bothered me. I pressed my palm against the keypad at the dorm entrance, and the doors swung open. I was housed in Mulligan Hall, named after American Revolutionary War spy Hercules Mulligan. All the buildings at UTOP were named after famous spies, which I thought was kind of cool.
Frankie and I shared a suite on the fourth floor with the two other girls from our original team at the UTOP trials—Kira Romanova and Hala Youseff. Our suite had two rooms, each with two beds, as well as a connecting bathroom and a common area furnished with a table, mini-kitchen, and couch where the four of us could study, snack, or talk. The four guys from our group were in a similar setup on the first floor of the dorm, with Wally and Mike Garcia rooming together and Jax and Bo Coleman sharing the other room. It wasn’t fancy, but it was nice we were all in the same dorm.
Just saying that was a big step for me, considering that just a few months earlier I was one of the biggest loners on the planet. Somehow I’d morphed into a person capable of living in close quarters with three other girls and not even minding…much.
As soon as I entered the suite, I ran into Kira, who was fixing a salad in our common kitchen area. Kira, tall, blonde, and beautiful, spoke something like fifteen languages and was a biology whiz who wanted to become a doctor who spies. Her father had been a top Russian official, as well as a double agent for the US, so I guess spying was in her blood. We’d had a rocky start as competitors at the trials, but she’d proven herself as an ally and, much to my surprise, as a friend. I wasn’t sure which of us had been more astonished by that. Wally had a wicked crush on her, but then again, so did most of the students at UTOP. Kira, however, was more of an introvert like me, so she ignored all the attention. She was deadly serious, however, about the spy stuff.
“Did you hear the news?” she asked me, carrying the salad to the couch and sitting down. She folded her long legs beneath her and took a bite.
“What news?” I slid my backpack off my shoulders and dropped it on a nearby chair.
“They’re closing the school for a week due to asbestos remediation starting tomorrow, after school. We can either go home for the week or the government will house us at a nearby hotel, which means like forty minutes away.”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
She didn’t have time to answer, because someone pounded on the door. I opened it to find Wally standing on the other side. “Angel, did you hear? The school is closing for a week.”
I opened the door wider, ushering him in. He crossed the threshold and came to an abrupt stop when he saw Kira.
“Kira! You’re here,” he stammered. “Not that that’s weird, because you live here, so naturally, you’d be in your suite.” His face turned beet red and he turned to me, obviously looking for help.
I came to his rescue. “Kira just told me about the closing. Asbestos remediation. It’s kind of random they just discovered it.”
“I heard it happened after two students got into a wrestling match in Bondurant Hall and punched a hole in the wall,” Wally said. “They did an inspection on all the campus buildings and found unsafe levels in a bunch of them. So, out we go for at least a week until it’s fixed.”
“Are you going home or to the hotel?” Kira asked him. “Apparently we have to tell them tonight so they can move us tomorrow.”
“Me?” Wally pointed to himself, apparently surprised she’d asked him. “Ah, I’m not sure what I’m doing. Angel, what about you?”
“I’ll probably go home. It’s a good excuse to check up on my mom and see how she’s doing since Gwen is in Brazil. What about you, Kira?”
“I’m going to the hotel. It’ll be like a mini-vacation.”
“I think it kind of sucks,” Wally said. “We just get to UTOP, and now we have to move to a hotel. Then we’ll come back to the campus, and in two and a half more weeks, we’re off again for Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas break. It’s too much downtime.”
“Listen to you, Wally,” I said, grinning. “Complaining because you can’t have school.”
“Fine. Make fun of me because I like spy school. Except the driving-with-Frankie part. I