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the most she’d ever seen at once. Nothing was ever written on paper anymore, since everyone had switched to tablets, and yet here was a boxful of it, yellowed, handwritten, one of a kind, confidential. In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets. Not to be copied and pasted with the stroke of a stylus, not to be sent around the world at the press of a button, not to be recorded and stored forever in a million irretrievable pieces across cyberspace and time, paper was intimate . . . fragile. Her father wrote of things she never knew existed, of the Eyes & Ears Bureau where Mr. Arbitor worked within the Department of Marked Emergencies, of missions he’d been on, surveillance he’d taken, people he’d locked away . . .
    My dad is a spy . Erin now found herself reassessing every perception she’d had of her father. His career move from the Beacon police department finally made sense. The stress he was under, his humbled nature, the seriousness with which he took his work . . . even his effort to blend in, physically, over the past few years . . . all of it fit, once Erin had the context.
    And then there was the paper at the top of the box, the most pressing memo of all—Agent Arbitor’s current assignment. The one that brought him halfway across the country, the one that uprooted Erin’s life and tore her family apart: Peck and the Markless threat in Spokie .
    A real-life mystery. A whole slew of unsolved crimes. Ongoing. Dangerous. And her father was the detective.
    She had just begun to wrap her head around it when out of the corner of her eye she saw a short, skinny, jumpy boy with dirty-blond hair approach and heard him say in a quiet voice, “Hi. I’m Logan. You’re Erin, right?”
    But in that moment the class bell rang across the field, and Erin did not answer, and Logan went red and hurried away.
    4
    “No luck, huh?” Dane ribbed Logan as they walked the halls to their next class. “Maybe she was just overwhelmed by your confidence and your masculine good looks.”
    “Shut up,” Logan said, but he was laughing. “I didn’t exactly see you walk away with her number either.”
    “I was just playing hard to get,” Dane said. “Chicks dig that. Don’t they, Hailey? ” he yelled, and Hailey looked confused and caught off guard across the hall. “See what I mean?”
    Science & tech lab would have been beyond boring if Dane and Logan hadn’t been joined by class president Tom Dratch, who fed off Dane’s sarcasm and turned the two of them into an unstoppable comedy duo intent on getting Logan detention for laughing.
    It turned out Hailey was in the class too, as was her friend Veronica, and from across the room they quickly became the source of Dane and Tom’s comedic material for the day.
    Having grown up just a bit bigger and stronger than the other girls at Spokie, it seemed that every semester Veronica tried a new sport only to become the best at it. So far she’d been Spokie Middle’s MVP in soccer, field hockey, tennis, lacrosse, and softball. She was taller than any of the boys in their grade, had coarse black hair and wide shoulders, and always dressed in a sports uniform. Before class started, Dane and Tom asked her if she planned to join the boys’ football team this year. Tom said they needed a new quarterback. The boys all laughed, but Logan got the impression that Veronica was genuinely interested.
    Logan didn’t know Tom too well outside of Tom’s friendship with Dane, but Logan did know he could count on Tom to begin bugging him about the school play, and Tom sure didn’t disappoint. This year, it was Mark of a Salesman . As class president, Tom saw it as his job to stir up interest in all the school’s extracurricular programs, and years ago he’d pegged drama as Logan’s one true calling. (It wasn’t.)
    “I just think it would get you out of your shell,” Tom said, having no idea how condescending that sounded. “Besides, it’s a