things. I'm getting on a chopper to save an abducted athlete from enemy agents with my superspy dad. Good luck with your boring day.

I hear the faint beating of helicopter blades getting louder.

Carter Strike beckons me toward the edge of the roof.

“Bridget, don't!” shouts a voice.

I see the chubby substitute teacher, Mr. B-or-D, coming off the top step of the ladder and hitting the roof. He's pretty fast for a heavyset guy. In fact, he's
really
fast. He comes barreling toward me.

“Get away from him,” he shouts at me.

“It's all right,” I tell him. “He's my father.”

“No, he isn't,” says Mr. B-or-D.

Carter Strike puts himself between me and the chubby substitute.

“He's just some guy from my school,” I tell Strike. “He's not even a real teacher.”

“I know who he is,” says Agent Strike. He presses his palms together and gives the substitute a little bow. “You've no idea what an honor this is.”

“Let her go,” says the sub to my dad. “You don't need her. You've got me.”

This has become very confusing.

“Wait, do you know each other?” I say, looking between the two of them.

“Bridget, walk away now,” says Mr. B-or-D.

“But Pru?” I say.

“There is no Pru,” says the sub.

“There is too a Pru,” I say.

“She's not in any danger,” says the sub. “Spool made it up to get you here.”

“Next thing you'll be telling her there's no tooth fairy,” says Agent Strike.

“Let her go,” says the sub.

“As you wish,” says Agent Strike. He raises his palms and takes a couple of steps away from me.

I'm not sure what's going on here but I don't like the
fact that I don't seem to have any say in it.

“What if I don't want to go?” I say. “I'm not some little schoolgirl.”

Agent Strike smiles at the sub. “Admit it, we do good work.” He puts an arm around my shoulders.

The substitute teacher lets out what sounds like a strangled yell of anger. He moves like lightning. With one hand, he pulls me away from Agent Strike; with the other, he grabs Agent Strike's wrist and twists it in ways hands are not meant to be twisted. The pain drops my dad to his knees.

“Stop it!” I yell. “You're hurting him.”

My dad kicks out a leg and slams it straight into the sub's knee. He hooks a foot around the sub's ankle and topples him to the ground. As he falls, the sub grabs my dad and pulls him down with him. I'm not sure what's happening now but it looks like he spins around as he falls and crosses both legs around my dad's neck.

I am able to register what is happening in front of me but that is all. I am completely frozen to the spot. Even though I see my biological father and my substitute teacher fighting on the roof of my school, I might as well be watching it on TV. What's happening here in no way seems real.

Agent Strike's face gets redder and redder as he tries
to wriggle out of the sub's tight grip. But the chubby guy applies more pressure with his legs and my dad can't break the hold he's in.

“Bridget,” Strike gasps. “Help.”

It takes me a second to realize my father is asking for my help. I don't know what to do. Then I do. I pull out my lip balm, twist the bottom, and shove it in the substitute's face. Smoke billows out. He starts coughing. My dad breaks the grip. He pulls out a syringe and jabs it into the side of the sub's neck. All the fight leaves Mr. B-or-D's body.

As the awkward substitute drifts out of consciousness, he looks up at me and says, “Bridget, I'm your father.”

“What?” I say. Then I feel a sharp pain in the side of my own neck and everything starts to go blurry.