Oh. My. Gosh.
"Macey!" I moaned. "Does it matter?"
Bex nodded. "He was pretty hot."
"Guys," I pleaded, "the hotness is really beside the point."
"But exactly what kind of hot was he?" Liz asked as she pulled open her notebook and grabbed a pen. "I mean, would you say he was pretty-boy hot, like Leonardo DiCaprio the early years, or ruggedly-handsome hot, like George Clooney the later years?"
I was about to remind her that neither kind of hot could justify my revealing the location of a clandestine rendezvous, when Bex answered for me. "Rugged. Definitely rugged." Macey nodded her approval.
Down the hall, the rest of the sophomore class was hacking into the Smithsonian surveillance system and running the pictures of every male between the ages of twelve and twenty-two who had been on the Mall that day through the FBI's facial recognition program. At least a dozen girls were in the library scouring the very books we had abandoned days before.
Still, no one had said the name Blackthorne. No one had mentioned the East Wing.
Liz closed her notebook. "Well, now we know what your mom and Mr. Solomon were talking about. And it's over." She smiled. "You never have to see him again."
Then she seemed to consider the naiveté of what she'd just said. "Do you?"
By four a.m. I was seriously starting to resent Joe Solomon and all of his "use your memory" training, because at that point I would have given my entire life savings (which were $947.52) to forget what had happened.
Bex was lying in the light of the window, smiling a devilish smile, probably dreaming of hostile takedowns and elaborate covers. Liz was curled up against the wall, taking up no more room than a doll, and Macey lay on her back sleeping peacefully despite the wheezing sound of air rushing past the great big diamond in her nose. But me? All I could do was stare at the ceiling and pray for sleep, until I finally threw off my covers and brought my bare feet to the cold hardwood floor.
I swear I didn't know where I was going. Seriously. I didn't. I just slipped on a pair of tennis shoes—no socks— and crept toward the door.
Every spy knows that sometimes you just have to go on adrenaline and instinct, so when I found myself wandering the dark empty hallways, I didn't ask why. When I started down the second-floor corridor, I didn't tell myself to turn around.
Moonlight fell through the stained glass windows at the far end of the corridor. I crept toward the tall bookcase at the mouth of the Hall of History and the hidden passageway it conceals. Then I heard the floor creak behind me and saw the beam of a flashlight burn through the hall before shining in my face. I threw my hands over my eyes and started preparing alibis. (I was sleepwalking. … I needed a glass of water. … I'd dreamed that I hadn't turned in my COW homework for Mr. Smith and was going to check…)
"You didn't think we'd let you go without us, did you?" Bex asked.
When Macey finally lowered the flashlight, I could see Liz shivering in her thin nightgown and Bex holding open a small black case; her trusty silver lock picks shimmered in the light.
No one had to say where we were going. We'd started down the path days before and were finally going to see where it ended. While Bex worked on the lock to the East Wing, I didn't look into the Hall of History; I didn't look at my mother's dark office; and most of all, I didn't think about all the promises I was no longer in the mood to keep.
"Got it," Bex said in record time, and then the door swung open.
We stepped into a hallway we used to know. Now it led to a large open room. Deserted classrooms ringed the space, but the desks were gone. A door stood open, and I could see that a bathroom had been modified to stand between two…bedrooms? The scent of sawdust and fresh paint filled the air.
"They look like…" Liz started but trailed off. "Suites?" she said, her genius mind trying to wrap itself around such a simple fact.
There were beds and desks and closets. The rogue-florists theory didn't seem scary anymore. "You know what this means?" Bex asked.
There was only one thing it could mean.
"Boys," I said. "Boys are coming to the Gallagher Academy."
"Yeah." Bex smiled. "And we're going to get a rematch."
Chapter Eleven
The Gallagher Academy is a school for exceptional young women for a reason. Actually, lots of reasons.
For example, by having only girls' bathrooms (not counting the faculty lounges), the mansion is able to devote valuable square footage to things like chemistry labs and TV rooms.
Also, the average teenage girl in a coeducational environment is likely to spend one hundred hours a year getting ready for school, when that time could be used for sleeping or studying or debating the merits of foot vs. vehicular surveillance in an urban setting.
But the biggest reason the Gallagher Academy is a school for girls is that in the late 1800s it was perfectly acceptable for boys to learn math and science and how to hold their own in a duel, while girls like Gillian Gallagher were forced to master the fine art of needlepoint.