I slumped back into my chair, the wind out of my sails already. “I just hope that for your sakes, I don’t get caught up in a sexting scandal,” I told them.
“Duly noted,” my mom said. “Anyone want more coffee?”
That’s the thing with having spies for parents. They don’t get upset about much. Sometimes it’s awesome, and sometimes it does not work in my favor.
I sighed once more and reached for my coffee cup. It was white and modern, almost too heavy in my hand. I sort of missed the I BRAKE FOR CAFFEINE mug that we had in our old house. I wondered if another spy had that mug now, or if it had been destroyed. When I was younger, I used to take one thing from each house we lived in, but after a while, they just made me homesick for homes that I would never see again and that had never really been mine anyway.
The dossier was straightforward. Maggie Silver, sixteen years old, transferring from Andover in New Hampshire to the Harper School in Greenwich Village. The school’s pamphlet looked pretty straightforward: a happy, smiling, multicultural, “Yay, we’re so smart!” student body, reading their books and enjoying their study groups. Liberal arts education, a focus on the individual, blah blah blah.
Booor-ring. I picked up the dossier page labeled OBJECTIVE and started to scan through.
“Jesse Oliver, sixteen years old, son of Armand Oliver, editor in chief of Memorandum magazine. Student, the Harper School.”
I sat back in my chair and sighed. “I have to seduce someone,” I announced to my parents. “High school is already destroying my moral code and I haven’t even set foot on the campus yet.”
My mom peeked at my dossier. “I think ‘befriend’ is the word you’re looking for,” she said after a minute.
Sometimes she’s no fun.
The three of us sat at the table for a good hour, going over the new assignment. My job was to make friends with (or seduce, depending on your interpretation) Jesse Oliver at school and then use that friendship to get access to Armand Oliver’s computer and e-mails. “So,” my dad said, and then he and my mom put on their Serious Parenting Time faces. “We think that Armand is going to publish a story about the Collective and it’s going to name names.”
I froze when they said that. “What?” I asked. “How would he even know who we are?”
“No one’s quite sure,” my dad said. “Someone may be selling information or they might have heard rumors. Either way, we need to stop it. You need to stop it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said as I read through the assignment. “If you just want to kill the article, why doesn’t Mom just go work in the IT department at Memorandum or something?”
“Because Armand’s paranoid,” my mom said. “His hiring process takes months. He’s notorious for it.” She held up her hand. “He demands fingerprints.”
Fingerprints. The one thing a spy can’t change.
“So you get in through Jesse,” my dad said to me. “This one’s on you, kiddo.”
“I have to go to school while you two get to stay home?” I glared at both my parents. “You’re so lucky.”
“Hey, I did my time in high school,” my dad said.
“But Maggie,” my mom added, her voice cautious. “You know this means that you aren’t actually making friends. You’re getting to know people to gain information, but it can be more difficult if you get attached.”
“Duh,” I said, flipping through the paperwork and wondering if I could possibly retake my school ID photo. “This is not a friendly business, I get it.”
I could feel my parents exchange glances over my head, but I ignored them. “Besides, the people in this pamphlet look lame. These aren’t the kind of friends I’d want to have, anyway.”
“Well, once you get the paperwork, then your mom and I will do our analysis. Et fin.” He stood up and went to gather up the dossiers. “Everybody got it?”
My mom and I handed him all the objectives and mission statements, which he took to the sink. One lit match and two minutes later, our assignments were burned to a crisp. We used to shred everything, but even cross-cut shred isn’t that safe anymore. No one can tape together ashes.
I started to gather up everything else: my new social security card, birth certificate, school ID, and cell phone. “I have to go to work now,” I told my parents. “I have to start assimilating. I hope you’re proud.”
“Bursting with pride,” my dad said, not even looking up from his bagel.
“Glowing,” my mom added.
“You’re no fun,” I told them, then went back to my new bedroom.
I spent my first day in New York huddled over my laptop, gathering as much information as I could about Jesse Oliver and the Harper School. You’d think we’d get a vacation between jobs, right? Wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Sometimes I think it’d be amazing to just sit on a beach or, I don’t know, go to Disney World or something touristy like that, but then I remember that I burn instead of tan, and giant crowds of people wearing Goofy hats just sounds scary. Still, it’d be nice to have a few days without being inherently suspicious of the world at large. Including Jesse Oliver.
And when it came to Jesse Oliver, I was suspicious.
“He’s a delinquent!” I yelled out to my parents. “He was arrested for shoplifting last year!”
No response.