Going Rogue (13 page)

Now the tears were starting to fall and I was too exhausted to try and stop them. “Jesse, wait,” I said. “We’re both tired. We’re both angry. Let’s just talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

“When? Can you make time in your busy, world-saving schedule for me? Or do you want to leave me hanging and making excuses to my mom for ninety minutes while you risk your life around town?”

“You didn’t tell your mom, did you?” I asked. “Oh, my God, Jesse.”

“Of course I didn’t!” he cried. “That’s what I’m talking about! You can’t even trust me and all I’ve
ever
done is trust you and worry about you and—”

“I can’t tell you because it’s dangerous!” I exploded. “It’s really, really dangerous, Jesse! I shouldn’t have even told you and Roux about any of this in the first place, but I did and it was my stupid mistake and now I have to protect you because if I don’t …” The words stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get them out for a few seconds. “If I don’t and something happens to you …” They were stuck again, not going anywhere this time.

“You don’t have to protect me this time,” Jesse said, stepping toward me.

“Yes, I do!” I cried. “If you don’t have any information, then no one can get it from you. That’s what I keep trying to tell you!”

Jesse went quiet for almost a minute as we stood across from each other, both of us trying to catch our breath. He was the first to speak.

“So if you can’t trust me and I can’t protect you, then how the hell are we going to make this work?”

It’s a special sort of pain when someone voices your exact fears, when someone tells you that all the dark
thoughts you have about yourself are not only real, but that everyone else can see them, too. It’s the sort of pain that drives the tears out of your eyes and shuts down your heart and drops a steel wall in front of it and makes you realize that yes, being alone is terrible, but it will never be as painful as this.

“Maybe we don’t,” I said, the tears stuck in my throat. “Maybe this is how it ends.”

Jesse just blinked. “You seriously want to break up?”

“I don’t want to,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! No matter what I do, I’m going to hurt you!”

Jesse bit the inside of his cheek, his jaw tightening. “Nothing hurts worse than this,” he said, echoing my own thoughts.

“Maybe we just need to take a break,” I said. “Not break up, but just figure things out.”

If a nod could be sarcastic, then that’s what Jesse did. “Cool. Fine. Okay.” He put his arm up to signal a cab turning the corner, then pulled open the door when it glided to the curb. “Get in,” he told me.

“I can hail my own—”

“Just.” Jesse took another deep breath and I saw his chin quiver a little. “Just let me do this for you,” he said. “In case this doesn’t work, let me do one last nice thing for you.”

My hands were shaking as I climbed in. We had shared a cab together last Halloween, hauling a very drunk Roux back to her apartment and then heading back downtown
after sharing a kiss on an Upper East Side brownstone stoop. It had been our first kiss, and I remembered feeling the cracked pleather seats on the cab ride home, the smell of Jesse’s cologne, and the buzzing feeling that I had from kissing someone for the very first time. I had been
in
love with him then, but now it was deeper. Now I loved him.

And I had to let him go.

He shut the door after I got in and I pressed my palm against the window, wondering if I could feel his touch through the glass. He looked away, and I felt my heart sink, but then he wiped at his eyes before pressing his hand up against mine. There was only cold between us, no contact, and when the cab driver pulled away, Jesse’s fingers slipped along the glass, leaving tearstains on the window, sending me home alone.

The scene was no less explosive when I got back to the loft.

“Where have you been?” my mom yelled as soon as the fingerprint scanner beeped to let me in. “We have been waiting here, calling your phone—”

“The SIM card in that phone is in pieces somewhere on Ninety-Fifth Street,” I told her, then held up my hand. “I cannot fight with you right now. I’m not going to.”

“Yes, you are, because we’re your parents and we’ve been in the dark for the past two hours.” Now my dad was entering the fray, a small smear of peanut butter on his cheek, a telltale sign of his stress-eating. “Two
hours
, Maggie! We can’t even get ahold of Angelo! You need to tell us everything, right now!”

“Can’t,” I said, opening the refrigerator. I was suddenly ravenous, not having eaten anything since two granola bars at lunch. “You’re part of the case, I can’t tell you about it. We’d be compromised.”

Cue the hysteria.

“We’re your parents!” my mother said. “We are not just your assignment!”

I grabbed a yogurt, slammed the refrigerator door, and whirled around. I knew I was being unfair, but it was too late and I was too tired to care. “Angelo’s orders,” I told them. “He’s the only person I can talk to about this.”

“Jesse thought you were lying dead in a gutter somewhere!” my dad yelled. “And so did we!”

“Well, I think Jesse and I might have just broken up, so don’t worry about him anymore,” I said, tearing off the lid. It was strawberry-banana flavored, which I personally think is one of the most heinous flavors imaginable, but I was too starving to even notice. “And I’m not dead, obviously, so you don’t have to worry about that, either.”

“When did you become so flippant?” my dad asked, just as my mom said, “You and Jesse broke up? Why?”

“I don’t even know if we
did
,” I said, licking the yogurt off the lid and going to find a spoon. “But if we did, it’s probably because he’s tired of me lying to him. Yeah, that’s probably why. Frankly, I’m tired of lying to him, too. It
sucks
. And I became flippant,
Dad
, when I spent two and a half hours stuck in a crawl space while trying to save both of your reputations. You’re welcome, by the way. The pleasure was all mine.”

My parents stood there dumbstruck, and to be honest, I felt a little dumbstruck, too. I had never spoken to them like this before. We had never fought like this, this fast and hurtful. It was like the power had shifted and now I was the
one in charge, holding information and making decisions. Fighting dirty had apparently become one of my strongest talents, and now I wanted to do it all the time.

The problem with fighting dirty, though, is that it makes you
feel
dirty. I was arguing with the wrong people for the wrong reasons: I was fighting with my parents because they cared about me, I fought with Jesse because he was worried about me, and I was angry at Angelo because of bad intel. But the truth was that I wanted to fight myself. I wanted the two sides of me to clash and only one to win. Either I was a spy or I was a normal girl. I was lashing out at everyone else but in truth, the battle was happening inside me.

And no matter what happened, part of me would end up losing.

“I’m going to my room,” I said, very aware of how my voice was shaking.

“No, you’re not,” my mom said. “What do you mean, you got stuck in a crawl space? Did you walk into a trap?”

“Can’t talk about it,” I said.

“You
will
talk about it,” my dad said.

“No, Dad,” I replied, “I can’t talk about it. I can’t, okay? I just …” I took a deep breath that sounded more like a sob. “I want to go to bed. I want to sleep and wake up and figure out what the hell I’m doing, and then we can talk. But I just can’t talk tonight because I don’t have words for how I feel.”

That seemed to hit both of them in different ways. My dad’s face softened and he just said, “Okay, baby, we’ll talk in the morning.”

My mom, though?

“Did Jesse say something to you?” she asked. “Did he hurt your feelings?”

Moms, man. How do they always
know
?

“Mom, this isn’t kindergarten,” I started to say.

“He did, didn’t he. Oh, I knew it. I knew it. Did he say something about you being a spy?”

“Of course he did!” I cried. “What else do you think we argue about? It’s the
only
thing we fight about! It’s not like you and Dad! At least you two work together and can share information. You didn’t have to start off your relationship by lying to each other in Paris. Which, by the way, is still a sketchy story, and I’m really pissed that you won’t tell me more about it and about Dominic.”

My parents looked stricken. “We don’t tell you everything for the same reason that you don’t tell Roux and Jesse everything,” my dad murmured. “We were keeping you safe.”

“Safe from
what
?” I cried. “Does anyone ever just tell the truth anymore?”

I was crying now, really crying, and my dad moved to comfort me, but I stepped back and put out my arm, keeping him at bay. “No, please,” I said. “Just tell me the truth or don’t do anything.”

My mom sank down on a stool at our kitchen island, resting her elbows on the concrete top. “We told you we used to go through the tunnels, right?” she said, and I wiped my eyes and nodded.

“In Paris,” I said. “You and Dad.”

My dad sat down next to my mom and picked up her hand. “We stumbled across this map when we were around your age,” he explained. “It showed all these underground tunnels, so we started exploring, just us and a few other kids from school, and we realized that we could use these tunnels to get into different sites in Paris. We could break into museums or the Pantheon, whatever we wanted, so we started to fix up some of these old building and relics. We didn’t steal anything,” he added quickly. “Your parents aren’t those kinds of criminals.”

“I love that you have to clarify that,” I said, but my tears were already drying. “Did Dominic go with you?”

“No,” my mom said. “We didn’t tell him about them. We
wouldn’t
tell him, to be more specific. Dominic was always …
different
from us. He was sneaky. A couple of students accused him of stealing things from their dorm rooms. He could take things at noon and return them at two and no one would see it happen.”

“It was like he was a magician,” my dad said. “He could make things just appear. Or disappear.”

“You thought he would steal from all the museums if you gave him the chance,” I said, putting the pieces together.

My mom nodded. “And he got upset with us, of course. We never agreed with the Collective recruiting him, but we couldn’t blame them. And Dominic never did anything illegal, or at least, nothing that we could prove. Not until now.”

“So he doesn’t know about the tunnels?” I asked.

“Oh, he knows. He just didn’t know what we used to
do, or how we used to do it. And again, we were just having fun. We were young and dumb teenagers.”

“
Ahem
,” I said.

“You’ll see one day.” My mom smiled at me. “One day you’ll be amazed by all the things you didn’t know.”

“I already feel that way now,” I told her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about all this?”

“Because we were afraid that Dominic might try to get the information from you,” my dad admitted. “It was such a little thing, but we never knew what he would do. And now …” He raised his hands, then dropped them into his lap. “You know.”

“I wish you had told me.”

“I wish we didn’t have to.”

My mom’s words hung in the air as I contemplated what they told me. “Any other family secrets we need to air?” I asked.

“Not yet,” my dad asked. “How about you? Want to get anything off your chest?”

“Not yet,” I echoed. The pressure of the night was starting to weigh on me, and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts, both old and new. “Do you mind if I go to bed? I’m really tired.”

“Of course,” my mom said, coming to hug me, and I let her. “We love you, okay? We love you so much.”

“Love you, too,” I said, then tried not to wince when she gave me an extra-hard squeeze. “See you in the morning.”

I woke up the next morning around 10:00 a.m., still exhausted. I had tossed and turned for most of the night, but I hadn’t cried any more after turning off the lights. Crying was too draining, too emotional, and I needed every ounce of strength that I had to figure out this case and get my life back on track. Or at the very least, figure out a new track. Clearly this whole “be a spy and a teenage girl at the same time, yay!” thing wasn’t working.

When I rolled over, I saw an
A
card taped to my bedroom door. “Oh, God,” I muttered, but dragged myself out of bed and went to look at it. Angelo had clearly been here that morning, doing his sneaky thing with his ever-present cards. I wondered if he had talked to my parents at all, or if they had talked to him. They were no doubt furious with him for not letting me tell them about the case, but I knew Angelo could handle himself. I just didn’t feel like getting stuck in the crossfire, which, the more I thought about it, seemed like a pretty good metaphor for the current state of my life.

“So what do you have to tell me today?” I said to the card, turning it over. The familiar pen-and-ink drawing was on the back, stone archways stretched across a small courtyard of trees and grass. It was Angelo’s sketch of the Cloisters, a small part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was at the very tip-top of Manhattan.

“Oh, joy,” I said, then got into the shower.

When I was ready to leave, I opened my bedroom door and stuck my head out. I felt like a rabbit, poking its head out of its hideaway to see how close the enemies are. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to my parents. I just didn’t want to
talk
to my parents.

They weren’t there, though, and I found a note on the counter that they had gone to run errands. That seemed dubious at best, and I wondered if maybe they didn’t want to talk to me, either. It was too awkward to make small talk and too soon to discuss what was really wrong. It’s always bizarre when you realize that your parents don’t have a clear solution to the problem, that they’re just as confused as you are. It makes them too real, too human, flawed just like you.

“And how was your journey north?” Angelo asked when I approached him at the Cloisters. He was sitting against one of the archways, tiny coffee cup in hand that I knew held a double espresso, and he looked as calm as ever. He had the sort of serenity of a man with a plan, which made me feel a little better.