I really had to work on my pep talks.
The Harper School was on a tree-, squirrel-, and brownstone-lined street, over on Jane Street in the West Village. Red brick buildings lined the streets like antebellum soldiers at attention, and I sort of felt like saluting them as I walked up West Fourth toward the school.
As soon as I reached it, I could tell I had made a tactical error. I was just wearing my normal, semi-inappropriate school uniform, nothing flashy or cool, along with the suede boots I had found in my closet. Everyone else, though, had accessorized to the teeth. (Literally. One kid had a gold cap on his front tooth when he grinned. It made him look like an entitled pirate, but still, A+ for effort.)
Girls were wearing tights, necklaces, and gaudy brooches on the lapels of their blazers. I was wearing none of that. If this school were a circus, these girls would be the trapeze artists and I would look like the sucker who had to clean up after the elephant act.
Well, shit.
I had a backpack, too, something black and simple that traveled well, but everyone else had messenger bags or purses slung over their shoulders. I might as well have had a neon sign over my head that flashed, NEW KID! NEW KID! as I walked up the concrete steps, and I could feel everyone looking at me, which was so uncomfortable that I wanted to turn around and run back to our loft. Or Reykjavík. Either place seemed better than the front stoop of the Harper School.
Was this what teenagers did at school? I glanced down at my uniform and then back at the girls, realizing how boring and, well, beige I looked. Beige is great when you’re opening a safe, but in a world of neon and color, beige was suddenly anything but.
At least I had worn my gray suede boots. That had to count for something, right?
I pressed on. It’s rule number three, after all: Never look back.
The hallways inside were filled with kids my age and I took a deep breath. I hadn’t been around this many teenagers in … well, ever. It was sort of claustrophobic and reminded me of that one time we got stuck at O’Hare in Chicago during a blizzard and almost missed our flight to Amsterdam. (Now that is a story for another time, but I will say that it involved the mutiny of the airport Starbucks employees and a nun who turned out to be an undercover cop.) “You survived O’Hare, you’ll survive this,” I muttered to myself.
I let the crowd carry me toward the office, which was blessedly empty. I wondered if I could just stay in here all day, maybe tell them that I had a contagious disease that flared up whenever I was near people my own age. “Hi,” I said to the woman behind the front desk. “I’m Maggie Silver, it’s my first day.”
I don’t know what I had been expecting, but this woman barely blinked. I mean, she didn’t have to fire a confetti cannon or cue the tap-dancing elephants, but a smile would have been nice.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being part of a spy family, it’s that you have to give to get. If you want someone to talk to you, you have to talk to them. So I grinned at her, a full-banana smile that made my cheeks hurt, and turned on the charm. “I am just so nervous,” I told her. (For some reason, I had also adopted a slight Southern accent, but whatever.) “First-day jitters. Any advice?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. She would be amazing during an interrogation. “Study hard,” she told me, then handed me my class schedule.
I nodded as I took it, doing a quick scan of the office. Three secretaries; four closed doors, which probably led to various principals’ offices; and three computers. One of the doors near the very back had a Simplex vertical push-button lock on it. Most people set a three-number combination: just push the buttons in the correct order and the door clicks open. I smiled to myself when I saw it because they’re pretty much the easiest locks in the world to crack. All you need is a thirty-dollar magnet. (I got mine on Craigslist two years ago.) Hold the magnet up to the lock and BOOM! The lock pops open.
Seeing that lock sort of flipped a switch in me, and I smiled even wider.
“Good luck,” she said to me.
“Right back atcha,” I said, taking my class schedule and sauntering out.
Bring it, Harper School.
The Harper School definitely brought it.
By the time lunch rolled around, I felt like I was ready to retire. What had I been thinking, cursing my lazy summer in Iceland? I would give anything to be on my couch, surrounded by combination locks and practice safes, making up imaginary conversations with Cute Boy.
It wasn’t that the schoolwork was hard. I had been put in geometry, which was outrageous because I had learned geometry three years ago, and French, which was going to be ugly because my accent was terrible. They should’ve put me in calculus and Latin, but I would take care of that later. And it wasn’t that any of the students were mean to me, either.
No, it was that everyone kept looking at me.
I’ve never stood out so much in my life. I mean, my whole job is to make sure that people aren’t looking at me. If people notice anything strange, the jig is up, and what’s stranger than a new kid at school? I was sure that everyone was on to me by now, that my family and I would be outed and our lives over. The Collective should have enrolled me on the first day, not three weeks into the semester. What were they even thinking? I didn’t know who made up the Collective, but clearly, there wasn’t a teenage girl among them.
Right off, I noticed that no one else was alone: students traveled in packs of two, three, or four through the halls, not moving out of the way for anyone else. At one point, I actually had to duck under someone’s arm and almost got an accidental elbow to the eye. Wild animals also traveled in packs, I realized. That was usually how they surrounded and devoured their prey.