Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Three

I couldn't ignore it.

I really, really wanted to ignore it, but I couldn't.  It was like this constant buzzing in my mind—a permanent shadow looming over a single, empty spot in my heart. 

This was the first year of my life that my mother wouldn’t be there to drop me off on the first day of school.  I know it’s not a lot—just another checkmark on the long list of absent firsts—but sitting in the limo, on the way to my mother’s school without my mother at my side, I couldn’t ignore it.

Aunt Bex was with us.  She was around a lot more.  Matt sat beside her, his carryon bag leaning over in his lap.  When they were done here, the two of them were headed straight to the airport and Aunt Bex was going to show Matt all of London.  He was, after all, on his way to becoming an official member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  That’s right.  It had taken him all summer, but now my brother was just one more interview away from being an active member at MI6.  He was going to be elite.  He was going to be powerful.

He was going to wet himself.

“What’s the matter, Matt?” I teased from the leather bench opposite him.  “Scared?”

“Morgan Ann,” Dad scolded from beside me, using that signature dad-voice.  “I’m sure your brother is very excited for his future.  Some consider MI6 to be the most honorable career choice that a young spy can make.”  Then he looked at Aunt Bex and half his mouth turned to smile  “Well, second most honorable.”

“Hilarious, Zachary,” she said, turning up her nose.  “Tell me, who was it that saved the CIA’s butt during the Cuban Missile Crisis?”

Dad just huffed at her, arms crossed.  “It always comes back to Cuba, doesn’t it, Baxter?”

“As it should,” she argued back.  “Considering the fact that Florida still exists, we reserve the right to hang that over your unjustifiably large heads.  MI6 is the most efficient intelligence agency in the world and you know it.”

“Efficient.”  Dad raised his eyebrows, falsely impressed.  “Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed of, Matt?  Joining the most efficient intelligence community that this fine universe has to offer?”  He said that last bit with his hand over his heart as he looked off into the distance, stretching out every last word until it became aggressively sarcastic.  I could almost see the massive starts and stripes waving behind him, the national anthem playing as he brought a finger to his eye and swiped away an invisible tear.  “I must say, as a father, I am so very proud.”

Which might’ve been a pretty good rebuttal.  That is, if not for the fact that Dad actually was ridiculously proud.

“You go on and laugh,” Aunt Bex said.  “I’ve already convinced one of your children to cross over to my side.  It’s only a matter of time until I have them both.”

Dad waved his hand at her, sticking an arm around my shoulders.  “Puh-lease,” he said, drawing out the word into two syllables.  “Maggie’s been CIA-bound since her first backflip.”

It was true.  To me, the CIA was endgame.  It was where my mother had served and my grandmother before her.  It was where both of my grandfathers—biological and not—had served.  My aunt.  My father.  Nearly my whole family.  Almost everyone I had ever looked up to.  My family had too many roots in the CIA.  Too much history to be apart of.  To me, the CIA was more than an agency.  It was the very definition of success.

But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t poke fun at my father before I got there.  “I don’t know, Dad.  They have a really nice lounge.  And their training room is the best in the northern hemisphere, and—”