“Excuse me?” I asked, because even though I’d never been in a really nice hotel, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have exotic birds on the penthouse level.
“Peacock,” the agent said again as we stepped into the service car that was soon carrying us, nonstop, to the top floor. “See, we use code names,” he explained as if I were
. . . a sixteen-year-old girl, “when we talk about the protectee. So you and Peacock, you’re . . . friends?” he asked, and again I realized that he wasn’t looking at me the way a well-trained, well-armed security professional looks at a potential threat (because I know a thing or two about well-trained and well-armed security professionals!). Nope. He was looking at me like I was . . . a Gallagher Girl.
Of course, if you’re reading this you must already know that there are two types of people in this world—those who know the truth about what goes on inside the walls of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, and those who don’t. Something in the way the agent was trying to weigh my slightly out-of-style clothes against the snooty reputation of my school told me that he was definitely the second type—that he assumed we were all rich; that he thought we were all spoiled; and that he had no idea what it really meant to be Gallagher Girl.
