Sealed with a Lie (3 page)

Sunglasses? It’s a cloudy, rainy day in Paris. Why would they need shades? And especially inside?

They’re so intent on the computers that they don’t even notice my arrival, and their expressions are rapt. Almost worshipful. I have a fleeting moment of terror that perhaps Matthis has introduced my little brother to porn.

I sneak up behind the boys just to make sure and yell, “Boo!”

Matthis jumps three feet out of his chair and comes down in a tangle of flying limbs, hyperventilating.

Charlie only lifts a pale blond eyebrow. “You’re so immature.”

“I know.” At sixteen, I love being told that by a seven-year-old. “Can’t help myself. What are you guys up to?”

“This is so cool. Matthis saw these sunglasses on the Internet and developed his own prototype!” Charlie waves his pair. “And guess what they do?”

I open my mouth to say something irreverent, but he doesn’t wait for an answer.

“They take pictures! And video!”

“Really?” I’m intrigued. “How?”

“You just touch the logo on the left—it’s a button—and it takes still photos. Press the one on the right for video. Then you turn your head and look at whatever you want to record. The images get stored here”—he points to the stems of the glasses—“in tiny hidden flash drives. And then you can download them to your computer.”

“Wow,” I say. “That’s very cool.” I turn to Matthis. “And you built these? Yourself?”

He’s recovered from his fright. He bobs his head shyly.

“You rock, Matthis!”

He blushes, stares at the floor, then folds his long legs up in a Buddha position, rolling office chair and all. That takes a certain amount of talent and balance all by itself, and I tell him so. He blushes again—it’s hard to see because his skin is so dark, but I can tell, even in the low lighting. He casts about for something to do so that he won’t have to meet my eyes and settles for snatching off his glasses and cleaning them on his sweater.

Matthis is one of the shyest people I’ve ever met. It’s sort of endearing, though. I don’t know him that well, partly because Charlie and I have been here only a couple of months and partly because the dude doesn’t speak. But his dad is the janitor at the GI building, and I suspect he has a complex about that—even though his mom is the top analyst at GI and that alone should make him proud.

Anyway. I try to draw Matthis out of his shell whenever I can. Not that it’s so easy.

“So, Matthis. Show me a video that you’ve made with these wild sunglasses.”

He jams his glasses back onto his nose, then exchanges a glance with Charlie, who nods. Why am I suddenly uneasy?

With a few strokes on his keyboard, Matthis brings up an image of my face on his screen. My face and the back of Evan’s head. As the camera pans out, it reveals that we’re in our
gi
s. Matthis pushes the play button.

“Seriously?” I query.

The two boys giggle, and I am forced to relive my humiliating defeat at Evan’s hands. It’s very weird to see the combination of aggression and arrogance on my own mug, and excruciating to witness the moment when it changes to shock and then mortification. Worse, I realize that I look like a rag doll that the Invincible Evan is toying with.

I cringe; now it’s my turn to blush. But the two boys don’t notice—they’re too pleased with their coup at my expense. Nice.

“Thanks for that,” I say breezily. “And I’m
fine
by the way—thanks for asking.”

“Oh, we knew that,” Charlie announces. “Evan would never hurt you. I mean, not really.”

Now I’m offended. “He made me pass out! You don’t think that’s hurting me?”

“Nah.”

“Wow, Charlie. You’re pretty callous, don’t you think?”

“Nope,” my little brother says. “Evan let go right away, and he looked like he’d do CPR on you in a heartbeat if necessary.”

“Totally,” Matthis agrees.

“Huh.” I swallow and try very hard not to think about that.
Luke, Luke, why won’t you come visit?
I know all I need is to see him in person, and this strange thing with Evan will go away.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m becoming a bad person . . . OMG, what if I turn out like my parents? The whole “blood will tell” thing? That doesn’t bear thinking about.

Even though I know stuff like this is not preordained—I
have control over the kind of person I become—anxiety floods my system. I feel as if ants are crawling over my body, doing little jigs on my skin. I need to get out of this building and away from anyone and anything in GI. The very last place I want to be right now is in spy school! Learning to be just like Mom and Dad.
Ugh.

“C’mon, Charlie,” I say, as casually as I can manage. “I hate to cut this short, but we need to be going.”

His face falls, and so does Matthis’s. “You guys can’t hang out for a while?”

I open my mouth to refuse, but they make big, sad puppy eyes at me.
Aaargggh.
I am desperate for air and just want to be outside on the street. “We really do have to be going . . . but how about if we stop on the way home for hot chocolate? With extra whipped cream?”

There’s an amazing little chocolate café a couple of blocks away. It looks like an old-fashioned tearoom, but they specialize in hot cocoa and pastries. It’s a little bit girlie, but Charlie loves anything on the menu and so chooses to ignore the feminine surroundings.

“Yeah!” he says with glee.

I turn to Matthis, who looks hangdog. “Hey, you want to join us?”

He nods, his expression breaking my heart. It’s as if he’s fearful that I’m going to take back the invitation, that it’s too good to be true. Poor Matthis. I don’t think anyone ever really asks him to do anything fun.

“Well, c’mon already,” I nudge him.

He almost trips over his own feet as he jumps up, wraps the prototypes of the sunglasses in soft chamois
cloth, then starts to stuff them into his backpack.

“Hey,” Charlie says. “Why don’t we wear them and video stuff?”

So they do. As we hit the streets of Paris, I’m unwillingly drawn to the beauty, architecture, and history of the city, while they video passersby, dogs in cafés, pigeons, and even a newspaper page that’s being blown along the sidewalk.

I wrestle—not too hard—with my moodiness while acknowledging a cool thing about Paris: It’s willing, especially on a gray December day like this one, to be moody right along with me.

The boys video the chocolate shop’s display window, the stairs, the menu, and the waitress. And after we’ve gorged ourselves on
pain au chocolat
and
chocolat chaud
(hot chocolate), Charlie begs to borrow the pair of sunglasses he’s wearing, just for the night. He swears to return them the next day. Matthis is clearly tickled that Charlie loves them so much, so he agrees.

Oh, boy. I guess Charlie will be taking video of the Metro station, the tracks, and the train, too . . . somehow, I manage to contain my excitement.

The Paris Metro is not nearly as clean as the Metro in DC. I make Charlie hold my hand, even though he’s offended that I still treat him like a baby and he feels that it’s “entirely unnecessary.” Jeez. Charlie even talks like a banker! Where he got his formal speech patterns, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that he reads so much . . . he even reads
Roget’s Thesaurus
for fun.

It’s wall-to-wall cranky people in every corridor and stairwell. At six p.m., everyone in Paris is streaming home from work. Charlie is still videoing away, after confiding to me that he’s looking for particularly crabby expressions on “old fart frogs.” This makes me laugh, maybe because it’s the first thing out of his mouth this afternoon that’s something a kid his age might say.

There are certainly lots of “old fart frogs” to choose
from. Some look stressed. Some look angry. Others just look tired. Every once in a while, someone shocks me by looking happy and thankful to be alive. I wonder, when I see these radiant faces, if they’ve found drugs or religion. I guess that’s a terrible thing to say. Maybe they’re just seduced by the essence of Paris.

Anyway, Charlie’s having a ball, and I can’t help but smile in the face of his innocence and delight in the simple pleasures of life—not to mention technology. It makes me feel a little lighter inside.

I propel Charlie onto a train on the 12 line, headed for Issy-les-Moulineaux, the suburb of Paris where we live now with Interpol agent Rebecca Morrow, her husband, and her daughter, Abby.

Evan, Charlie, and I are Rebecca’s satellite kids. The three of us are enrolled in GI, but Abby isn’t. Poor thing, she failed the basic recruitment tests—not that I think she cares all that much. Abby’s mission in life is really just to fit in, be popular, and find a hot boyfriend. In short, she is totally normal, unlike the rest of us.

Abby is friendly; she’s sweet . . . but there’s something about the way she hurls herself at anyone “cool” that smacks of desperation. It’s really off-putting. I always feel the urge to sit her down and explain this, but it would only hurt her feelings and make her even more socially desperate. Besides, it’s not like I’m the poster child for popularity. These days, I could write a how-to manual on becoming an outcast.

As I ponder my role in GI, I get a weird, jumpy
feeling. A sensation that someone’s watching me. It’s nothing specific, just a gut thing. I look around but don’t see anyone taking any notice of us.

I’m probably just sensitive to my little brother and his demented video-recording sunglasses, that’s all. But he’s not even gazing in my direction. He’s now gone from studying people’s faces to honing in on their shoes.

I shake my head. Don’t be surprised if next year there’s a big photography exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou or someplace, entitled: “Paris Metro: a la Chaussure! Photographs by Child Prodigy Charles Andrews.”

I feel eyes drilling into my nape. I spin around, hoping to solve this mystery—and see a very normal businesswoman dressed in a navy coat with a yellow scarf. I spin the other way and look straight into the face of Lisette Brun, one of Cecily Alarie’s sidekicks.

Predictably, she makes a little
moue
with her pale, frosted lips and averts her gaze. I never “got” the word
“moue”
until I came to Paris. It’s one of those terms that can only be demonstrated by a French chick, or maybe Kate Moss.

Next to Lisette, looking bored to tears, stands LuLu Something-or-Other, another GI snot and cohort of Cecily’s. She spots me, lifts a dark eyebrow, and yawns before murmuring something into Lisette’s ear. Something that I’m quite sure is about me and not complimentary, since they break into quiet laughter. Their gazes meet mine for another half second, then
slide sideways toward the window, as if anything at all is more worthy of their attention than
moi
.

I’m really glad that ours is the next stop, and when the doors open with a whoosh, I tow Charlie off the train and into the noisy beehive that is the Metro station. Sounds assault our ears: the rumble of the trains, the galloping of thousands of shoes on concrete, the conversations and wails of children. The smells are overpowering too—wool and cologne, baking bread and coffee, body odor and a tinge of urine.

I’m glad when we’re through the crowd, up the stairs, and out into the cool air of the street. Charlie has at last lost interest in his gizmo glasses and is dangling them by an earpiece. His feet are dragging, and I suspect he’s experiencing a sugar low after all that cocoa and the pastry he inhaled.

“Here, let me take those.” I put Matthis’s precious video-shades into the outside zipper compartment on my backpack and grab Charlie’s hand. “Almost home.”

“It’s not home,” he says, looking forlorn. “We can never go home again.”

That stops me in my tracks. I turn to face him and crouch down so that we’re the same height. “Oh, Charlie. We’ll make a new home one day. One that’s just ours. I’m so sorry that all of this has happened.”

“It’s not your fault,” he points out.

“I know . . . but . . .” I stare at his small, freckled button nose. It seems weighed down by the horn-rims, just as his innocence is weighed down by his extraordinary
intelligence and appetite for knowledge. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and put everything back the way it was before.”

He kicks at a cobblestone, then looks up and meets my gaze with old eyes, eyes that are wise beyond his years. “I don’t. It wasn’t that great, remember? Our parents were two big walking lies—we just didn’t know it.”

Rebecca Morrow’s Paris town house on Rue Pierre Brossolette is tall and skinny. The living room, kitchen, and dining room are on the ground floor. Rebecca and Stefan, her husband, and Abby have bedrooms on the second floor. Charlie and I sleep on the third floor, while Evan has moved his things up into the small attic space, which is lit by a couple of decrepit dormer windows. He has to use a space heater because it’s freezing up there, and in the summer he’ll have to use an electric fan.

Evan could have stayed with us on the third floor, but this way everybody has a room and some privacy. And it would have been extremely weird to bunk right across the hall from him—it’s weird enough to have him only one floor up.