To warm up before we started the challenge we’d decided to try a few jabs, long shots, and low kicks on the heavy bag and follow up with some hand-to-hand sparring. I wrapped my hands and slipped on my boxing gloves.
“What does the winner get?” I asked as my fist connected with the bag. My father, who was holding the bag, took a step back and steadied himself so my next punch wouldn’t take him by surprise.
“The loser tells mom he or she broke the lamp in the sitting room yesterday,” he said with a galling smile.
“But you broke it,” I argued, taking another punch at the bag. “You were that one who knocked it over.”
“It was an accident,” he defended himself.
“Sure, if you call flying through the air at top speed just to be the first one to get the TV remote an accident, then yes.”
“Still an accident.” He winked while I continued working the bag, this time three short jabs in a row before I took a breath. “You’ve got quite a punch. You’re stronger than you look. Logan must be teaching you well.”
I continued with the bag for almost half an hour as my father commented on my moves and made suggestions on how to improve—don’t lean into your punches! Remember to keep your balance! —and he handed me a water bottle when I finished. Right after the short water break we moved to freeform sparring. It was here that I’d be able to show off any self-defense skills Logan had taught me.
My father tightened a pair of boxing gloves on his own hands—at the intensity with which we trained, we’d be bruised all over if it weren’t for a little bit of padding.
“Your arm needs to be lower.” He took hold of my elbow with his clunky padded hands and bent it into the proper position.
I didn’t say anything in response. I’d learned this trick from Logan the last time I’d begged him to cancel one of our training sessions because I wanted to hang out with my friends. He’d bargained, saying that if I could knock him down during one-on-one combat, he’d give me the day off. He’d started off by letting me beat him until the last minute, at which point he took me down, and I’d earned myself an extra session for losing.
“Lower your elbow.” Again, he didn’t wait for me to do this myself: he did it for me. “Now, try and block my arm.”
When my father swung his arm this time, it didn’t hit me in the stomach; instead, I blocked it.
“Good,” he said as I blocked his fist once more. I could see from the way he threw his arms that he was going easy on me.
“Twenty bucks if I take you down,” I blocked his fist from hitting my jaw.
When I said this he laughed, and then he stopped fighting. “Seriously? Sweetheart, I don’t want to take your twenty bucks.”
“But I wanna take yours.” And with that, I ran my fist straight into his jaw, taking him by surprise.
He groaned in pain, and then his fist passed by my chin, inches away from contact. “I wasn’t ready.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know the enemy would wait for me to be ready before he beat me to death or shot me,” I teased.
“All right, you asked for it!” And just like that, I was sprawled on the mat, groaning, with my hand on my stomach. I knew my best friend Sarah’s father came to her cheerleading competitions and cheered her on; mine took me to abandoned buildings and beat the crap out of me.
“You do realize that I’m your daughter and also a girl, right?” I asked, as I stood upright and swung my hands toward my father’s face.
“You don’t hit like a girl, and the enemy is going to hit you even harder when he learns you’re my daughter.” Touché.
This time around when I blocked my father’s fist, he blocked mine too, and we continued like that for about ten more minutes. Sometimes he managed to land a blow, and other times I got him. Neither of us looked ready to give up and declare the other a winner.
“You tricked me into thinking you were bad at this, didn’t you?” my father asked when my next blow connected with his stomach.
“No, I would never.” I crouched down so that his fist flew over my head, and then I threw another punch at his abdomen. I didn’t wait for him to pull himself back up when I struck a second punch that caught him on the side of his face. He gathered himself and swung at my face. I’d assumed he’d do that, so when I blocked his blow, I didn’t let go of his hands; instead, I immediately placed my foot forward for leverage and pulled him toward me so that he tripped on my legs and then bang, he fell, and I won.
“Yes!” I rejoiced, suddenly getting a little hopeful. Maybe I could win this. Maybe I could do this after all.
“Have you considered a future here?” my father asked as he got back to his feet.
“What happened to Harvard?” He and my mother had already mapped out my future—the very future they were afraid I wouldn’t even have.
“That’s still part of the plan,” he said, and then he started moving toward the rope. I trailed him, removing my boxing gloves.
I looked at the fishnet rope stretching above us and I inhaled deeply. I could climb: I’d done it often enough, but I was shaking because of the tiny, little known fact that I was afraid of heights. I hated anything that involved heights. The thought of having to sleep with a gun under my pillow didn’t even scare me as much as the rope in front of me did.
“Logan, start the countdown,” my dad called out, waving at one of the cameras behind us, through which Logan was watching us from the control room.
I managed to take one more deep breath before a gong went off, signaling the start of the challenge. I couldn’t see the clock from where I stood.
My father was already halfway up the rope by the time I got the courage to start climbing.
“You’re not letting me win, are you?” he stopped so that I could reach him. “I’m serious, loser gets mom’s angry stare.” I knew that stare, the one that said more than words could.
Suck it up, Abigail. Another deep breath, and I started climbing. When I reached the top of the rope, my father was already starting down on the other side. I caught my breath yet again, told myself that I wasn’t going to collapse, and then I went down again with no problems.
I felt so happy when my feet touched the ground. At this point my father was already using the metal spikes on the wall to climb over.
“You’re too slow, Abigail!” I heard when I’d managed to make it halfway up the wall. He was standing below me, having already gone back down. What my father seemed to be forgetting was that I didn’t have his years of field training. I was only just starting out.
“Are you trying to make me win?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant to cover my sadness that he was talking to me in his not-so-impressed voice.
“You wish.” And then he started climbing up again. This time around, I pushed myself and made it to the ground before he did, but when he reached the first long jump, he jumped right to the other side, no hesitation, leaving me standing still.
“You’re going easy on me, aren’t you?” he called from the edge of the second long jump.
I went back a few steps. “You wish.” Then I sprinted that paltry few steps and jumped. I was pretty sure I would land on the net below like last time, so when my feet actually touched solid ground, I was more surprised than my father.
“You did it!” he cheered, and then both of our eyes flickered toward the next pit, and we started running toward it. We both jumped at the same time: he landed perfectly, and I almost fell, but luckily for me, my father reached down and caught me.
I was too startled and winded to thank him. We scrambled for the final long jump, and the moment both our feet touched solid ground at the far side, we rushed on toward the rope and started climbing.
My heart felt like it was nearly jumping out of my chest because I was ten, now fifteen, now seventeen feet above the floor, but I refused to stop now.
My father and I both reached our quiver and bow at the same time. We both hooked them over our shoulders and started climbing back down.
/> He was fast going down. He was already lining up his first shot with the bow.
“Look at that, slowpoke. You’ve only got twenty seconds left.”
My father’s first arrow was straight and true. I quickly shot my own first arrow and felt delighted when it hit home. My second arrow hit right in the center of the red target moments after my father’s did.
“Five! Four!” My father’s final arrow hit the target, and he rejoiced. “Three! Two!” I nocked my last arrow, but it was too late. The buzzer sounded just as I was preparing to shoot.
My father shook his head sadly. “I am awfully disappointed in you for breaking your mother’s beautiful lamp.” He proceeded to place his bow and arrow on the floor and do a victory dance that I hoped, for both our sakes, he never did with people around.
“You know, children pick up on what their parents do. If you’re asking me to lie, I might just lie at some point…”
He cut me off with a “don’t even go there.” He tried to hug me, and then tried again after taking my bow.
“I’m so proud of you. Really, truly proud of you.” He threw his arms around me now that the bow was out of the way. It was only then that I realized my whole body hurt from today’s workout.
“My little girl.” He pulled away. “Look at you, all grown up.” I believed from the tone of his voice that he was proud of me.
“Logan’s taught me well.” I reached for some water. “And I’ll take care of Mom, so you don’t have to worry when you leave. I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“I’m worried about you, too, honey,” he said. “And I never wanted to bring you into my crazy world. When you were born, I dreamed of riding ponies and having princess tea parties with you. There was very little gunplay in any of those dreams. And now, look at you: you’re not my little girl anymore.” He sounded sad, and I knew he regretted the life that we were forced to live.
“Oh, Dad.” I forced a smile. “I’m all right. Besides, ponies and princesses are overrated.”
He smiled back, wistfully. “I’d still have loved to attend a tea party with you.” He pulled me into another hug. I winced against his chest.
Our private father-daughter moment was interrupted by Logan, but Dad didn’t let go of me right away.
“Are we done here? Because I’d like to go home.” this made both of us laugh. I didn’t blame him; it was late, about an hour to midnight, and it was a school night. I needed to sleep as well.
My father finally let go of me. “Hey, we’re in luck. Others are coming to train after us, so we don’t need to clean up.” This got a cheer out of Logan.
The three of us crowded into the elevator up to the abandoned warehouse in which the training center was hidden.
My father placed his thumb in the biometric scanner and then punched his password into a keypad beside the elevator.
The doors closed behind us, and the elevator started to ascend. The overhead light was brighter here than it had been in the gym, and I could get a really good look at my father. He looked a little less beat up than I did, but nevertheless, he looked pretty bad.
The elevator came to a stop, and before the door opened, a computerized voice announced my father’s departure. “Goodbye, Agent V.”
We entered a musty, ruined space when we stepped out of the elevator. Broken pieces of wood and bricks surrounded us.
“Anyone else think this place is a little spooky?” Logan asked when we came out.
The outside of the warehouse didn’t look like much. It was meant to look old and abandoned and as little like a state-of-the-art CIA-training facility as possible, and the designers had really outdone themselves. It was tattier and more run down than any other building in the city. A tall chain-link fence surrounded it on all sides with a tangle of rusted barbed wire along its top. Signs reading danger and no trespassing were tacked to the fence near the gate.
Logan and my father joked about whether the warehouse might be haunted as we headed for the cars, and made ghostly noises at one another that echoed off the damp gray cinderblock walls. “That sound! That was the Ghost of Burritos Past!”
“I’m moving upwind of you.”
“Do you want to ride with us honey?” Dad asked when we’d made it back to the sidewalk.
I wanted to go with my father, I did, but I didn’t want things to get awkward again, because I didn’t want to discuss the fact that I walked around waiting for something bad to happen all the time. He’d planted that fear in my head. He was a badass agent everyone loved and respected, and I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle the life being his daughter entailed, or that I was weak.
So I shook my head. “No, I’ll take my motorcycle.” I was already walking toward my Yamaha. “I’ll see you at home.” I put on my helmet, and rode out in front of them.
I’d trained with Logan for years. The first time he’d handed me a gun, even though it had been empty, I’d freaked out. We’d started my training with paintballs and empty guns until I was ready to handle the real thing. I didn’t understand then that everyone didn’t spend afternoons after middle school learning to use weapons, didn’t realize how unusual, and how necessary, it all was, but now I did. The world was a battlefield, and I’d been born right in the middle of it. Now I could hold any weapon without flinching. The scariest thing now about knowing how to use all those weapons was realizing how tempted I was to put my knowledge of them to the test.
When I merged onto the highway I saw the reason why both my father and Logan had been willing to let me ride home alone: the two black SUVs that were tailing me.
INNOCENCE
Abby, is everything all right up there?”
Crap. “Yes, Mom, I’m almost done!” I jumped off my bed and fell flat on my face, as my legs got tangled up with my sheets.
I forced myself out of the covers. “I’ll be right out!”
When I’d finally freed myself from the sheets I hurried into my walk-in closet. For some reason, my body wasn’t hurting from training the previous night.
My mother was about to launch her pre-spring collection, an addition to her fashion line, Cells. She’d asked me to get ready for the party, but instead I’d taken a shower, called my friends, and crawled into bed to read Harry Potter for the millionth time.
I grabbed the first dress I saw upon entering my closet. I was in luck; it was a short red Alexander McQueen that Mom was sure to approve of. I tugged it on, snatched a pair of black Christian Louboutin pumps (Louboutin’s signature red soles coordinated perfectly with my dress) from a shelf and rushed into my bathroom. I quickly brushed my hair, slipped into the heels, and dashed out of my room as fast as I could.
“I know you don’t like crowds, honey, but please—smile for me tonight,” my mother said when I came downstairs. She stood together with one of my bodyguards, Ben, a dapper thirty-two-year-old with thinning blonde hair. Ben clutched a camera in his hand.
“Of course I’ll smile, Mom. I’m happy for you,” I lied, repeating a pat response I’d used many times before. I hated being famous, hated having to smile and pose for the paparazzi, but I put up with all of it for her.
“How about giving me a smile now, Abby,” Ben said, snapping a picture of us. “You look beautiful,” he added, and my smile disappeared.
The camera’s flash reflected on the chandelier hanging between the wings of the double staircase, reminding me of all the cameras that were probably about to invade my space.
My mother saw that my smile was fake, and saw how quickly it had disappeared. “Stop saying that, Ben. Abby still thinks she’s ugly.” My mother always said this whenever the topic of my ‘beauty’ snaked its way into our conversations. In her eyes, I was a beauty and an inspiration to my friends and to teenagers everywhere. But, seriously: couldn’t someone else inspire them? Why me?
I hated getting caught up in the chaos the media brought to my life. There was no privacy, and the tabloids talked about everything I did. At school, it was like I
was parting the Red Sea whenever I walked down the hall.
It always surprised me that Mom would find me beautiful, when compared to her I was a gawky adolescent frump. Compared to her, Helen of Troy was a gawky little frump. At the age of forty-two, she looked no more than thirty. She had dark, wavy hair that cascaded down past her shoulders and golden brown eyes like mine. She’d always been the cool, beautiful mother who turned heads and graced the covers of magazines. I’d lost count long ago of how many times she’d been named the Most Beautiful This or the Sexiest That Alive. Each year her name was at least mentioned in some such category.
“All right, maybe I’m not ugly, but can’t I just be Abigail, at least in my own home?”
Both my mother and Ben laughed as if I’d just made a joke, which I didn’t get because I wasn’t the funny kind. I’d tried telling a joke once, and my friends told me to never do it again.
My mother posed for one last picture with me. “Honey you are so innocent, and so adorable.”
I wasn’t innocent or adorable. As a matter of fact, I was sometimes the opposite of the loving, caring, role model Abigail that the media made me out to be. The public loved me because I was charitable. My fans loved me because of my mother—it didn’t hurt that I’d inherited her sense of style and her friendly nature. Only my family and friends loved me because I was Abigail.
And to most of my friends and family, Abigail meant a clumsy, loving, caring, awkward, selfless young lady. And I was that Abigail, but there was another Abigail, too—one who liked the rush of danger and loved playing with guns. I didn’t quite understand her, because she was nothing like the Abigail that everyone knew and loved. That other Abigail was lethal.
JUMP—DON’T JUMP—jump—don’t jump—jump—don’t—
“Abigail!” my best friend Sarah shouted my name, jerking me back from my internal debate.
Caught. Damn, I should have jumped.
I looked around, slowly realizing I was in a restroom. I could hear music booming in the background. I knew I was at the party, I just didn’t remember how I’d arrived.
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