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.

"Ouch!" he protested, glaring at me.

"So silly of you to accidentally stab yourself. Ha, ha. Duffer." I patted his back with a bright faux smile, reiterating to my family that we were definitely for sure BFF's for life. "We should definitely go upstairs to finish that, uh, project. Upstairs?"

Mum waved us off. We clambered out of our seats immediately,

"As long as that project isn't my first niece," Liv said. Alec grinned at her.

"It's actually about burning annoying people at the stake," I said sardonically. "But it was centuries ago, luckily for you."

Jace ruffled my hair in a way I'd seen him do with Daria countless times. So, this is what tentative friendship with Jace Hartley was, huh? Messy, frizzy hair. I wasn't perfect like Daria; my hair would not simply fall glossily and bouncily back into place. It would remain frizzy and gross. I was totally right to avoid being nice to him all these years; even if Austin didn't appreciate it, my hair did.

"Sure, Lena," he said, in one of the worst displays of acting I'd ever seen. No wonder everyone had dubbed me the mean one in our little feud; Jace couldn't be mean because he sucks at everything required to win our feud. How he got away with the pranks he did was baffling to me. "Let's go... upstairs."

I rolled my eyes and dragged him up the stairs behind me, my handbag dangling from my other arm. The food made it rather heavy, so as soon as we were away from my family's line of site, I dumped the bag in Jace's arms.

He didn't protest; just hoisted it over his shoulder and followed me up the staircase.

I didn't say anything either. For the first time in my life, I was lost for words around Hartley. I didn't know how to act like his friend. Didn't know how to be nice around him. Hence why my original plan had been to avoid him today, until circumstances had forced me into his company pretty much constantly.

But even so, all of those plans had been in the context of just one day. Just today. But I wasn't a bad person; I hated Hartley because, yes, he was awful, but also because he hated me. If he was waving the white flag—asking for my friendship instead of my hatred—it would be cruel to not at least attempt to be... civil.

I would definitely not achieve bubbly friendship, but I could, you know, only call him the worst human being alive like once a day now.

"You're panicking because you don't know how to be nice to me, aren't you?" said Jace with amusement.

I whirled around to face him. "No idea what you're talking about. I am a pro of all things friendship."

He leaned against the staircase banister. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. In fact, I am even more of a pro at friendship than you."

Jace grinned and continue to climb the staircase so that he was above me, looking down on me. He tweaked my nose patronisingly. "Friends don't compete about who's the better friend."

"Maybe your friends don't, because they're lame. My friends challenge me to be the best version of myself possible, which means we all compete to be the greatest friend. So not only am I better at friendship than you, I have better friends too."

"We literally have the same friends."

"Well, yeah."

Jace smiled down at me fondly. "Aw, it's so cute how much you suck at this."

I shoved him good-naturedly. "I do not, shut up."

"You're just like, this little ball of rage. It's adorable." The expression on his face was patronising, but in the way that made me think he was joking. It still made me want to wipe the look off his face.

"I want to die, like, currently, I hope you know that."

Jace mock gasped. "You're saying, all these years of pranks and teasing, and the way to get rid of you all this time was just to... try to be your friend?"

I laughed as we strolled into my bedroom, pleasantly pleased that the new kind-of-not-really friendship between Hartley and I wasn't nice or chummy. I liked having a verbal punching bag, and so did Hartley.

Jace followed me into the bedroom, and he was also smiling. Jace smiled a lot. It was almost endearing. He looked at me with a momentary odd expression, something unexplainable etched into the planes of his face.

"What?" I said softly.

"Nothing," he said, and his voice was almost a whisper. "I just think I like being your friend."

I didn't know what to say to that. I had been blackmailed into this situation, but I could hardly match the sincerity in Jace's tone with a lie in return of my deep and profound respect for him as a homie. Besides, I'd already told myself downstairs; it was very hard to hate a boy who looked at me with the fondness Hartley seemed to have reserved for his little angry ball of rage. Well, not his. But. You know.

We stared at each other for a beat. His head was tilted slightly to the side, as if making a show of his examination of me. As if he was searching for something in my face, for a response.

I inhaled sharply, opening my mouth to speak—

"If I'm sitting in here hungry because you two are making out again, I'm going to suffocate you. You know, if you haven't already suffocated each other," came Knight's voice through my wardrobe door.

"Oh, come out, drama queen," I said, relieved that I didn't have to respond to Hartley.

The door swung open slowly, revealing a pouting Knight staring up at us with innocent doe eyes. "Snack?"

Jace looked at me for moment with something like regret, before turning back to Knight and dropping the handbag of wrapped food on the floor. "We have come bearing gifts."

Knight tittered happily, and I felt like the owner of a dog instead of the roommate of a teenage boy. Immediately unwrapping the non-vegetable shaped package, Knight bit shamelessly into a baked potato.

"Lena," Jace admonished. "Do you not feed him? You know it's very irresponsible of you to not make sure your kids are well fed. He's all skin and bone, seriously. I might call child services."

"Yeah," said Knight, covering his mouth with his hand in a show of uncharacteristic politeness. "You're not taking good care of me. Jacey might have to take me away and adopt me."

I collapsed on my bed. "Okay, Jace, this is Knight. He needs to go potty five times a day, and is bad at following instructions. Congratulations, you're now the proud owner of... this." I waved a hand at Knight, who had burned his tongue on the potato and was rolling around on the floor proclaiming that his limited fortune was to be left to his fish, Alfred.

Jace winced. "Fun! So, what you're telling me, is I walked into this house with things completely normal, and I'm walking out having made out with my worst enemy, befriended said enemy, and adopted that enemy's teenage child."

Knight, who had already recovered from the affliction that he had, thirty seconds ago, claimed would take his life, nodded sympathetically. "It's been a big afternoon, hasn't it? Now, do you prefer Dad or do you prefer the more formal Father?"

"He likes Daddy," I said absently, my interest momentarily claimed by the magazine at the foot of my bed.

"Interesting that you know that," Knight noted.

I made a face at him that he immediately imitated. Jace clipped him lightly over the back of the head. "Now, son, no need to copy the silly girl over there, you hear? We will raise you to be better than that."

Knight nodded profusely, but shot a dirty look at me when Jace wasn't looking. I stuck my tongue out at him in return. Like an adult.

"Now, eat your vegetables," said Jace, pointing at the bag.

Knight, in his first display of rebellion against his newfound father, grabbed another potato instead.

Jace came to sit down next to me on the bed. Twenty-four hours ago, I would've shoved him with alacrity onto the floor. Now, I just turned the page in my magazine passively, maturely ignoring the weight of his body next to me.

Somehow, I was growing accustomed to his presence next to me. It had once been an unwelcome occasion, a sign of bad fortune for the day. Hartley sitting next to me had been my equivalent to waking up to a rainy, stormy day; he was overcast weather, walking under a ladder, gum on the bottom of your shoe. A small inconvenience that overshadowed the brightest days.

Now he was something else. A cool breeze on a midsummer day; somewhat pleasant, perhaps, when you were walking and far too hot, but annoying when you were sitting on the beach and it blew sand into your lunch. He was the tolerated and the annoying. The welcomed and wished away. Wanted in some circumstances, cursed in others.

He was a tightrope, a narrow path between everything I'd always felt for him—hatred, annoyance, irritating, loathing—and something different. Something that felt a little bit like friendship.