48 pages • 1 hour read
Ally CarterI'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
The girls tail their professor as best they can, Cammie and Bex doing much better at field work than Liz. The carnival provides lots of crowds to hide in and ways to appear nonchalant, which helps Cammie live up to her chameleon nickname. Liz loses sight of Cammie while she sits in plain sight because there’s nothing to draw attention to her, and Cammie notes that if she’s still and calm, “it's really easy to be invisible” (70).
At one point, the professor almost spots Cammie when she helps an older woman who tripped. As the professor walks away, the woman asks if she knows Cammie at the same moment Liz asks if they still have eyes on the mark. Cammie answers yes to Liz, but the old woman thinks Cammie is talking to her and mistakes Cammie for someone else. She asks another question, and Cammie gives a response that’s also a warning to Bex that their professor is closing in on her location. Cammie hears Bex curse and then loses visual on her, too.
Not knowing what else to do, Cammie heads to the funnel cake booth, where she finds their professor yelling at Bex and Liz for being off campus without permission. The professor orders them to come with him back to school before throwing a bottle into the trash. Cammie hides until the group passes and then retrieves the bottle—the professor’s drink. As she’s turning to head back to school, she sees “a boy across the street-- seeing me” (77).
Chapter 7 Summary
Cammie drops the bottle, which the boy picks up and hands to her. He doesn’t know why she’s picking bottles out of the trash, and Cammie launches into a long story about her cat named Suzy who likes to play with bottles. When she finally stops, the boy introduces himself as Josh and says he can’t wait to see her at school. Cammie explains she’s homeschooled before saying she has to go and jogging away. Josh calls after her that he’ll see her around and to “tell Suzie she's a lucky cat” (82).
Cammie finds the abandoned delivery van in an alley and realizes Solomon ditched it. She makes her way back to school, where the professor who drove informs her there’s a debrief in the Covert Operations classroom. Feeling resigned and like she’d rather be back with Josh, Cammie goes to join her classmates.
Chapter 8 Summary
At the classroom, Cammie finds everyone but Bex and Liz waiting. Mr. Solomon shows a series of images on the projector of Liz and Bex during the operation. Someone had trailed them the entire time, and Cammie feels sick that she hadn’t noticed. Next, Solomon shows blurry images of people who might be Bex and Liz captured and bloodied. The images shake Cammie and the others, and when Mr. Solomon asks, “who wants to be a spy now?”, no one speaks (89). Before he leaves the room, he slides a partition in the wall aside to reveal Bex and Liz, unharmed.
In their room, the pile of clothes and accessories from before they left is still there, but it all feels insignificant now. The professor they tailed never knew Cammie was out there and was very impressed by Cammie’s ability to stay undetected. Liz and Bex ask Cammie what happened after they got caught. Though she feels like she should, Cammie doesn’t tell them about Josh because, in a place where everyone knows her life’s story, it felt “nice to know there was a chapter that only I had read” (91).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
The spy and “normal” worlds collide in these chapters in several ways. Cammie meets Josh, a boy living what Cammie deems a “normal” life—meaning that he’s not training to be a spy. Cammie is used to being unseen, even by her friends, as evidenced by how Liz loses track of her during the mission. When Josh sees her, Cammie starts to wonder if she really likes being invisible, which is the first time she’s ever questioned her status as the “chameleon.” To Josh, Cammie is a “normal” girl, and Cammie feels free because she can be anyone, not just the girl who lost her dad on a mission.
The field mission in Chapter 6 offers a glimpse at the non-glamorous side of spy work. Earlier, Mr. Solomon nearly hit Macey with the letter opener, symbolizing the action sequences common in spy movies. Cammie blending in and making people believe she’s someone she’s not is the other side of spying that isn’t captured by Hollywood. The ease with which Cammie navigates this situation emphasizes the importance of feeling confident in one’s skills and comfortable with one’s role during a mission. At the end of Chapter 7, Cammie lets her friends get captured to complete the mission, knowing it’s what she’d be expected to do in the field even if it doesn’t entirely sit well with her. Spying is also about making difficult decisions.
Mr. Solomon’s slideshow in Chapter 8 is a wake-up call for the sophomore class. Up until now, they’ve taken their skills for granted, even letting their attraction to Mr. Solomon guide their preparation for this mission. While Bex and Liz aren’t actually hurt, the images Mr. Solomon shows are real enough to shake Cammie’s confidence and make her question herself. It also illustrates another difference between spy movies and the real thing. In the movies, the “good guys” may get captured but typically escape and complete their mission with all team members intact. In this situation, Cammie would have completed the mission but lost her friends, who would have been tortured for information and likely killed. This incident forces the girls to confront reality and teaches them to be more careful, something they don’t necessarily do while spying on Josh.
