Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twelve

Sometimes I still get tired.

I know she's been gone for a while and that it's time to move on or whatever, but sometimes, when it's just starting to get dark out and everything gets a little quieter, my mother's necklace starts to feel a bit heavier.  It makes my shoulders slough and my back ache.  It's like I can feel it every single time I move, pounding agaisnt my chest as it swings.  

Sometimes I still get tired.

"Focus Goode," are words that have been said to me at least a hundred times in my life, each and every time by Charlotte Woods.

A year ago, I probably would've bit back.  I might've spit out some remark that I thought to be far wittier than it actually was or given her one of my best glares, but I had since learned to pick the fights I had with Woods.  Pick them carefully and pick them well, because more often than not, I was going to lose.  And besides.  That night, I was feeling a little tired.  

I had no idea where we were going.  Nineteen minutes before, Woods had scooped up the junior CoveOps class, thrown us into the back of the van, and told us to could the seconds.  We'd turned right, then left, lef again, then right.  We'd stopped at seven intersections, only one of which was a four-way, and I was pretty sure that there had been a roundabout in there somewhere.  Or the driver was intoxicated, but probably the former.

None of us asked where we were going.  We didn't asked when we'd be back.  When Woods tells you to get in a van, you get in and you shut up.

There wasn't a single word.  No whispers, no codes, and not even the discrete application of sign language.  Not a single word until the van stopped and someone pulled open the back doors.  "You're late."

Dad?

He had that signature smirk on his face, his eyes glistening with excitement as he glanced over each of us.  There was something about the way he looked just then, leaning up against the door like that.  Something about the way his smoky grey fleece fit aroudn his torso and the way the moonlight streaked his hair that made me think about how, at some point, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Dad had been a total hottie.

He scratched at the scruff on his jaw and once he rolled up his sleeves, my classmates were done for.   Almost the entire van broke out into a sighfest and I knew that Dad had heard it too, because he looked straight at me with a smug expression that said You hear that?  I'm adorable.

I rolled my eyes at him, as did Alice, since she had long ago grown accustomed to and possibly immune to the appearance of my hot dad.  Woods wasn't doing any sighing either, ducking as she jumped out of the van.  She turned back to us, fire in her eye, wondering why we weren't already ahead of her.  "Let's go, ladies."

We didn't need to be told twice.

The first thing I saw was the fountain, a grandiose marble spring at the center of the frosted garden, water spouting out in every direction and splashing agaisnt the illuminated waves below.  It seemed to fit perfectly among that neighborhood made up of pastille and chipped paint—houses even older than the Gallagher Mansion standing resolite in that fading sunset.  The roofs were pointed and sloped.  The windows curled.  Even the streetlights gave off that same cozy warmth that only ever seemed to come with age.  

The van had dropped us off in a park right at the center of it all.  There was a wrought iron bench looping in on itself and an empty chessboard sitting mid-game just beside it.  A flock of birds were pecking at the ground where someone had left crumbs, but who that person could be, I didn't know.  No one was out aside from us.  In this neighborhood, everyone went to bed before eight.