Barking Up the Wrong Lead - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

I woke up to the shrieks of teenage girls reuniting after almost a month away.  My cover must’ve gotten the best of me the night before because instead of just pretending to be asleep in the windowsill, I had actually done it.  My neck was stiff.  My legs were cramped.  Everything about me was sore.

And then I remembered that Mom was missing and I suddenly felt numb.

“There you are,” I heard my best friend say, quick blurps of a southern accent shining through (as they always did after she spent time with her mother).  “Up.  You’re going to miss dinner and it’s Italian night.”

Before I knew what was happening, her thin hand was around my wrist, pulling me up to my feet.  Even though she was a foot shorter than me, the movement was effortless.  Not for the first time since I’d met her, I found myself fearing the disproportionate strength of Alice Anderson.  “Dinner?”  I asked, sleep crusting the corners of my eyes.  “What time is it?”

Alice turned to look at me like it was the strangest questions that a person could ask.  I guess for a Gallagher Girl, it sort of is.  But then she straightened out her face as if nothing were wrong and strung me along behind her, leading us straight towards the Grand Hall.  “Pizza, pasta, that bread that you dip in oil—it’s all gonna be there.”

She pulled me through the sea of girls.  All shapes and sizes were flooding through the massive doors, each looking up to read the sign that gave us permission to speak our native languages.  All was as it should’ve been.  When I closed my eyes and listened, I could pretend that everything was normal.  When I closed my eyes and just listed, I could pretend that Mom wasn’t gone.

But when I opened my eyes again, the pretending was over.  Every set of eyes we passed all turned to steal a glance at me.  Every reflective surface in the room was hot with the curious looks of trained operatives trying to go unseen.  But I saw them.  I saw all of them.  All of the pity and the fear and the sadness.  I saw it all in each of my sisters as we passed and I knew that the word about Mom had spread.

Alice plowed through the onlookers until we finally reached our spot at the sophomore table.  Our roommates, Faith Neal and Blair Bateson were already there, Faith working on some sort of master plan with her tablet and Blair fiddling with her Rubik’s cube.  “Found her,” Alice told them both.  It was only then that I realized I had been lost at all.

Neither of them responded, which was pretty standard for Faith.  Most of the time she was too distracted by her screen to even notice the conversations around her.  That’s why she and Blair made such good friends.  Faith never spoke and Blair never shut up.  They were truly perfect for one another. 

Except Blair had shut up.  She wasn’t saying anything at that table, even though she was usually the first to speak.  When I looked down at her busy hands, I noticed that she wasn’t spinning her Rubik’s, but rather, peeling the stickers and putting them where they needed to go.  As in cheating.  And, well, Blair Bateson holds about six world records for solving Rubik’s cubes, so it didn’t take a genius to see that something was wrong.  “What’s going on, Blair?”  I asked her.

“She didn’t approve me,” my roommate mumbled.  The words were right there, like she’d been waiting for someone to ask.  “Woods didn’t approve me for CoveOps.  Stuck me on Research and Development.”

“What?”  Alice spat.  “What do you mean she didn’t approve you?  Woods loves you!”

“I don’t know,” Blair said, slamming her cube onto the table.  One of the squares popped off and slid across the tabletop.  “Alls I know is that I signed up for CoveOps and I don’t have it on my schedule.”