Tightrope

Snack?

I was born to be a spy.

Lena 'Stealthy' Montez; I was going to get my name legally changed after today. I was a firm believer in having a name that matched one's identity, and it was evident that I was born to bear the stealthy moniker. The mission? Operation Vegetables.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the Montez family, Jace and I had taken it in turns to distract the family with a—in my case, hilarious and in Jace's case, tedious—story while the other slipped food into a napkin and dropped it into my handbag. I definitely shouldn't have used my Burkin. It was going to stink of potatoes and vegetables.

"...and somehow, her foot got stuck in the toilet, so we had to wait twenty minutes for the fireys to come and pull her out, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that Daria was already in the cop car by this point, so I had to stand in the girls' bathroom like a creeper."

My family was laughing uproariously at Jace's still unbelievably nondescript tale, and Jace was looking rather pleased with himself.

"Wait, wait, wait," Austin said, wiping a tear from his eye. Okay, Jace was not that funny. "Was the crazy lady in there while you waited?"

"Okay, that was the craziest bit," said Jace. "She asked me if she could do her next line off my arm. So obviously Corine tried to fight her, but she couldn't get out of the toilet."

Liv giggled, and Mum and Dad seemed to be highly amused by Jace's conclusion. It was, admittedly, a little bit out of the ordinary. I couldn't say I'd gone out to a bar with my best friend and birth mother, and wound up stuck in a toilet with a crackhead.

Maybe Jace's life was somewhat interesting.

While the rest of the family was distracted, I dropped another potato into my bag, which was well beyond capacity at this point. A veritable mountain had been packed into the bag. Fortunately, Knight had the appetite of a small village.

I nudged Jace's leg with mine, giving him the signal eyes. "The chicken is stuffed. I repeat, the chicken is stuffed."

Jace looked mildly confused for a second—as he was not as experienced a spy as me—before looking down at the overflowing handbag of napkins. Recognition dawned on his face.

"That's an incredible story, Jace," said Mum, distracting him easily from the mission at hand. Amateur hour, honestly. What was I working with? This is why, after literally, like, a day, Knight was already my favoured partner-in-crime. "Honestly, you should invite Corine down sometime," Mum continued. "She's always been a hoot."

"I didn't know you knew Corine," said Jace with interest.

"I knew her when she was pregnant with you, actually," Mum said. "She went to school with my younger sister. Wild one, your Aunt Corine."

"So I've heard," Jace said. "How she is Mum's sister I have no idea."

Mum and Jace laughed, clearly enjoying their nostalgic trip down memory lane. Well, memory lane would not put food in Knight's belly. Jace was a terrible sidekick. The instruction was to be politely interesting so they wouldn't notice my mad ninja spy skills. It was almost insulting that he felt the need to be so engaging that he would enthral my family. I was a good spy; I didn't need that much to work with.

Clearly one day of friendship had led Jace to pull rose-tinted glasses out of his bag and view me as an innocent Daria double, because he seemed to have forgotten the countless semi-illegal spy missions, I'd undertaken against him; one of which I'd managed with a broken leg. So, yeah. He should really not doubt my abilities.

Maybe I would enlist Alex and go draw a penis on his forehead while he was sleeping to reaffirm my international super spy skills.

For now, I settled with kicking him under the table.