My mom’s the computer hacker in our family. She can get into huge computer mainframes, pull up incriminating e-mails that most people would never be able to find, and hide her tracks without even breaking a sweat. My dad’s the linguist and statistician, which doesn’t sound awesome until you hear him start shouting in German to create a distraction so my mom can drop a tracker into a corrupt businessman’s jacket pocket. (You haven’t lived until you’ve shouted German curse words with your dad in a Tokyo airport. It’s pretty great.)
I was, as Roux so nicely pointed out, an excellent lock picker and safecracker. Angelo had taught me some tricks of the trade when I was a toddler, but now I had surpassed even his talents. “Go fly, little Jedi,” he had said to me after I broke into the safe that he had given me for Christmas last year, which made me happy because it meant he had watched all the Star Wars DVDs I had given him.
My phone buzzed as Roux and I gathered up our bags and chess games, and I glanced at the screen to see two texts from my boyfriend, Jesse. I tucked my phone away without reading them. I don’t know why, but I like to read his texts in private. It makes them feel more special, more personal, more mine.
“Jesse?” Roux asked. “You have that dopey, love-struck look on your face.”
“Shut up some more.” I grinned. “You ready?”
“Ready to face that unrelenting, diabolical heat? No.”
“You should be a writer.”
She snorted out a laugh. “BOOOOR-RING! C’mon, let’s go so you can call your boyfriend and say a bunch of gooey, lovey things to him.”
“Yeah, because that really sounds like me.”
“Hey, you’re a spy. You have all sorts of secrets.”
“Yeah, and you know most of them.”
“Thanks, that makes me feel special.”
We went down the narrow staircase before getting to the set of double doors, but just as Roux used her hip to shove it open, two girls came through the other side and we all nearly bumped into one another.
“Hey, slut,” one of the girls said, and Roux froze, her hip still pressed against the door’s bar as they sauntered past, giggling to themselves.
“Rude much?” I yelled after them, but they didn’t turn around, and by the time I looked back at Roux, her face had smoothed out into its normal, “what-ever” expression. “Do you know them?” I asked her.
“Nope,” she replied. “They’re probably starting at Harper in September. A new set of ducklings ready to taunt me.”
When I first met Roux, she had been the outcast of Harper School, our private high school in the West Village. She had once been the Queen Bee, the Mean Girl, whatever you want to call it, but karma had reared its ugly head and Roux became a social leper. She rarely talks about it, but the whole experience really hurt her. I had thought things were a little better, but I knew she was nervous about the first day of school this year, and if those two strangers were any indication, she had every right to be.
But the slur was forgotten as soon as we stepped outside, greeted by a wall of hot and humid air. “Forget it,” Roux said, starting to step back inside the school. “I’m just going to stay here until Thanksgiving. Maybe Christmas.”
I grabbed her sleeve and tugged her outside. “It’s miserable, but we’re going to suffer together. And it’s only two blocks to the subway station.”
But we weren’t even four steps away from the building before I thought that maybe Roux’s idea had been better. “I can feel my hair melting.” I moaned.
“I think my skin is bubbling.” Roux held up her arm to check. “This has to be super aging, too, right? You can’t be exposed to this much heat and not get some serious frown lines.”
“I have no idea.” I tied my hair up into a messy bun and then fanned the back of my neck. “If I faint, promise me you’ll send someone back for my body.”
“If I don’t go insane from heatstroke first, then absolutely.”
“Thanks, you’re a true friend.”
Roux and I made our way across the street and up Broadway toward the subway with the rest of the end-of-summer zombies who were staggering around Manhattan. The city had been pretty empty for the past two weeks, as most everyone escaped the city and the heat for the last few days of summer. Even Jesse had bailed to visit his mom in Connecticut. When he and I first met, his parents had just split up, his mom had moved out of their downtown apartment, and Jesse had been barely speaking to her. Things were a lot better between them now, though, so I was super happy that he was visiting her.
“Jesse’s coming back tonight?” Roux asked me, slipping Ray-Bans over her eyes.
“Yep. He’s gonna call me when his train gets into Grand Central. He might come over later.”
“He better come over later,” she said. “It’s almost your first anniversary.”
I side-eyed her. “Our anniversary is technically on Halloween. It’s two months away.”
“Isn’t it sooner? You met in late September.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t dating-dating. He was still my assignment then.”
So … yeah. About that. There’s really no way to tell this story without making me sound like a terrible person, so I’ll keep it short.
Basically, I was assigned to get to know Jesse because his father runs Memorandum magazine, which is pretty big. They were going to run an in-depth article exposing the Collective and me, and it was my job to stop the article from running. Only I kinda maybe developed this huge crush on Jesse. And then he started crushing on me right back. And then we sort of made out a lot, and I never told anyone, including Jesse, that I had pretty much become a double agent until we found out that his dad wasn’t going to run the story after all. And then when I tried to tell my parents, they realized that I had fallen in love with him and they didn’t believe me.