Barking Up the Wrong Lead - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Madame Baudin can usually be seen dancing.  Or humming.  Or smiling.  Sometimes, if you catch her on a good day, you can even see her doing two of the three, but I had never before seen the trifecta.  That afternoon, as she waltzed into her tea room, we all sat up a little straighter—listened a little closer—because we were spies and in our guts, we knew something big was about to happen.  “Oh, this is my favorite time of year, ladies,” she said in the middle of a tune.

Erin Cross leaned forward on her desk, pulling the pen off the back of her ear.  “And what time of year is that, Professor?”

Madame Baudin looked up with a glazed look in her eye.  If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve thought she hadn’t heard Erin’s question, but I knew that couldn’t be the case.  Madame Baudin hadn’t escaped from an internment center on an unmarked island near Madagascar by having poor hearing.  Make no mistakes, Madame Baudin heard all.  “Why, Ms. Cross.  Why don’t you take a look for yourself?”

She placed a cream card onto Erin’s desk as if it were the most delicate piece in her glass menagerie.  Erin picked it up like she head a deadline and twelve angry editors screaming at her.  She tugged on one end of the navy bowtie and opened up each side, reading aloud to us all.  “You have been formally invited to attend a cumulative examination at The Blackthorne Military Academy for Boys on the second Friday of March.  Please wear formal attire and the appropriate accessories.”

“You will be fitted for your gowns tomorrow afternoon,” Madame Baudin added when Erin finished.

With the promise of ball gowns, the girls in the room overpowered the spies.  “Wait,” said Blair who, no doubt, had already pieced together whatever Madame Baudin was building up to.  “You mean that this is gonna be…?”

Madame Baudin grinned.  “A promenade examination, Ms. Bateson.”

“Prom?” At least three girls called out at the same time.

“Prom, Madame Baudin confirmed, the elegance of her fine French words seeming particularly appropriate.  “Now, in an ideal world, we would hold the dance here,” she went on.  For a moment, I could almost picture it.  Lights twinkling across the stone and wood.  A Grand Hall already so beautiful that decorations were a mere nuisance.  Girls in silk and satin instead of cotton and 50% polyester.  “But due to curriculum restraints, the dance is traditionally held at The Blackthorne Military Academy for Boys.”

Blackthorne, my mother repeated.  Something about Blackthorne.  I shook my head, trying to uncover more.  As if she were in my mind somewhere, stuck behind some sort of sound-proof door. 

But no more words came.  Just the one.  Blackthorne.  The Blackthorne Institute.  It had been an institute.  My father had attended.  Grandpa Joe had attended.

“… correct, Morgan dear?”

Madame Baudin’s voice tore me back into current affairs.  “Umm… yeah,” I said and it must’ve been the right answer because Madame Baudin smiled.

“Excellent,” she said.  “Now, partner up please, everyone.”

“What are we doing?” Faith asked, because Faith is the type of girl who thinks that seeing is believing and that everyone should know what they’re doing before they do it.

Madame Baudin floated over to her top heavy, golden gramophone and began the music.  “Well, Ms. Neal.  I trust that you would like to learn how to dance before you are tasked with such a responsibility in front of the boys of Blackthorne.”

I’d never seen my classmates partner up so quickly.

- - -

By the time I was three, I knew how to break an arm.  By the time I was seven, I could purposefully crack various NSA codes (as opposed to that one time that I accidentally did it when I was four).  But the most frequent and probably most important thing that my family has taught me is this: notice things.