Dad had stayed back while Carolyn and Mom pounced, and simply winked at me. We’d already gone through the birthday routine that morning. “Guess we’ll make up for today’s classes tomorrow.”
“Yes! But!” I said. “We could also not do that?”
Dad made a Nice try face, his smile wry. He’d been of the opinion that if normal kids didn’t get to skip school on their birthdays, I shouldn’t get to, either—so I should probably be glad he’d relented in the first place.
I gave in with a dramatic sigh. “Fiiine.” I took off my coat and rubbed my face warm.
“Grandma Yeo is almost ready,” Dad said. “Check the windows?”
Mom and I adjusted the curtains and the plants on the windowsills to hide the observation tower, fence, and a tank that’d arrived yesterday. (Tanks weren’t common. That kind of thing tended to upset Grandma Yeo.) I jogged outside to let the agents know to stay out of sight—especially since there were more people on-site than usual.
“Can I help?” Carolyn asked when I returned. She sounded lost. She came over from Philadelphia several times a week and every other weekend, but wasn’t normally around when we called family.
“Nah, we’re ready.”
“You do this when we video chat, too, right? I never see any MGA stuff in the background.”
“It’s just a security measure.” People knew we shared a home with a government base, but the less visual proof, the better.
Especially in the hands of teenagers with social media accounts, I thought with a pang of guilt. Carolyn knew the MGA didn’t trust her—there was a reason she no longer lived at the house—but she didn’t need it rubbed in.
“Sorry.” I felt my cheeks turn red.
It’d been two years since Carolyn moved into the Philadelphia townhouse the government bought us. She lived there full-time, while my parents rotated every two weeks. I was used to life with the MGA, but to Carolyn, all these precautions might’ve become alien by now. So much hassle, just to visit her sister.
Luckily, I could sweeten the deal.
“You want to play the Xbox after this? I have early access to the next Elder Signs.”
Caro’s eyes lit up, lifting a weight off my shoulders. “Heck yeah.”
CHAPTER TWO
The diner one-point-three miles down the road might be a nice diner—quality food, minimal grease smell, clean—but it was a diner nonetheless.
I’d invited a few friends and hadn’t missed the puzzlement in their expressions when I mentioned the party’s location was Franny’s Food. Still, they were used to worse from me, and we were friends—or at least friend-ly.
Maybe they wanted free food, maybe they wanted to pry for information about the government base, or maybe they were simply bored since West Asherton, PA, population 1,704, wasn’t exactly an entertainment hub. Whatever the case, they came.
There was Neil, Imani, Amber-Lynn, Marybeth (Marybeth!), and Carolyn. Dad had gone into town after dropping us off, and I knew two agents were sitting in a nearby van, hooked into the diner’s hidden-camera feed.
Normally only one agent accompanied me. Maybe it was because of that power outage. I wanted things back to normal; these changes were putting me on edge.
“I wasn’t sure what you wanted.” Neil pushed a wrapped package my way. It turned out to be the first book in that rich-girl spy series that’d been turned into a movie last summer. “I hope you haven’t read it yet?”
“I haven’t!” I grinned wide. “I wanted books for winter break. And this looks great! Thanks!”
Imani gave me a set of soft purple gloves, which she seemed embarrassed about but which I loved; Amber-Lynn, a fifteen-dollar gift card to Zara that I hoped was redeemable online since the nearest brick-and-mortar store was twenty miles away; and Marybeth, a massive bag of sour belts, which must’ve made me blush like a traffic light.
Marybeth McKellan was way too cool to be at my birthday party, and Marybeth McKellan knew my favorite candy. I managed to be semi-smooth about thanking her, which was a relief, because since her dance performance at school last September, I apparently could no longer talk to her without stammering. I had that in common with half the guys in our class, but Marybeth probably knew it wasn’t the same thing.
(I hoped she knew.)
(I didn’t always know.)
I passed the sour belts around and was happy for the distraction when Carolyn handed me her gift. A framed original drawing by my favorite comics artist. I squealed loudly enough to make patrons across the diner look up, which turned my face beet red a second time.
I normally didn’t celebrate birthdays with friends; you could only have so many birthdays at the mini-golf course before becoming That Weird Mini-Golf Girl. An evening at Franny’s seemed like a good option, except, crap, maybe now they’d be expecting me to come to their birthday parties, far outside of my radius. My mouth suddenly felt dry. I grabbed my milkshake, sucking down a large gulp. Maybe I should’ve ditched the idea of a party. Sixteenth or not.
“Food!” Carolyn cried as our waitress approached.
We stuffed our bellies with burgers and fries that were just the right kind of juicy and crispy, and I urged everyone to order more. Maybe it’d somehow make up for me not attending their parties in return. Afterward, Franny put on a thumb drive with music Caro and I had selected, but no one did more than nod along.
A real birthday party had dancing, didn’t it? I mean, not my parents’ parties, but they were old, and not Carolyn’s West Asherton birthday parties, but I bet her real parties in Philadelphia with her friends were different. Parties always had dancing in the movies. Characters our age were always slung over couches or flirting in the kitchen or passing around illicit beer; the six of us having burgers at a diner, wrapping paper strewed all around, might as well have been a ten-year-old’s party. I doubted anyone was impressed. Marybeth spent more time talking to Neil than to me.
I’d dressed up in my tightest jeans and a new shirt, bringing out whatever slight curves I had. I’d even put on lip gloss. All of a sudden that effort felt like I was embarrassing myself.
I looked at the clock. Eight forty-one.
“We missed it!” I blurted out. “Four minutes ago. That’s when I was born.” I smiled sheepishly. It was dorky to care about the exact minute, but still. Sixteen.
“Happy birthday!” Imani and Amber-Lynn shouted as one, then laughed. “Well, again,” Imani added.
“For real this time,” Amber-Lynn clarified.
“Will you get your license?” Neil asked. “Man, I’d love to drive down to Philly whenever I wanted.”
“Or even just to school!” Carolyn said, which I was grateful for.
“I’d love to get my license,” I lied. “I still need to convince my parents. You know how parents are.”
“I know, right?” Marybeth said. “Mine—”
I never found out about Marybeth’s parents, as two things happened then.
One, Franny butted out of the kitchen, carrying a sorbet with a lit sparkler. Two, the doors of the diner slid open and Agent Anne Valk entered, her suit entirely out of place beneath the fluorescent diner lights.