Going Rogue
ContentsIt seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.
BILLY COLLINS,
“On Turning Ten”
Going in circles, it’s a vicious cycle This is a crash course, this ain’t high school.
JAY-Z,
“American Dreamin’”
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-size movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor:
“Do not try to find us.”
— from
www.futilitycloset.com/2005/03/14/underground-cinema
/
“Roux?”
Nothing.
“Roux?”
Still nothing.
“Roux!”
“Ssshh! I’m thinking!”
I glanced up from my lock and key to see my best friend, Roux, frowning at a tiny magnetic chessboard. “How long does it take to move one chess piece?” I asked her. “You’ve been sitting there for nearly an hour.”
“Did anyone ever ask Catherine the Great how long it took her to take over her husband’s army?” Roux asked, her eyes never leaving the board. “Or Elizabeth the First how long it took her to do … whatever she did? No. So sssshh.”
“But they were royalty. You—”
“I dare you to finish that sentence. Really. I dare you.”
I sighed and sat back in my desk, restless and ready to
leave. We had been at an SAT prep class for most of the afternoon (Roux’s absentee parents had forced her to register because they read about it in
New York
magazine’s “What’s Right Right Now” issue while stuck on a plane to Milan; I enrolled because Roux threatened to end our friendship if I didn’t), but Roux was in no hurry to leave. We were in some lecture hall at NYU, where the one bright spot was the central air-conditioning. Manhattan had been engulfed in a late-August heat wave for nearly a week, and I was pretty sure that our prep class had a few stragglers that just wanted to escape the heat and had no interest in learning about analogies and test-taking secrets.
Roux was still bent over her chessboard, muttering to herself. Angelo, a family friend and pretty much my surrogate uncle, had taught Roux the rules of chess last spring, and they had been engaged in a summer-long game that seemed never ending. He refused to play online, though, which meant Roux had to keep the game going on her travel chess set.
“Roux seems to be quite good at scheming and masterminding,” Angelo had commented soon after their game started.
“And this surprises you how?” I replied.
“Touché.”
But Roux also had a soft, mushy side, and she was one of the most trustworthy people I knew. “You’re like a Cad-bury egg,” I had once tried to explain to her. “You’ve got this hard shell, but inside you’re all sweet and mushy and gooey.”
She waited a few seconds before socking me in the shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Can a Cadbury egg do that? That’s what I thought.”
Despite her prickly personality, we’d been friends from the moment we met last year. And she was one of only two people who knew my most secret of secrets, that Angelo, my parents, and I all worked as spies for a secret organization known as the Collective.
I guess you could describe the Collective as a sort of rogue, secretive Robin Hood organization. We try to right wrongs, return money to retirement accounts, expose the bad guys for who they are without ever revealing ourselves. This time last year, I was in Reykjavík with my parents, exposing a human trafficking ring. We’ve been all over the world, but after a near disaster last fall, we now call Manhattan home.
At least for now.
“Wait a minute,” Roux said, sitting up straight with an evil grin spreading across her face. “Waaaait a minute. Oh, you’re dead, Angelo. God save the queen because here she comes.” She expertly moved one of her pieces, keeping one finger on top of the figure until she was sure, then let go with a triumphant cry.
“He’s going to weep when he sees that genius move I just made!” she crowed. “You can tell him I said that.”
“Can’t wait,” I said. “Can we go now?” I gestured toward the lock in front of me. It was complicated, and I had made exactly zero progress on trying to pick it.
“This is frustrating me and I want to throw it out the window.”
Roux peered down at the monstrosity. “What the hell is that?”
I sighed. “Annoying locks are annoying. I can’t crack it at all, but Angelo told me that I had to try and figure it out while he was gone.”
“He’s so irritating that way.” Roux nodded in sympathy. “When’s he coming back?”
“Dunno.” I flicked at the lock with my fingernail, but it refused to unlock itself. “He’s been gone almost two months, though. Too long.”
“I know, right? Do you know what it’s like to have to play travel chess with someone out of the country?” Roux sighed in what I’m sure she thought was solidarity. “But c’mon, you’re the best lock picker and safecracker that I know. You can do it. Rah, rah, rah and oh, screw it. I can’t fake enthusiasm in this heat. I need to save my energy.”
I glanced at her. “How many safecrackers do you know?”
She shrugged. “Hundreds, for all I know. You spies are a sneaky bunch.”
She had a point.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I said. “I’ll try to figure this out later.”
“So where is our assassin friend, anyway?” Roux asked as we got our bags together.
“For the millionth time,” I said with a sigh, “Angelo is not an assassin. He handles documents and currency. End of.”
“
Suuuure
he’s not an assassin,” Roux said. “You just can’t tell me because you’d be compromising my safety.” She gave me a huge, exaggerated wink and then nudged me in the ribs. “I get it.”
But I was telling her the truth about Angelo. He wasn’t an assassin; he handled the paper trail: phony passports and birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security cards. Whatever documents my family needed, he provided.
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.”