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."
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. 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.
Chapter Five
I know the sounds my school makes—the squeaky steps and creaking doors, the hushed voices during finals week, the noisy chaos of the Grand Hall before dinner. The first day of a new year has a sound all its own, as limos turn down the winding lane and car doors slam, suitcases bang against banisters, and girls squeal and hug hello.
But the first semester of my junior year…That semester started with a whisper so quiet I almost didn't hear it.
"Is Macey taking the semester off?" one senior asked another as they stood huddled in the hall outside the library.
"I heard they had to amputate Macey's arm and replace it with a bionic limb that Dr. Fibs made in his lab," an eighth grader said when I passed by the door to their common room.
Gallagher Girls spend their free time scattered throughout the four corners of the world, but that year every girl who returned from summer break brought back the same questions. So I kept moving, roaming the quiet halls like a shadow, right up until the point when I turned the corner and ran into Tina Walters.
"Cammie!" Tina cried, and in the newfound quiet of our school, the word echoed. She threw her arms around me. "You're okay!" she proclaimed, and then she reconsidered. "You are okay, aren't you?"
"Yeah, Tina, I'm—"
"Because I heard you killed one of them with a campaign button?"