“Downtown is the new uptown,” my dad said. “Look, my socks match my tie!”
“He read that in the Times Style section.” My mom rolled her eyes. “Maggie, fix your hair.” She reached out to brush a lock of hair off my shoulder.
They may have looked different, but they were still my parents.
They were suitably impressed by the school building. “Wow, look at this masonry,” my dad said. “What is this, prewar, do you think? Or maybe—?”
“It’s old,” I said, cutting him off. “That’s what it is. And it’s worth thirty-thousand dollars a year, apparently.”
“Is that a community garden?” my mom said, peering out a window. “Do they do organic?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t the only student hurrying their parents through the hallway, though. Several other kids were herding parents into classrooms and looking just as mortified as I felt. “All the organic you want.”
My parents were due to meet with my French teacher, Monsieur McPhulty, whose name my dad had a hard time swallowing. “I’m pretty sure ‘McPhulty’ isn’t in the original French,” he had grumbled when I first told him, but when I introduced them, it was all “Bonjour” this and “Merci!” that.
“I didn’t realize that Maggie had French-speaking parents,” Monsieur McPhulty said, shooting a glance in my direction. “Her accent is, well, terrible.”
Parent-teacher conferences, I decided, were the dumbest things ever.
I hung out in the hallway while they talked, dragging the toe of my boot back and forth across the floor. I could hear someone banging on a locker and I finally got annoyed and went to inspect the noise. I found Jesse Oliver trying to get his Master Lock open. He would try, then bang it against the locker in anger, and try again.
If this wasn’t a sign from the heavens, I didn’t know what was.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you need help or is this just an extreme sport?”
“I’m fine,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “This lock is just broken.”
“Want me to try?”
“Be my guest,” he said. “I hope you enjoy frustrating experiences.”
“Oh, I live for them,” I said, then starting spinning the dial around. “Are you here for your parent-teacher conference?”
“Yeah, my dad’s supposed to be here soon.”
Armand was going to be here! My heart started to beat a little faster and I glanced toward the closed door of my French classroom. There was no way that my parents and Armand could see each other, not if I had anything to say about it. They would probably try to usurp the whole mission, and I wasn’t about to surrender my very first assignment. Not yet, anyway.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Jesse said after I started to spin the dial back and forth, trying to feel the catch of the wheel.
“I picked up this talent in middle school,” I replied. “My locker was always busted. What’s the combo?”
“24-37-2.”
“Easy enough.” I spun it a few times, then felt the wheel catch on a 3. “I think it’s actually 24-37-3.”
“No, it’s not. The locker assignment said …”
I popped it open. “It’s three,” I said. “Trust me.”
“Wow.” He looked at the lock, then back at me. “That explains why I can never get it open.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“Sorry. Thanks. Thank you, that was awesome.”
I shrugged. “Like I said, easy enough.” Down the hall, the double doors swung open and I saw a dark-haired man heading toward us. He had the same build as Jesse and looked to be about the same height.
I didn’t need a dossier picture to know that it was Armand.
“Well, see you around,” I told Jesse, starting to walk backward. “Good luck with the conference. Hope you’re not failing calculus.”
He looked at me oddly. “I am failing calculus. How did you—?”
But I was already around the corner, ducking behind another row of lockers. “Stupid!” I whispered to myself. Why didn’t I just tell Jesse that I knew his entire school transcript? I had never tripped myself up like that before.
“Is Mom here?” I heard Jesse ask, and I pressed myself against the wall and tried to be as small as possible.
There was a pause before Armand said, “No,” and an even longer pause before he said, “I’m sorry.”
Where was Mrs. Oliver? As far as the dossier knew, they were still married. Was she out of town?
“It’s cool,” Jesse said, and I didn’t have to see his face to know how disappointed he was. He was the aural equivalent of a kicked puppy.
“I’ll e-mail her an update,” Armand said. His voice was deep but not all villain-y. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. I’ll send it as soon as I get home.”
“No, don’t do that,” Jesse said. “If she wanted to know, she’d be there.”
“Son, I’m sure she—”
“Forget it. C’mon, you’re late.”
Armand sounded way nicer than I had imagined. I don’t know why I had pictured some gruff guy sitting behind a computer and chomping on a cigar, but it was clear that he was trying to make Jesse feel better about his absent mom.
I was tempted to follow Jesse and find out more, but I heard the door to the French classroom open and I hustled over as fast as I could. My French is so bad that I couldn’t tell what my parents or Monsieur McPhulty were discussing, but it sounded like they were long-lost friends by this point.