Becoming Calypso Chapter 3 (all)

“I went back to school today,” Katie announced as she wiped an invisible speck of dust off of well shredded jeans. The psychiatrist nodded, moving her body forward to invite more from her patient. “Mom and Dad suggested I go on a Friday, so that I’d have the weekend to recover from the day. They were right. I’m totally going to need this weekend.” Her voice broke, but she steadied herself quickly.1

“Everyone was coming up to me, apologizing for my loss.” She laughed bitterly, remembering, “It’s a funny word, loss. I haven’t lost her, like some toy dropped in some hidden corner of the basement, to be found once I’ve grown out of my need for it. Kelly was taken from me. A freak chill,” and her tone was derisive, her face snarling, “made the road icy. She was out later than she normally would be. It could have been anywhere from ten minutes to an hour before someone noticed the broken guardrail. She’d been under for over an hour by the time they got divers in the water to look for her. They said the current must have dragged her body away.2

“Was she conscious when it happened? Did she see her fate coming? Did she try to get to the surface but wasn’t able to? They keep saying something about the skid marks on the bridge being strange, like she tried to catch herself, but then it happened anyways. So she hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel, like the papers are trying to say. To me, it seems more like she caught herself, thought for one second that she wasn’t going to be crashing through that wall, felt this huge wave of relief for that knowledge,” she paused, then took a deep, shuddering breath, “and then hit the second patch of ice and went flying through the wall anyway. Was she conscious when she was headed for the water? Did she see the water rushing towards her? Or did the crash send her to the unconscious state that ultimately ended her life?”3

Her eyes, when they locked on the doctor’s, were red stained blue, swimming in tears. “I sat in the bathroom and sobbed through my lunch period. Rob found me there. He had a friend of his find me,” she laughed, the thought of a boy in a girls bathroom too amusing to ignore, even while tears poured down her cheeks and snot ran from her nose, even as the muscles of her face ignored her and pulled her mouth down into a frown, “and then she guarded the door while he sat with me on the floor of the girls restroom and tried to be strong for me.”4

She stopped, picked herself up and pulled in the emotions. “I’m going to sleep in Kelly’s bed tonight,” she informed the doctor gravely, tiredly.5

Both waited in silence for a few heartbeats. “They didn’t find her laptop in the car,” Katie murmured, “I wish they had. There were all these pictures of us on there. Pictures of her. When I realized it was gone, it felt like I was losing her all over again. I’ve looked at every picture of her in the house, but most of our life was recorded in digital form on that laptop. And now it’s gone. I’ve lost that too. And one day, if I lose my memories like other people have, will there be anything left of her?” She turned the full force of those swimming blue eyes on the doctor as she confessed, “Will there be anything left of her but the feeling that a ghost once haunted my house and our lives?”6

_-_-7

Callie learned quickly that training occurred in two week segments, feats which were deemed impossible to learn by some adults were accomplished in less than fifteen days by the teen prodigy. She’d been taught the arts of the trapeze, the tight ropes, and the silks, acrobatic acts which required intense concentration and incredible strength. Both she had in great measures.8

“Are you ready to run away with the circus yet?” Joel joked at lunch the Monday after Callie’s last day with the circus. Maggie was sitting with a crowd of girls at another table, so he’d affected a laid-back pose that hid the fact that his eyes were doing sweeps of the room, as if expecting danger to leap out at the red-head at any moment.9

“Well, I’ve fallen deeply in love with one of the contortionists,” Callie teased, lowering her voice to suggest that what she had to say was top secret and completely true. Joel had come with Callie, Liz and Ezra to see the show that Saturday, and had spent the entire time drooling over Nadia, the pretty Russian girl who had been Callie’s primary instructor. The two of them had gone down to talk to her, and Joel had made a fool of himself, in Callie’s opinion, trying to act suave and debonair in front of his new crush. Nadia had laughed along with Callie, but had permitted Joel to give her a chaste kiss on the cheek.10

“If he’s related to Nadia, I can see why,” Joel replied dreamily, missing the teasing tone.11

“She is Nadia, but don’t tell anyone,” Callie whispered dramatically, her tone sincere enough to have Joel whip his head around towards her in surprise. He sighed when that action knocked over his soda right into his lap.12

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he sighed dejectedly as Callie convulsed with silent giggles.13

“Oh,” she managed to squeak, “but I’m so glad it did.” He took that as an open invitation to take the rest of the drink and pour it into Callie’s lap. She avoided most of it, and only laughed when the rest landed on her knee.14

“I leave you two alone for a day and already the food is flying,” Maggie said with a sigh, appearing at Callie’s side suddenly.15

“You have an internal trouble meter, don’t you?” Callie asked as Joel growled, “It would never have happened if Callie hadn’t teased me about the contortionist.”16

The girls exchanged a glance and twin grins spread wickedly across their faces at his expense. It was gratifying for both to see his face pale as Maggie bat her eyelashes at him and asked “contortionist?” in a sugar-sweet voice.17

“You’re never going to be a secret service agent if you blurt things out without thinking,” Callie warned him before turning to Maggie and describing Nadia and Joel’s reaction to her. Joel appeared to sink lower and lower in his seat with every blushing “um” and “er” Callie faithfully recounted to a thoroughly amused Maggie.18

“She was going to run away with her,” he muttered sullenly, gesturing to Callie rudely. Maggie rolled her eyes but turned to Callie with eyebrows raised anyways.19

“Alas,” Callie shouted theatrically, standing up in her place and drawing the attention of the surrounding tables, “it was never to be for my sweet Nadia and me. We were two star-crossed lovers, destined for separation. We come from entirely different worlds, high class and high rise act. ‘Tis sorrowful to think on it,” she raised the back of her hand to her forehead dramatically, to the applause of several, including Maggie but certainly not Joel, who had his head pillowed on his arms on the table, “I shall think on her and pine for her until the end of my days.” She bowed, with many dramatic twirls and flips of her hands, and sat down with a huge grin on her face. “And my training there ended yesterday,” she admitted to Maggie and Joel when the buzz of conversations reached a safer level for private conversations.20

“Drama club could use you,” Maggie said, her eyes not on Callie but on the hamburger Joel was lifting to his mouth.21

“You could always visit,” Joel suggested, taking a bite while Maggie watched him chew longingly, “they aren’t leaving any time soon.”22

“Ah, the boy’s done his homework! Give the man a prize!” Callie laughed. “Maggie, you’re drooling,” she added.23

“Must not eat hamburger,” Maggie moaned, “Must remain a vegetarian!” she groaned as she collapsed forward onto the table theatrically, drawing the unwanted attention of her bodyguards, who started forward apprehensively. “I’m fine,” she growled at them, noticing their alarm. “God, I can’t even act strange at all anymore, can I?” she muttered under her breath.24

“Nope. Your safety is their prime objective,” Joel replied. Callie noticed that he’d finished the hamburger quickly while she’d been distracted by her bodyguards. “I want to hear more about Callie’s clandestine lover.”25

“It was a joke, Joey,” Callie rolled her eyes. “I was more interested in the strong man. He looks like a guy who can keep a girl satisfied,” she faked a sigh, “with all those muscles.”26

“If you can see them, they aren’t cool,” Joel scoffed. “The best is a man who’s got the muscles, but doesn’t look like he’s got them. He’s the one that surprises you. Hidden strengths, my friend, is a girl’s best friend.” He nodded to emphasize this point and took a huge bite of the apple Maggie had switched for his fries without his permission.27

She didn’t seem too thankful for his unwilling generosity, as the next words out of her mouth were “spoken just like a girl herself.”28

“No, Mags, I’m the girl with the awesome muscles no one can see,” he insisted, making his eyes puppy-dog wide and nodding his head insistently, like a toddler insisting that the monster was really there, under his bed.29

“You’re just scrawny, Joe. No strength to that. Give me that strongman any day. Quite the man, that one,” Maggie’s sigh was slightly less faked than Callie’s had been.30

“You saw the show?”31

“Yeah, just last week. I got my aunt and uncle to take my cousins and me. It was pretty fun, and that boy was smoking! Can I have a crisp?” Maggie asked, eyeing Callie’s bag of chips. When she saw Callie’s confused look, she quickly amended, shaking her head at her own slip, “Chip, that is. I spent eight years in England with my other aunt. I forget sometimes.”32

“I knew that, once,” Callie said as she held the bag open to her for her to choose her own. “Forgot though.”33

“Couple of elephants you are.” Joel rolled his eyes when they looked in his direction , faces blank, as though they’d forgotten he was there. “Dr. Suess sarcasm.”34

“Got it,” Maggie said, looking up at the clock. “Shoot, I forgot, Jamie wanted my help with some math problems before the hour was over. I’ll leave you two to your conversation then. Ciao!” she said quickly, standing up and making her way back over to her posse, stopping to drop a friendly kiss on Joel’s cheek and murmur, “thanks for the fries, Joe,” before continuing on her way. 35

Callie realized she had a speculative look on her face when Joel moved his hand up and down in front of her eyes. “Not what you think, Callie,” he barked. When she only raised one eyebrow superciliously, he just shrugged it off. “That girl’s going to be the death of me. You’re so much more sensible when she isn’t around,” he confided, breathing an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Anyways, any way you could get Nadia’s digits for me?”36

“I’m not your wingman, Joel,” she laughed.37

“It’s technically wingwoman, Cal, unless there’s something you aren’t sharing, and I don’t need a wingman or wingwoman anyhow, I was just curious. Maybe she found me attractive, said to you, hey, hook me up with that hottie.” He wiggled his eyebrows for emphasis.38

“No, she found you amusing, nothing more. And she wasn’t interested. She’s dating the strongman.”39

“Another woman fooled by big, obvious muscles. They have no brains, you know.”40

“I didn’t think muscles had their own brains, I thought the people behind the muscles had the brains,” Callie replied as the bell rang and they rose to join the horde of students rushing for the exit.41

“Funny, real funny,” he muttered as he rolled his eyes. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Callie only grinned, and he turned the conversation to a safer topic, one less likely to end with him being teased. “So, what is Liz teaching you today, now that you’ve finished your circus training?” They’d just gotten to the hallway where she had to go right to the English hallway and he had to go left to get to History.42

“I don’t know yet, but I can’t wait to find out,” she said before, with a wink and a wave, she left him for her next class.43

_-_-44

Liz was waiting in the familiar black sedan when school let out that day. She was chatting through the car window with a woman Callie knew was one of Maggie’s bodyguards and Joel’s older sister, though she and Joel didn’t look all that much alike. The woman had distinctive burn scars up and down her arms and a voice that rasped from smoke inhalation. Coupled with the scars, it told Callie that the woman had been in a bad fire for a significant amount of time, but she still hadn’t gotten the full story from her guardian. As usual, the woman, Meghan, just waved to Callie as she approached and turned to meet Joel and Maggie and Maggie’s other bodyguard on the steps, to walk the high profile teen to the waiting limo.45

Callie knew better than to ask what Liz and Meghan had been talking about, instead jumping into the car and immediately asking, “what next?”46

“We’re working two training schedules simultaneously these next two weeks, one right after the other, in the same location,” Liz replied as she pulled out of the school parking lot and into afternoon traffic.47

“Where?”48

Liz only smiled.49

Their destination turned out to be an abandoned warehouse. “Lovely. Do I have any chance of guessing what I’ll be learning in here?” Callie asked as she and Liz both got out of the car and slammed the doors shut.50

Liz shook her head. “Let’s just say we’re working you on a different kind of playground, like last time.”51

Callie couldn’t help but grin as the image of the circus as a playground leapt to mind. For the type of gymnast she had once been, it really was the perfect playground. But that broke her out of her happy moment. Back home, she’d been a gymnast with her little sister, unable to compete. Their coach thought they could go pro, could make it to the Olympics, even. It would have been easy, Callie knew now, because her body was built for gymnastics, specially created for the sort of agility that gymnastics required.52

Except that she was built for that agility so that one day she wouldn’t die at another’s hand.53

“I know that face,” Liz murmured. “Please, Cal, I promise you’ll enjoy this. One of them is pretty cute and just about your age.”54

“One of them?” Callie asked, prodding herself back into a more appropriate mood.55

“Yeah. They’ll be coming later though, so until they show up, I’d suggest you make use of your new playground. You’ve only got about a week with the mats. Then your life gets a tad more difficult, and dangerous.” 56

She opened the metal garage door with a small flourish, her blue eyes dancing with pleasure at Callie’s stunned reaction.57

She could only stare in shock. In an abandoned warehouse, they’d built a gymnasts’ dream. It was full of standard equipment, which was enough on its own, Callie decided. But the presence of the dream world beyond it was incredible. There were irregular stacks of crates, bars suspended from the ceiling, block walls at the end of fake alleys where only pseudo-trashcans stood. Ropes hung from the ceiling, cables fell from cranes. It was a representation of the kind of world you would only find in comic books or children’s cartoons.58

Callie loved it.59

With a running start she hurtled towards the wall in the alley. She tried to use a garbage can to vault herself to the top of the wall, but it was emptier than she’d expected it would be. The end result was far less cool than she’d imagined, as she fell to the ground with a small ‘oomph’ , the fake garbage can right behind her with a sharp clatter.60

She ignored Liz’s laughter as she stood, a little shaky, and sighed. She reset the can and was about to test the others when she stopped herself. If this was a simulation of life, she decided, she wouldn’t know how full the cans were unless their lids were bulging with the amount of garbage in them, and even that would be guesswork. So she settled with resetting the can and knowing which one was not full enough for her purposes.61

It took five tries before she found a good one. Her body launched through the air, and she just barely managed to control herself so that she landed on the back wall of the alley, slightly off balance.62

“Hey Shawn, you gotta see this little ninja!” she heard a boy call. The surprise from hearing his voice caused her to lose the battle for her balance.63

“Whoa,” the arms that caught her groaned. “you’re heavier than you look64

“I’m a falling human being, what did you expect? You ruined my launch,” Callie rejoined.65

“You weren’t stable to begin with,” the boy grinned, his teeth very white in a dark, handsome face. “Nate, number five of Jump 5.”66

“Callie.”67

“Oh, so you’re our sixth man for the next two weeks.”68

“I see,” Callie replied, though she didn’t, “Lovely. What exactly is Jump 5?”69

“Street performing group. You’re learning our performance.”70

“Why?” she asked before she could think it through.71

Nate raised an eyebrow. “Well, because you’ve always wanted to, so your brother and sister bought you two weeks ‘a lessons wif us?” He spoke as though Callie were an idiot and changed his voice to sound more like a street performer. She couldn’t help but grin.72

“Yes, of course, I forgot that that was my deepest, darkest wish. I have a ridiculously awesome brother and sister for fulfilling that desire. Hopefully they never figure out that I want to learn those skills so that I can run away when I turn 17 and support myself on the streets of New York City.”73

He laughed. “Well then, little ninja, why don’t we start? And don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret safe.”74

Nate introduced the girl to the other four, all of whom were tall and broad African American men who varied in age from two to ten years older than Callie. The shortest, Four, was over a foot taller than Callie’s diminutive 5’2”. “Don’t worry, she isn’t the spoiled little rich kid we’ve been fearing, Shawn,” Nate said when he introduced the girl to their leader, number One, Shawn Blaise. 75

Shawn was darker than Nate, with startling, green eyes. Combined with his low voice, the effect of the man was almost hypnotic. The other boys all clearly had African roots, but Shawn was the darkest of them all, with the lowest voice. Nate’s was high and light, with a hint of laughter in it no matter what he was saying.76

Liz, sitting on a hurdle near the mats where the boys would be teaching Callie, sent her charge a wicked grin that suggested she knew that Callie was interested in the young man.77

Nate grabbed a black backpack and tossed it to Callie. “Go change. Those clothes might be good for a gymnast’s purposes, but they ain’t fresh,” he ordered with a wink and a grin. She disappeared down a hallway to the bathroom. The other four looked over at Nate.78

“She’s not that bad looking,” Nate said when he noticed their taunting expressions.79

“Oh, he’s got it bad,” Four declared, causing Nate to fake attack.80

Callie came back to the three oldest boys egging Nate and Four on in a wrestling match, while Liz looked on in amusement.81

Shawn, noticing his student had returned, plucked the boys up and began to work the girl through the basic movements as the other boys watched. They were impressed by her freestyle flips, and amused by her attempts at break-dancing.82

“You gotta loosen up, lil’ ninja,” Three laughed after one particularly bad looking freeze. It would have been fine if it had been the first time he’d laughed at Callie, but between him and his brother, she’d been mocked too many times.83

“Three, right?” Callie snapped. “Your momma give you a name?”84

Everyone but his brother, Four, began to laugh, including Liz. “Yeah, Momma gave me a name,” he growled. “But maybe I don’t care to share it.”85

“I wouldn’t want to share my name either, if my momma named me Lesley,” Nate hooted, earning him a quick fist to the face.86

“Seriously?” Callie asked, staring at the boy.87

“Yeah, and this one’s name is Wesley, no lie,” laughed Two, Mark Blaise, Shawn’s nephew, a senior at George Washington University.88

“Okay, no mother is that cruel,” Callie began to laugh but stopped suddenly, eyes clouded with sadness. Because Three and Four were looking abashed, no one caught her slip.89

“We go by Three and Four,” Three said, “anyways, you’re too tense. Roll out your shoulders, try to relax.”90

She did as he suggested, throwing her shoulders back, stretching her neck to one side, then the other, shook out her arms and began a running start for a series of flips Shawn wanted her to try.91

She wouldn’t ever admit it aloud, but Callie felt the tension drain out of her whenever she was in mid-air. Something about flipping, twisting, giving her body over to momentum and gravity, made her feel like she could leave the pull of the earth. She’d felt like this since the first time she’d jumped from the sixth stair to the ground, a feat which had broken her two year old foot but had left her eager for more, nonetheless.92

It felt like flying, and Callie needed to fly.93

She’d learned how to control her aerials perfectly long ago, so when they asked her to change things, it didn’t take much effort on her part.94

Learning their dance moves was more difficult, except where it involved acrobatics. Her moves looked too simple, not quite “street” enough to fit in well with the boys’ seemingly effortless moves.95

“You act like the ground’s gonna eat you, girl,” Nate laughed. “Like it has no give. You roll with things, you work with the pavement, it’ll give.”96

“I’m working on mats, genius,” she groaned as another freeze flopped. Her arms ached and her side stung from falling too many times.97

Nate just laughed and helped her up from the ground. “We done for today, Shawn?”98

Shawn looked over at Liz, who shrugged and gestured that it was his call. “Yeah, we’re done teaching here today.”99

“Can we try out that urban jungle over there?” Nate asked, looking over at the city he’d caught Callie working on before their lesson. Callie shrugged and Liz nodded. “Sweet,” he grinned, “Three, Four and I like free running.”100

“Free running?”101

“It’s what you were doing earlier, using urban structures for doing street stunts and tricking. It’s a lot like parkour, but apparently they’re technically different. Something about efficiency,” he said with a shrug, his self-effacing manner suggesting that he was being modest, and he’d really done his homework when it came to this particular hobby. Shawn and Liz exchanged a quick grin over where they sat on the balance beam, Mark standing between them, leaning up against their seat.102

They watched as the younger boys fooled around, challenging each other to greater and greater stunts while Callie watched, amused, from her perch on one of the garbage cans. “Your boys look good,” Liz murmured to Shawn, placing her hand on Mark’s shoulder.103

“They do, don’t they?” Shawn replied, not looking at Liz. “Your girl isn’t too bad either.” Liz shrugged. “I know you never had a sister, Lizzie, and even if you did, she’s too young to be either of your parents’ child. Who is she?”104

“Doesn’t matter,” Liz replied, watching her charge lean back and laugh, completely in the moment, not worried about anything. “She’s my responsibility now.”105

“O’Neill’s got her claws in her,” Mark growled, “ruining another life.”106

Liz nodded, tightening her grip on Mark’s shoulder.107

“No,” Shawn disagreed, putting one hand on Mark’s other shoulder, the other on Liz’s knee, “Callie’s got Liz, Mark. And Liz won’t let that happen.”108

Liz hoped with all her heart it was true.109

Callie looked back over her shoulder at the three of them, her eyes laughing at something the boys were doing, and she felt that same sense of peace wash over her that Liz had brought out on her first day in D.C. Good people, she decided, Liz and Ezra were good people. And apparently, so were Shawn and Mark.110

She turned back around to see the three boys standing in a row, Three and Four flanking Nate, grinning like little boys with frogs in their pockets, planning a trick on their unsuspecting sister.111

“We want to see you do better,” Four smirked, leaning back on one heel and tilting his head to one side, challenging her with his half smile and cocky stance to come show him what she had.112

“You’re going to wish you never asked,” she warned as she stood up, stretched up to the ceiling, baring her stomach flirtatiously in a move that had the three behind her laughing at her guile and shamelessness and the three in front of her staring appreciatively. She laughed throatily just to see Nate gulp and raise his eyes to hers, the amusement that was his signature dancing in his eyes. “Are you ready for this?” she asked them.113

“Bring it,” Nate grinned.114

It was a different alley this time, a dumpster, a ledge and fire escape stairs. She took it at a run, leapt onto the dumpster, used a suspended ladder from the fire escape like an uneven bar to propel herself onto the ledge, and then leapt from the ledge, ten feet above the ground, to a cable strung like a telephone wire between one of the ‘buildings’ in her alley and one across the ‘street’ from her.115

She was pleased to hear the boy’s shouts of shock, even Shawn’s and Mark’s, though Liz laughed, recognizing a trapeze move. Callie swung up onto the cable, raised herself on it like it was any other bar, testing the tension and give.116

She couldn’t help but send Nate, whose fist was to his mouth, a cocky grin of her own as she pulled herself up to sit on one foot on the slightly shaking wire. Then she rose to standing in seconds, as though the wire were wood and not mere cable.117

“Oh wow,” Shawn breathed, watching Callie jump up and down on the wire, twisting in midair, shaking like mad but looking fearless. “I’m so glad she’s your responsibility and not mine,” he said to Liz.118

“Oh, she isn’t done freaking you out quite yet,” Liz warned just as Callie fell, arms pinwheeling, feet kicking. Five men screamed.119

And Liz watched, heart in her throat but her face quite passive, as Callie hooked the cable with her arm and swung herself easily back up, the smile never having left her face.120

“Bet that shaved a year off your life,” Liz murmured to Shawn.121

“Oh, Lizzie, mighta been two,” Shawn replied, shaking his head and watching Callie dismount the rope with a bow, the other four boys completely speechless.122

“She’s not just some girl, is she?” Mark asked shrewdly, turning to Liz, suspicion in his eyes.123

“If only you knew,” Liz replied, “If only you knew.”124

_-_-125

“You, my little friend, were showing off.”126

“You gave me lessons at the circus so I’d be able to use those skills. I was using those skills. Saw the cable, walked across it, just like I was taught.” Callie’s face was split with a huge grin.127

“Walked, she says. Leapt through the air ten feet above the ground, to catch a cable six feet away, and then deliberately fell off said cable, but no, she ‘walked’. Dios mio.”128

Callie laughed at Liz, who was muttering in Spanish under her breath. “Okay, so I did some dangerous stuff. I’m fine.”129

“You faked a fall!” Liz was laughing now.130

“Well yes, in true showman fashion, yes, yes I did. And then I looked incredibly amazing when I caught the wire on the way down and managed to pull myself back up anyways,” Callie replied, completely unrepentant. “Why are we at the mall?”131

“You need a better workout outfit. You stuck out like a sore thumb out there with all those boys,” Liz informed her as she dragged her into a shoe store called Wright Foot, Lepht Foot, a designer shoe business whose owners immediately came out to speak with Liz when they heard she was there.132

“She’s our best customer. She always get something typical and something completely insane from us. She’s our best buyer of custom shoes.”133

Liz winked at Callie. “One for me, one for work,” she said out loud, and Callie knew that though the owners would think the custom ones were for her, they were actually her work shoes. “Shoes are my single weakness. Whenever Ez forgets my birthday or what I think of as my anniversary, he buys me a pair of shoes. It’s so feminine and sometimes feels silly, but I love shoes, and I’m not ashamed of it.”134

She ordered Callie custom decorated slip-ons and a pair of knee high black leather boots. She also bought plain white hightops, promising the teen that she had a great idea for spicing them up that she’d work on that night. “There’s a door in the back of your closet,” Liz confided, shocking Callie, who thought she knew everything about her room. “It leads into a huge walk-in closet where you can keep the disguises you accrue over the next few years.”135

“That sounds incredible,” Callie stuttered, shocked. “Am I going to be getting that many disguises, then?”136

Her secretive grin didn’t exactly answer Callie’s question. However, the five separate outfits they got Callie to dance in, and the three other ones Liz bought, just because she was in a mall and had a seemingly limitless credit card, were a good enough answer. Their original intent was to get something that looked gangster, like the boys’ outfits did, but still gave her a feminine look. Most of the pants were baggy with a lot of pockets, but they fit snugly at the waist, so they weren’t in danger of falling down, even when doing flips. The men’s sweatshirts they added to their bags hung halfway to Callie’s knees, and her hands were swallowed by the sleeves. Tight wife beaters in varied colors finished off the outfits, but Liz wasn’t done there. She found a small shop that sold new age things, where she found patterned bandannas to hold back Callie’s long hair.137

“Disguises have always been my forte,” she confessed, “I was never a shopaholic until they handed me a credit card and told me to get myself an outfit that would help me assimilate into the business world. I was eighteen. O’Neill kept throwing things at me, situations, and told me to dress for them. I got to the point where I never expected to use my disguises, because she only ever wanted me to buy them. Then she told me to get an outfit for myself and one for a man, hide the man’s clothes in a bag that matched my outfit, and meet someone at a certain location. I thought it was just another false alarm and then it turned out to be an assignment. Ezra, who I vaguely recognized from a class we’d had together at the University, though I didn’t let that on, met me by a public phone in a restaurant, changed in the bathrooms, and escorted me to a lookout, where we spent the night looking like a pair of fools in love as we sat in the corner of a club, his arm around my shoulders, spying on the club owner, who was selling weapons to gang members. It was one of the strangest experiences ever, I won’t lie. But Ez flirted with me and laughed me out of any discomfort. O’Neill figured we’d work well together, because his dad and mine used to be partners back in the day, when they worked at the Agency.”138

“Your parents worked at the Agency?”139

“Yeah, my dad did. Ez and I are double legacies. There aren’t a ton of us in the business, and Ezra and his three sisters skew the data a bit, as do a couple of the larger families. Oh, you have to get that top. It would work so well with your eyes!” she said, subtly informing Callie that the conversation was over for the moment. Callie allowed it, but tucked the information away for later.140

The two finished up at a hat store. “They think I work as a prop director with a high school theater department,” Liz laughed, when Callie looked suspicious at her casual use of the clerk’s names.141

“I imagine that persona would visit often,” Callie agreed, inclining her head in the direction of a salesclerk who looked pleased to see Liz and was waving happily in their direction.142

“You mentioned exotic dancing earlier,” Callie remarked as she tried on a black baseball cap similar to one Nate had been wearing. Liz froze warily. “Do the people at the adult clothing store know you by name as well?”143

Callie had been wearing the cap on backwards like Nate wore it, so Liz twisted it around and pulled it down over her eyes, effectively avoiding answering the question. Callie pulled it off and shoved it on Liz’s head, and both dissolved into giggles.144

Callie knew they looked like two sisters on a shopping spree, albeit a strange one. She felt like she was with her sister. But in the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but remember that Liz had no ties to her except the ones the ADEPT had forced on her, and she wondered if this was all an act on Liz’s part. How could it be, when it felt so real? And there was her problem, she decided: how can you ever trust a spy?