He hands me a brown paper bag. I open it to find a partially eaten blueberry muffin, half a banana, and a string cheese wrapper, and give it back along with some serious side-eye.
“I got hungry on the drive to school,” he says, looking guilty as he stuffs it into his Phantom Menace backpack, a relic from his dad’s bunker. I tried to tell him no one beyond middle school carries a Star Wars backpack, and certainly not one from a movie two decades old, but Bunker doesn’t care about that kind of thing. He likes what he likes, including my food, apparently.
Just thinking about that muffin makes my stomach growl, but missing breakfast was worth avoiding another interrogation from Bunker. Of course, he’d have tried to mask his questions, but Bunk isn’t exactly a whiz at subterfuge. It’s hard to learn the nuances of interpersonal deception—also known as lying—when you spend your whole life with only one person, sharing a three-hundred-square-foot space. Pretty hard to hide anything in that situation.
“Look, we’ve only known each other a short time, but we’re already like brothers from another mother. Except for you actually being a brother. Wait—since I’m not black, is it okay for me to call you that?” Bunker asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “What I’m saying is, you can confide in me. Come on, aren’t you just a little worried about … the incident?”
I consider pretending I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I know evasion won’t work with Bunker. He’ll only pester me until I concede or punch him in the face. I like Bunk; in fact, he’s my only friend at Carlisle, even if we aren’t quite at the ‘brother’ level yet. That’s something Rogers would consider further evidence of my emotional attachment issues. An operative should never have actual friends, only assets.
Still, I’d rather avoid punching Bunker in the face, so I try a confusion tactic instead.
“I’ll admit I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. Depending on how those freshmen frame the whole thing, if she ever saw that photo, Darlene would make my life hell.”
“Darlene?”
“My girlfriend, you know, back home in Texas? I told you about her.”
“No, sir, you did not. First time I have ever heard of this Darlene person,” Bunker says, sounding skeptical. I don’t dare look at his face to get a read. Not that I need to. It’s clear from his voice he doesn’t believe me. “How is it possible that we’ve shared a home for eight weeks and I have never heard a single mention of a girlfriend ‘back home’?”
“Because when I left, things weren’t so great between us. She was angry I’d chosen Carlisle over her. I wasn’t sure there was anything to tell,” I explain, feigning interest in something buried deep inside my locker. “But we’ve been talking and, you know, working it out with the long-distance thing. So yeah, I’m a little worried about what they might do with the picture.”
I peek around my locker door and manage an expression of worry that must convince Bunker, because he seems to buy the story.
“And what about her?” Bunker says in a low voice. “Is you-know-who aware of Darlene?”
He nods to someone across the hall, but I don’t turn around to see who’s there.
I already know.
“She wouldn’t care,” I say, crushed as I am to admit it.
“I get it,” Bunker says, nodding knowingly. “You haven’t told her.”
“There’s nothing between us, so there’s no reason to tell,” I say, hoping Bunker senses I might actually punch him in the face.
“Uh huh, that’s why you couldn’t stop talking about her after you guys went out that one time. Didn’t sound like ‘nothing’ to me.”
“Like you said, it was a one-time thing, okay? Moving on.” This time, my tone should make it clear even to Bunker that the Q&A session is over.
He stares at me for a second, and while I’m a good actor—nature of the job and all—I get the feeling Bunker hasn’t believed a word I’ve said since he walked up. I see in his expression that he’s forming another question, but he must think better of it.
“You probably haven’t been online this morning, given your aversion to the internet,” Bunker says, and then it’s like I can see the cartoon light bulb go on over his head. “Which could point to you actually being Peter Smith, mild-mannered prep-school student, because a you-know-what would be on the dark web infiltrating sleeper cells and black-hat networks—”
“I think you mean the deep web—not the same thing.”
“—on the other hand, your aversion to social media is the appropriate response of someone flying under the radar,” Bunker says, ignoring my correction. “Anyway, I already know how those girls will frame it.”
I get this sinking feeling, like when the teacher is handing out graded exams and you’re pretty sure you bombed.
“What are you talking about?”
“You really need to get online more often. For all your talk about hacking code, or code-hacking, or whatever—”
I stop him before he can go off on another tangent. “What were you saying about the freshmen?”
“Oh, right,” Bunker says, handing me his phone. “I’d look like a sweaty mess in desperate need of a shower. Thanks to the born-with-it tan and six-pack abs, you manage to look like a glistening Adonis.”
I take the phone and give Bunker a look that says, Stop saying crap like that.
There’s the photo on Twitter—my expression looking like someone just told me I won the Powerball instead of the fear and anger I felt at the time—along with a caption: See Prettyboy run. My stomach drops, but only for a second, before my brain pushes that reflexive feeling away. They posted it last night to the account @CarlisleAcademy, and so far, it has been retweeted a couple hundred times.
Wow. That’s kind of a lot, but I pretend like I’m not worried about it. The hacker has no idea I’m on his tail, and no idea what I look like. He was only at the compound for a few hours before my team’s incursion and, on the off chance he saw me, it had to have been from a distance. I look a helluva lot different than I did then, and not just from the addition of eyeglasses. Here, I’m clean-shaven and let my hair grow out into a high fade. In Ukraine, my hair was barely there and I had ditched my razor for a few weeks.
“You and a few of her closest friends are the only ones who even care,” I say, returning his phone. “Stop worrying. It ain’t nothing but a thing.”
And it really isn’t, when I consider why I’m even at Carlisle. I was there when Rogers vouched for me, saying I had the makings of a great operative. I may be on suspension, tasked with an assignment-not-really, and everyone in the office probably thinks Early Bird is a horrible idea after my Ukraine performance, but I see it as my shot at redemption, and I don’t plan to screw it up.
CHAPTER 3
After the first-period bell rings, I put the photo out of my mind and replace it with the other thing that has kept me up worrying more than a few nights, which isn’t hard to do since she sits two rows in front of me.
Katie Carmichael is the “her” Bunker thinks might want to know about the nonexistent Darlene. But he couldn’t be more wrong. I could spontaneously combust right here in front of Mr. Maitland’s World Geo class, and she wouldn’t bother to throw the contents of her water bottle on me.
As I walk down the row to my desk, I pretend I don’t even see Katie. But I must fail miserably. She makes a point of turning to ask a question of the girl next to her, going out of her way to be oblivious to me.