Bunker notices it too, and whispers, “Oooh, it’s chilly in here. Guess you were right,” as we take our seats beside each other.
Maybe I should back up a minute, because I’ve probably presented Katie in a poor light when she isn’t the bad guy in our failed equation. That’s totally on me. I was initially focused on her because I thought she was the hacker I’m after. She was new to Carlisle, like Bunker and me, which automatically put her on my list. I’d been tracking my target through his signature, which is how some hackers mark their work. Sort of the way taggers tag their graffiti. It seems counterintuitive for a hacker to leave clues, especially one who has been trying—unsuccessfully, thanks to yours truly—to infiltrate our national security agencies, but some are so impressed with their own skills, they taunt hacker-trackers like me into trying to catch them. Sounds stupid, but these guys are actually geniuses. The type who tag their work are also classic narcissists. Aka assholes on crack.
Katie is not that, despite the whole wouldn’t-put-me-out-if-I-was-on-fire thing. Not that I can blame her. In eight short weeks, she’s become Carlisle’s star soccer player. She’s already poised to take the crown away from whoever won last year’s Most Popular Girl Ever. And the engineering club overthrew their three-term president in favor of Katie Carmichael as their leader. But don’t cry for the deposed ex-president. He took her to homecoming. That’s Katie’s problem, and mine: her unassailable likability. And the fact that she’s drop-dead hot. Plus, she’s got that English accent. Even the way she pronounces my name, Pee-tah, makes me—
“Mr. Smith, did you hear me, or is communication with you an exercise in futility this morning? Hello—is anyone home?”
I’m so focused on staring at the back of Katie’s head that Maitland startles me nearly out of my seat, appearing out of nowhere and rapping his knuckles on my desk.
“Um … I … uh … I mean, what was the question, sir?”
“Brilliant. Scintillating. But don’t overexert yourself for our sakes,” Maitland says, being his usual special self. The guy hates me for reasons unknown.
“Sorry, I’m a little sleepy this morning. Stayed up too late last night watching Seabiscuit. Ever seen that movie, Mr. Maitland?”
He gives me the evil eye but doesn’t say another word about my lack of brilliance. Oh, riiight, that’s the reason he hates me. A while back, I arrived at his class early, hoping to corner Katie into having more than a one-word conversation, but caught Maitland on the phone making book on a horse. He tried to play it off, but I knew his game. Before I discovered the money I could make from hacking, one of my hustles was hunting unclaimed betting tickets.
I’d take a Greyhound from Atlanta to the Birmingham dog track, sneak inside, and spend the whole weekend picking tickets off the ground, left there by people who didn’t have time to stand in line to cash out a five-or ten-dollar ticket. Cash in enough of them, though? Even after I’d pay out my partner—I’ve always been a decent con artist, but no teller is going to cash tickets for a twelve-year-old—I’d clear two or three hundred dollars and get back home before the truancy officer could report me to Children’s Services. It was easy enough as long as I had a half-assed foster family—and I had a few—who looked the other way if I spent a night or two away from home, so long as they got their tiny government check.
So, I know a pick-six from a superfecta. Both are pretty desperate bets, and I overheard Maitland place big money on both. I called him on it, and he called it the “sport of kings,” like giving it a snob name could cover the fact that he was violating Carlisle’s code of ethics. Yeah, I see you, Maitland. And he knows it, which is why he moves on to other prey.
“Ms. Carmichael, perhaps you can enlighten us?”
When Katie looks back at me, I detect a fleeting glimmer of sympathy. Or maybe not, since the eye-roll she gives me is not quite as fleeting. That I read clearly. Then she dismisses me with a toss of that dark, shiny hair I remember smelled so good and made me think of strawberries and vanilla cream. Even her hair smells English.
“Charlemagne’s march across Europe and his subsequent formation of the Carolingian Empire was driven by his desire to spread Christianity,” she says. “But his success in conquering the Saxons pointed to the possibility that he was motivated by territorial aggrandizement as much as religious fervor.”
For three seconds, the whole room is quiet—even Maitland, who is never at a loss for words. Intelligence delivered in that accent? Katie Carmichael can make even “territorial aggrandizement” sound good. I mean, she’s perfect, in a good way. I just can’t believe she could be the one who tried to crack NORAD a few months ago. Plus, when you look like her—olive skin that kinda seems to glow, brown eyes with flecks of something else in them, and her lips—well, why waste all that sitting in a room behind a computer? The bad guys would have to be idiots not to put an operative like that to better use in the field, no matter how mad her cracking skills are. That’s one reason why I ruled her out as the hacker. She’s brilliant, gorgeous, and the complete opposite of an asshole. Everyone loves Katie, including Maitland, and the only other thing he seems to love is hearing himself speak.
I had to end things the morning after our first real date—dinner and a movie in town, followed by half an hour in the back seat of her car making out. There’s another thing she could win awards for. She’s the best kisser.
Of course I wanted more. What guy doesn’t want more? But with Katie, just the kissing was enough to let me know she’d be the kind of distraction I couldn’t risk. My target could be sitting right next to me decoding the Pentagon’s cipher algorithms, but if Katie walked into the room, I’d probably be like, Whatever, dude. Go for it. So yeah, I dropped the it’s-me-not-you bomb on her the next morning, which also happened to be the day before I was supposed to take her to homecoming.
So you can understand why she hates me.
“… he not only shaped the new Holy Roman Empire,” Katie is saying as she wraps up her answer, “but continued to influence French monarchs a thousand years after his death, as we’ll see next semester when studying Bonaparte and the rise of the Napoleonic Empire.”
While we’re all absorbing the English-accented knowledge that has just been dropped on us, a screeching fire alarm breaks us all from our Katie Carmichael trance.
My fear instinct kicks in, but it subsides when I remind myself that this is probably a surprise drill or a prank. As we’ve all been instructed since kindergarten, no matter which school we attended, we keep calm and walk in single file out of the classroom and into the hall. The building is shaped like a U, and at the end of each arm is a stairwell and exit leading to the parking lot. We all follow the escape route we practiced at the beginning of the school year and head for the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
“I thought we only do one of these a semester,” I say to Bunker. “Not that I’m complaining about getting out of Maitland’s class for a few minutes.”
“Or away from that icy indifference Katie is throwing your direction,” Bunker says as he lines up behind me. “How much you wanna bet someone pulled the alarm?”
“That’s a sucker bet,” I say, because these things are never an actual fire, but I still keep an eye out for Katie, indifference and all, just in case for the first time in the history of ever, there’s a real emergency. She’s four people ahead of me, but since I have half a foot on her and a couple inches on the next tallest guy in the room, I can spot her no problem. At least, until I can’t. Somewhere between the hallway and the stairwell, I lose sight of her.
What the hell? I only turned my back for a second, and now she’s gone. How does a whole girl just disappear?
“Bunker, do you see Katie up ahead?”