"Cam!" Bex yelled from outside. "We're hungry!"
"Go on," I called, my eyes still locked with Macey's in the mirror. "Macey's not letting me go without eyeliner." It must have been a believable cover story, because the door closed. The suite grew quiet, and Macey turned around.
Wordlessly, she held her arm out to me, and I eased her shirtsleeve over her cast. She turned back to the mirror but no longer met my eyes as she said, "Nobody finds out."
Bex would have thought it was cool. Liz would have calculated the exact amount of force it would have taken to do that kind of damage. Bruises like that usually earn you a week's worth of extra credit in P&E. But Macey didn't want to hear those things.
And it was just as well, because I didn't want to say them.
So I helped her into her school sweater wondering:
7. Did I think Macey was okay? (Because I was the only one who seemed to be asking it.)
Sometime in the night our school had reversed itself. The Code Red was over. The Senator and his entourage were gone. Bookshelves and paintings had spun around again, and in the Hall of History, Gilly's sword was gleaming in its protective case.
Everything seemed right. Everything seemed normal. Then I heard a voice I hadn't heard in a very long time say, "Hey, squirt."
My mom calls me kiddo. My friends call me Cam. Zach called me Gallagher Girl. But no nickname in history has ever had the same effect on me as "Squirt." I suddenly had the urge to spin around really, really fast and eat cotton candy until I was sick. But instead I just said, "Hi."
"Someone grew up."
"I'm sixteen," I said, which was about the dumbest thing ever, but I couldn't help it. Even geniuses have the right to be dumb sometimes. I felt Bex and Liz come from the Grand Hall to stand beside me. "Everyone, this is"—I gazed up at her, wondering how she could look almost exactly the same when almost everything in my life was different—"Aunt Abby?" It came out like a question, but it wasn't.
"Don't tell me," my aunt said as she turned to Bex, "you must be a Baxter."
Bex beamed. It didn't matter that the two of them had never met before. My aunt didn't wait on introductions. Which was just as well—Bex never waited on anything. "So how's your dad?"
"He's great," Bex said with a grin.
Abby winked. "Do me a favor and tell him Dubai at Christmas is no fun without him,"
Beside me, I could practically feel Bex's mind spinning out of control, wondering about Dubai in December. But Abby didn't offer details; instead she just turned to Liz.
"Oooh," Abby said as she examined the fresh cut on her chin. "Paper clip?" she asked.
Liz's eyes got even wider. "How did you know that?"
Abby shrugged. "I've seen things."
I thought back to Mr. Solomon's cabin. Whenever he and my mother spoke about the things they'd seen and done, I wanted to hide from the details of their lives. But as Abby spoke, we hung on every word.
"Does Fibs still have that stash of the SkinAgain prototype in the lab?" my aunt asked.
"Isn't that a little"—Liz started—"strong?" (Which might have been a bit of an understatement, since I know for a fact the Gallagher Academy developed SkinAgain after an eighth grader fell into a vat of liquid nitrogen.)
Abby shrugged. "Not if you mix it with a little aloe. Rub some of that on, and no way that leaves a scar."
"Seriously?" Bex and Liz asked at the exact same time.
Abby leaned into the light. "Does this look like the face of a woman who survived a knife fight in Buenos Aires?"
Every girl in the foyer (by then there were quite a few) craned to look at her flawless, porcelain skin.
"That's not a good idea, Ms. McHenry," my aunt said, startling her admirers. I turned and saw Macey reaching for the front doors, and realized Abby had sensed her without even turning around. And just that quickly her skin stopped being the most amazing thing about her.
"I don't do breakfast," Macey said. (Which was a lie, but I didn't say so.) "I'm going for a walk."
At the sound of the word "breakfast," the girls in the foyer seemed to remember that they'd spent an entire summer without access to our chef's Belgian waffles. They filtered out, one by one, until it was just me, my three best friends in the world, and the woman who had taught me how to use a jump rope to temporarily paralyze a man when I was seven.