Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Eighteen

There were a lot of people who didn't know what it felt like.  The time for sympathy had long since passed and no one cared about my dead mother anymore.  The gift baskets had stopped.  The flowers had wilted.  No one was making condolance casseroles or commiseration cookies anymore.  The rest of the world had moved on.

Matt hadn't.  No matter how well he was hiding it, Matt still got tired sometimes too.  Matt had lost his mother, the same way I had lost mine, and I knew that even though there were so many people who didn't understand, Matt was someone who did.  Maybe that made it all a little bit easier.

"Oh, uh," he began.  I turned to look over my shoulder and watched as he pulled something from the cup holder.  It seemed to sparkle as he held it up against the sun.  "This fell off when you were getting off the plane.  The clasp is loose, so we should probably get you a new chain."

He let Mom's necklace fall into my hand.  It felt like ice as it pooled up in my palm.  Matt's eyes didn't leave the pendant when he said, "I don't think you want to lose that."

"No," I agreed, wrapping my fingers around it.  "Thanks."

But Matt didn't hear me because he had already torn the keys out of the ignition and popped his door open, doing what big brothers do best.  Ignore their kid sisters.  To be honest, I was glad he did it.  Nothing was worse than telling your brother you love him and we had been approaching dangerous territory.  "We're here."

The sun glared off of the top of that tiny silver car, directly into my eyes.  As I stood from my seat, I thought that maybe I was seeing things.  That maybe I hadn't completely woken up yet, but then I remembered where we were.  I wasn't seeing things—I was seeing Romanian, one of the few languages that was not a part of the Gallagher Girl curriculum. 

Matt led me into a crumbling building named Pensiune de lux and I could only assume that it was a hotel.  It was a quaint little place, the lobby decorated more with smell than with sight.  A salty waterfall flowing down a far wall.  The sweet aroma of fresh chocolate emanating from the gift shop and the rich coffee smell coming from the break room.  It smelled exactly like my coffee from that very morning.

Matt led me across the emerald carpet, navigating our way through an absurd amount of plant life.  A young lady at the front desk greeted Matt with a smiley and bubbly, "Bună ziua, domnule."  Poor girl.  If only she knew exactly how uninterested he was.

Matt replied with a simple, "Alo," and I realized that the Blackthorne curriculum covered this obscure language.

Everything was disorienting and unfamiliar until we reached the elevator.  Wood paneled walls and the dusty stench of old carpet, just like in the States.  I looked to the buttons on the wall and realized that even if their numbers were read aloud differently, they were all written out the same way.  Matt pushed the button for three—the top floor—and soon we were on our way.

"You do know that I don't speak Romanian, right?" I asked him, watching the stem on the dial above us tick to the right.

"Yes you do," he told me.  "It's a romance language.  If you know Latin, you know this."

Which is exactly why we Gallagher Girls are taught the language.  I'd have to remember that for the next time I saw Scout. 

The elevator dinged and Matt stepped off.  I followed him, pointing out the flaws in his oh-so-brilliant plan as we went.  "Okay, that's great and all, but I think people are going to know if I'm speaking some weird, ancient version of their language."

"Technically," he said with a smirk.  "They're speaking a weird, modernized version of your language."  He reached a door labeled with a big, golden three and pulled a key forward on his chain.  "But if on the off chance you do have to open your big mouth, then you should let one of your fluent partners do the talking."