It seemed to take forever for Bex to say, "What did your mom want?"
Sure, they'd all traded their ball gowns for flannel pajamas, but one look at my roommates told me they were anything but comfortable.
"She wanted to know where I was and what I saw." I kicked off my tight shoes and felt my feet instantly swell up to twice their normal size.
"Well…" Bex said slowly. "Where were you?"
And then I told the story—the whole story. Again. And when I was finished, two things were clear. A) I seriously needed to remember to go pick up that bra from the floor first thing tomorrow morning. And B) My roommates had been expecting a very different story.
Liz sat up straighter on her bed. "So you didn't decide to sneak out and go see Josh at the spring fling?"
"No!" I said. "It wasn't me! You guys know I wouldn't breach security like that."
"Of course it wasn't you," Bex huffed. "You wouldn't get caught."
Okay, so it wasn't exactly the vote of confidence I'd been hoping for, but it was a start.
"And besides, you'd never leave in the middle of a test," Liz added. "So you aren't in any trouble?"
"No."
"And Zach just disappeared?" Macey asked. "He didn't even go with you to your mom's office?"
"No."
"Cam," Liz said, and for the first time tonight, I could detect fear in her voice, "what do you think happened?"
Despite all my training, experience, and instincts, all I could do was crawl into bed, pull the covers tightly around me, and admit, "I don't know."
And then the lights came on.
Chapter Eighteen
I've had some very challenging days since coming to the Gallagher Academy (like the time our archery midterm happened to fall on nondominant hand day, for example), but the day that followed the ball was the most difficult yet—for a lot of reasons:
Even though it was Saturday, no one slept in, so that meant girls were walking up and down
the halls, talking in front of our door by seven a.m.
Even if it hadn't been for all the noise, I still probably wouldn't have been able to sleep.
The kitchen staff had gone to such extremes the night before that our only option for breakfast was
cereal.
Extensive ball preparations during the previous week meant that everyone was behind on their
homework.
My elaborate, twisty updo from the night before made the hair-washing and detangling process very
difficult and painful.
Even though the teachers were busy passing along the official story that the Code Black had been a
false alarm due to faulty wiring—the unofficial story was about… me.
The lights were on. The steel shutters had disappeared, and everything in the mansion was back to where it always was, but as soon as I stepped into the library, I knew things were different. The weird thing wasn't that fifteen teenage girls were in there at nine a.m. on a Saturday morning. The weird thing was that as soon as I walked in, everyone stopped talking.
Even Tina Walters dropped her book and gaped at me as I walked past the fireplace on my way to the section of the library devoted to world currencies (we had a paper due for Mr. Smith). I ran my hand across the spines of books, looking, until I heard a whisper filter through the shelves.
"Well, of course they're going to say it was a false alarm," said I voice I didn't recognize.
I froze.
"Obviously her mom is going to cover for her."
And my heart stopped. "It's not like it's the first time, either."
I'm used to people talking about me … sort of. I mean, I am the headmistress's daughter, and my chameleoness is rather legendary, and my secret boyfriend had followed me to my CoveOps final and driven a forklift through a wall. So you could say I've never been entirely under the radar. But none of those things were ever followed by pulsing sirens and spinning bookshelves and a mansion-wide lockdown three times more secure than what would happen to the White House in the event of a nuclear war.
By lunchtime it was all I could do to maintain a brave, unguilty-looking face as I sat in the Grand Hall, feeling entirely unchameleony.
I couldn't blame them, entirely. After all, my ex-boyfriend had invited me to a party in Roseville. I have, on occasion, violated school security to see that particular boyfriend. So it shouldn't have come as a total surprise that, as I sat in the Grand Hall at lunch that day, eating my lasagna, the entire school was staring … at me.
"How did this happen?" I whispered to my friends.
"Well, everyone knows you used to sneak out to see Josh; and they know he invited you to a party," Liz said, not really getting the whole rhetorical question thing. (Liz likes questions too much to ever let one go unanswered.) "And then there was a security breach, and the next thing we knew, you were there—looking …"
"Guilty," Bex said, summing the night up nicely.
"Cam," Liz said, leaning closer. "It's not so bad. No one thinks you did it on purpose."
Bex shrugged. "But everyone does think you did it."
There have been Gallagher Girl traitors before, but no one ever talks about them. Very few people even know their names. But right then I felt like one of them—or at least like people thought I was one of them.
"So, Cammie," Tina said, taking a seat beside me, "is it true that you weren't actually sneaking out to see Josh—"
"That's right, Tina, I wasn't," I said, kinda relieved to get it off my chest. Tina didn't even seem to hear me, though, because she just plowed on.
"—Because according to my sources, instead of going to that dance in town, you were really sneaking out to participate in a rogue mission for the CIA."