"I'm over by the dunk tank, Bookworm."
"Wave your arms or something." I could almost hear Liz standing on tiptoes, peering through the crowd.
"That kind of defeats the purpose now, doesn't it?" Bex noted.
"But how am I supposed to follow you, following Smith if I can't— Oh, never mind," Liz said. "I see you."
I looked around and thought, Oh, yeah, I can see why I'd be tough to spot. I was sitting on a bench in plain sight. Seriously. I couldn't have been more out in the open if I'd had a big neon sign over my head. But that's the thing most people don't get about surveillance. No one—not even one of my best friends—was going to look twice at an ordinary-looking girl in last year's clothes sitting on a park bench eating a corn dog. If you can be still enough, and common enough, then it's really easy to be invisible.
"He's flipping," Bex said softly, and I knew it was showtime. Roseville might look like Mayberry, but Professor Smith wasn't taking any chances. He was doubling back, so I got off my bench and eased toward the sidewalk, knowing Smith was heading toward me on the opposite side of the square, past Bex, who managed to duck her head and act nonchalant. That's when a lot of people would have lost it. An amateur would have looked at her watch and spun around as if she'd just remembered some place she needed to be, but not Bex—she just kept walking.
Half the town must have turned out for the carnival, so there was lots of pedestrian cover on the sidewalk between Mr. Smith and me (a very good thing). People don't see things nearly as quickly as they see motion, so when Professor Smith turned, I stayed perfectly still. When he moved, I waited five seconds, then followed. But mostly, I remembered what my dad always said about how a tail isn't a string—it's a rubber band, stretching back and forth, in and out, moving independently of The Subject. When something interested me, I stopped. When someone said something funny, I laughed. When I passed an ice-cream stand, I bought some, all the while keeping Mr. Smith at the edge of my vision.
But that's not to say it was easy. No way. In all the times I'd imagined my first mission, I'd always thought I'd be retrieving top secret files or something. Never once did I imagine that I'd be asked to tail my COW professor through a carnival and find out what he drinks with his funnel cakes. The crazy thing was that this was SO MUCH HARDER! Professor Smith was acting as if those KGB hitmen were already on their way to Roseville—using every countersurveillance technique in the book (or at least the books I've seen), and I realized how exhausting it must be to be him. He couldn't even go out for funnel cakes without "flipping" and "corner clearing" and "breadcrumbing" all the time.
Once, things got really toasty, and I thought for sure he was going to make me, but I fell in behind a group of little old women. But then one of the women stumbled at the curb, and, instinctively, I reached out to help her. Ahead of us, Professor Smith stopped in front of a darkened storefront, staring at the reflection in the glass, but I was twenty feet behind him and shrouded by a sea of gray hair and polyester—which was a good thing. But then the women all turned to face me—which was a bad thing.
"Thank you, young lady," the older woman said. She squinted at me. "Do I know you?"
But just then, a voice blared in my ear. "Did we rotate?" Liz sounded close to panic. "Did we rotate the eyeball?"
Professor Smith was getting away, heading back in Bex's direction, so I answered, "Yes," but that only made the woman c**k her eyebrow and stare harder.
"I don't remember seeing you before," the old woman said.
"Sure you do, Betty," one of the other women said, patting her friend on the arm. "She's that Jackson girl."
And that's why I'm the chameleon. I am the girl next door (it's just that our doors have fingerprint-reading sensors and are bulletproof and all…).
"Oh! Is your grandmother out of the hospital yet?" the more fragile of the women asked.
Okay, so I didn't know the Jacksons, much less how Granny was feeling, but Grandma Morgan had taught me that Chinese Water Torture is nothing compared to a grandmother who really wants to know something. I saw Professor Smith nearing Bex, but over my comms unit, Bex was laughing, saying, "Yeah, man. Go, Pirates!" as if she lived for Friday night football. Sure, Bex's definition of football might have been soccer, but boys were always boys, and a crowd of jersey-clad testosterone was assembling across the street. I didn't need surveillance photos to know who was at the center of the mob.
The old women were staring at me as if I were a needle they were trying to thread, and I said the only thing I could think of. "Dr. Smith says she needs to go south—that she needs to be toasty." I looked past the mob surrounding me and toward the one surrounding Bex, hoping she'd heard and understood that trouble was heading her way.
My hopes dwindled, though, when I heard her say, "Yeah, I love tight ends."
"Isn't that nice?" the old woman said. "Does she know where she's going?"
I saw Mr. Smith's dark jacket disappear past the pillars of the library's main entrance and then out of sight.
"You know she's such a bookworm," I said, hoping Liz was listening. "She can't wait to be near the library, just around the corner from the library, in fact," I said through gritted teeth, just as static and chaos filled my ears.
I heard Bex mutter, "Oh, no!"
Ahead of me, the football boys were heading in a pack down the street, but Bex wasn't with them. As far as I could see, Bex wasn't anywhere, and neither was Smith.