Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls 3)

Unfortunately, Operatives Morgan and Baxter had no way of knowing that.

"Oh, Joe!" Abby's voice echoed down the hallway. "You are going to get me into so much trouble."

I froze, totally unsure what was more terrifying: the look on Bex's face or the flirty tone of my aunt's laugh or the sound of a key being inserted into the lock on Abby's door.

I didn't have a clue what to do. I mean, as a rule, hiding is never a very good idea. When in doubt, get out, Mr. Solomon always says. But I wasn't exactly sure what he'd say when he is the person who is about to catch you.

"Bed!" I snapped, grabbing Bex by the back of the neck. "Now!"

Crawling underneath Aunt Abby's bed, I couldn't help but think about the thousands of times in the past four and a half years when I'd wondered where she was and what she was doing. (Note to self: be very, very careful what you wish for.)

"Oh, Joe, stop!" my aunt cried as the door creaked open. "What if Rachel found out? She'd never forgive me."

In the darkness under the bed, Bex looked at me, her eyes as wide and bright as the moon, as she mouthed the word, "Solomon!"

I wanted to put my hands in my ears and sing. I wanted to wish myself into another room—another galaxy—but instead I just squeezed my eyes together.

And that's probably why I didn't see the bedskirt fly up and two hands grab my ankles.

My back skidded on the hardwood floors as a great force jerked me from my hiding place.

My aunt stared down and said, "Hey, squirt."

The good news was that Mr. Solomon was nowhere to be found. The bad news was that my aunt had had absolutely no trouble finding us.

"Bex, darling, could you give us a minute?" Bex looked at me. One of the cardinal rules of being a Gallagher Girl was simple: never leave your sister behind. But this was different, and we both knew it.

"See you upstairs," I said as she walked away. The door closed behind her, and Abby turned to me. "You really have grown up."

"Aunt Abby," I hurried with the words, "I'm—" I had intended to say "sorry" but Abby finished for me. "Busted."

She dropped onto the bed and pulled off a black (standard Secret Service-issue) loafer that was covered with mud. I looked around the room. "Uh… where's Mr. Solomon?"

"Heck if I know." Abby shrugged. She must have read my confused expression because then she added, "Oh, Joe," mimicking her earlier tone. She laughed. "Squirt, you should have seen the look on your face."

"Was I that obvious?" I asked.

"Oh, no way," Abby said, and as crazy as it might sound, I felt a little proud. "But the bed thing is kind of a Morgan family tradition."

"Why? Did my mom—"

"Oh, not your mom." Abby stopped me. She cocked an eyebrow. "Your dad."

Your dad, she'd said. She'd just…volunteered it. My father was always with my mother and me, and yet neither of us ever said his name. I realized then that Dad was like a ghost that only Aunt Abby didn't fear. She walked to the dresser and pulled out a bag of M&M's.

"Want one?" she asked, offering me the bag. For a second I thought about the first time I'd met Zach, but the thought quickly vanished.

"Gosh, your dad loved sweets!" she exclaimed as she sank onto the bed. "You get that from him, you know. I remember this one time, we were trailing this double agent through a bazaar in Athens, and there was this lady selling chocolates. And they looked so good. And I could see your dad, and it was all he could do to keep his eye on the subject. But your dad was a pavement artist—you know that, right? So he's following this guy, while I'm up on this second-story balcony getting the whole thing on surveillance and routing it back to Langley. And your dad's a pro, but I could tell that he wanted something sweet so bad he could hardly stand it. The only problem was…"

I watched my aunt carry on. There was a light in her eyes, an easiness to her words that I don't think I'd ever heard before. It was just another funny story, an entertaining tale. I mean, sure it was classified and dangerous and she might have been violating about a dozen CIA bylaws by telling me, but still she talked, and I listened.

"Here's the thing you've got to know," she said as she leaned closer. "Everything's so crowded that if you blinked at the wrong time you could lose someone, so it's a tough tail, you know? And I'm up on this balcony, but housekeeping wants to come in and clean the room. This maid is yelling, and I'm calling back, and I look away for—I don't know— two seconds. Seriously. No way was it longer than that. And when I look back, your dad's got chocolate on one side of his face and he's smiling at me."

Abby threw her head back, and a part of me wanted to laugh alongside her. I tried to imagine my father alive and half a world away. But the other part of me wanted to cry.

"To this day I don't know how he did it. I went back and looked at the tapes, too." She wiped her hands together as if shaking off the dust of some old mystery she'd given up on solving. "Not a sign of it." Then she looked at me anew. "He was that good."

She pushed herself back onto the bed and told me, "You're that good." The way she looked at me said she

wasn't speaking as an aunt, she was speaking as a spy.

But I didn't want to be compared to my father in that place. In that way. I didn't deserve it, so I said, "I'm not."

"Yeah, maybe you aren't," Abby said, and despite my protest, a wave of hurt ran through me. But then she cocked an eyebrow. "But you will be."

A new feeling coursed through me—relief. I felt…like a girl. Like I didn't know all the answers and that was okay because I still had time to learn them.

"So you're not going to tell my mom?"

"Why?" Abby looked at me. "So she can get mad at both of us?"

It seemed like a fair point until I realized…

"But why would she get mad at you?"

"For showing you this." The sound of a heavy notebook dropping onto her wooden dresser caught me off guard. Sheets of paper almost seemed to whistle as she thumbed through the pages.

"The threat book," my aunt told me as I looked at the book. The covers could barely contain it. "This is just this month. This is just Macey—not even counting the rest of the McHenry family," She thumbed through the pages, but I didn't dare to read the words. "We keep copies of every letter, every e-mail, every 911 call and crazy floral delivery card. We keep track of everything, Cam, and analyze it and study it and do what it is we do."

She thumbed through the thick book one final time as she said again, "This is just this month."

Every spy knows that what you don't say is just as important—maybe more so—than what you do. Aunt Abby didn't tell me that what was going on was bigger than four Gallagher Girls in training and a secret room. She didn't tell me that there were a whole lot of psycho people in this world, and a whole lot of them were fascinated by one of my best friends. But those were maybe the only things I was sure of as I stepped toward the door.

Still, there was one thing I had to ask.

"What's this symbol?" I asked, pointing to the satellite photo of the hand, which had fallen to the floor. My aunt casually glanced my way.

"Not sure. That's one of the leads we're tracking down. It's probably nothing, though. They were too good to make a mistake that could lead us to them."

"That's what Bex says."

"Bex is good."

"Yeah," I said, turning to leave. Then I stopped. "I've seen it before…before Boston."

"You remember where?" Abby asked. A new light filled her eyes, and I got the feeling we were playing a game of covert chicken, both of us waiting to see if the other would blink first.

"It'll come to me," I said, which didn't exactly answer her question, but that's okay. I got the impression that it didn't exactly matter.

"If you remember, let me know," she said, and I would have bet the farm (or…well…Grandma and Grandpa's farm) that she already knew. I was halfway to the door when she called, "Cam." She held out a piece of paper. "Since you're here, would you mind giving this to Macey?"

I stood in the hall for a long time, reading the first line over and over, wishing the note were written on Evapopaper, trying to find a way to make the words dissolve.

Itinerary: Saturday, 5:00 a.m. Peacock departs Gallagher Academy for Philadelphia, PA.

Things You Can Do When the Life of One of Your Best Friends May Be at Risk, and She's Got to Help Her Dad Campaign for Vice President Anyway, and You Really, Really Don't Want Her to Go:

1. Sweet-talk Mr. Mosckowitz into moving up the exercise where the ninth graders (the grade Macey was up to now) are locked in a room and can't get out until they break the Epstein Equation.

2. Hack into Secret Service databases, leaving indications that the aforementioned roommate had been making some incredibly dangerous threats against another protectee, Preston Winters (because she totally had).

3. If the roommate were to have an allergic reaction to her mother's experimental night cream, resulting in a terrible zit outbreak that leaves her very unphotogenic and unlikely to test well with undecided women between the ages of 21 and 42 in the process, then maybe she wouldn't be required on the campaign trail after all!

4. Two words: food poisoning (but only as a last resort).

They really were good plans. After all, Bex and I hadn't just aced Mr. Solomon's Logistical Thinking and Planning for Success midterm for nothing. Logistically speaking, we'd been about as covert as we could possibly be without coming right out and hog-tying Macey to her desk chair (a plan that Bex proposed frequently).

But Mr. Mosckowitz wasn't doing the locked room assignment this year, since he'd developed a case of claustrophobia after a top-secret summer assignment that involved a Porta Potti and two Lebanese hairdressers.

And it turns out the Secret Service doesn't take death threats by protectees all that seriously. Especially if they're girls. Even if they're Gallagher Girls.

And we should have known that Macey would never get a pimple. Ever. It goes against the laws of nature or something.

And worst of all, the last part of our master plan didn't work because a person can't possibly get food poisoning if the person no longer eats food.

I didn't know if it was nerves or fear or if she really was reverting back to the Macey she had been when she came to us a year before, but night after night we sat at the juniors' table in the Grand Hall while our roommate pushed the food around on her plate—not eating, not laughing. Just waiting for whatever would come next.

"This is bad," Liz said Friday morning as we left Culture and Assimilation. The halls were filling up. And time was running out.

"We could always—"

"No!" Liz and I both snapped, not really thinking that was the time or place to be reminded of Bex's "no one can get out of my slipknots" argument, but it was Macey who made us stop.

"It's okay, guys," Macey said. She turned toward Dr. Fibs's basement lab. "Thanks for trying and everything, but I've got to go." The way she said it, I knew that getting her out of her trip wasn't really up for debate. She shrugged and added, "It's the job."