And then the strangest thing happened: my roommates laughed. I looked in the mirror and realized I was laughing too.
Macey turned to Liz. “Dr. Fibs has hydrogen peroxide in the lab, right?”
Liz sounded almost offended. “Of course he does.”
“Get it,” Macey said, turning back to me. “We have work to do.”
It wasn’t like we talked a lot. But then again, it’s not like there was all that much left to say. We’d seen things. We’d done things. And I wasn’t the only one who was still waiting for me to come home from my summer vacation.
I leaned over the sink and let Bex wash and bleach my hair. Then Macey took the scissors and trimmed away my dead, uneven ends. I sat, letting my best friends work around me, watching as the person I had been last summer washed away down the drain.
Chapter Sixteen
That night I couldn’t sleep.
It might have been the adrenaline or the new scratches on my body. I told myself it had something to do with the smell of hydrogen peroxide which lingered in the air, but if that was it, then I was the only one it bothered. My friends were around me, snoring softly. Bex had an ice pack on her shoulder. Macey slept with a self-satisfied smirk across her face. And Liz was listening to headphones, memorizing the audio version of some ancient textbook while she dreamed.
But not me.
I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood on Dr. Steve’s sleeve. Every time I almost drifted off to sleep, I heard the music, soft and lingering in the corners of my mind.
Finally, I threw the covers aside, crept into the bathroom with its busted mirror, and pulled on my uniform as quietly as I could.
“Where are you going?” Bex asked when I reappeared. She was sitting up in bed and squinting at me through the dark.
“Waffles,” I told her. Bex raised one eyebrow, doubtful. The clock beside her bed read five forty-five a.m. “The kitchen will be open soon, and I want…” There were so many ways that sentence might have ended. Answers. My memory. But most of all I needed my mom to hug me and smooth my hair and tell me I wasn’t a terrible person for pulling that trigger the day before.
So instead I just said, “Waffles. I’m craving waffles.”
Bex rolled onto her side. “Tell your waffles hi for me.”
There’s something especially beautiful about the Gallagher Academy when the classrooms are dark and the halls are quiet. Moonlight falls through the stained glass windows; shadows creep across the stairs. It looks like the most peaceful place on earth. Too bad every spy knows that looks can be deceiving.
“Thank you for coming.”
At the sound of Professor Buckingham’s voice, I froze in the middle of the Hall of History, staring down at the foyer below.
“You really didn’t have to rush,” Buckingham said, closing the front door behind two women I’d occasionally seen but had never met.
They wore heavy coats and heavier expressions, and there was no uncertainty at all in the younger woman’s voice when she said, “I assure you, we did.”
“Where’s Rachel?” the older woman asked.
“In her office.”
“And the girl?” the young woman said.
Buckingham seemed to bristle a little at the word, but she folded her hands and said, “Sleeping.” She gestured toward the Grand Staircase. “We’ll be ready to begin soon.” I slid around the corner while they climbed. It was easy for me to be invisible in the long shadowy corridor. I was still the Chameleon, after all, as I stood watching the trustees descend upon the Gallagher Academy.
Knowing they were there because of me.
There’s a passageway I never use. Or, well, hardly ever. Seriously, that particular passageway is an EMERGENCY SITUATIONS ONLY kind of thing, and, call me crazy, but it was starting to feel more than a little emergency-ish by the second.
The trustees were there.
In five and a half years at the Gallagher Academy, I’d seen them at my school maybe a half dozen times (and that included the time Dr. Fibs accidentally activated—but didn’t detonate!—a nuclear warhead in the labs). This wasn’t a meeting, I knew. This was an emergency.
“Where are you going?”