Spy School Oneshot Collection

Normal

I could never have been normal. My parents just weren't quite set up to raise a normal kid. Trixie could only be sort of normal because she came later. My parents had learned from their mistakes on me by then. (Sort of, at least. They may have gone a little too far in the other direction.)

And it's not that I would want to be normal. Of course not. That would be boring. But honestly, I probably could have benefited from just a tiny bit of boring when I was younger. Not a lot, but just a little bit. It might have made me more relatable to my peers and just a whole lot less intimidating. Because while intimidating people is nice in some situations, it makes making friends a whole lot harder than it should be.

I don't understand the people who can separate their lives as spies and their lives as other, more normal people. That's just not how it works for my family. That's why Mom originally started distancing herself from Dad even before I was born. (While it lasted, their marriage was largely a long distance relationship. They were in the same country like half the year. At most.) That's why Trixie got shipped off to boarding school at the first opportunity. (Paid for by the CIA because Dad managed to convince them it was a necessary business expense.) There just isn't any separation for us, and there never has been. Even though we could use some. But, The Legacy! And so this is impossible.

When I was little, I spent a lot of time going back and forth between staying with my grandparents and my mom. I really only spent more significant amounts of time with my dad once I got to spy school. (And that wasn't awkward at all...) When I was with Mom, she did try to get me to pick up some hobbies, but very few of those actually worked out. (Learning to knit was a disaster that I would like never to be mentioned again, but Mom still talks about it, for some reason delighting in my tangled yarn induced misery. And so whenever it gets mentioned, I have to then follow up with how lousy of an artist she is. You would think that after all the art she's looked at she might have at some point progressed beyond stick figures, but that is not the case.) My grandfather, as you might expect, just isn't much of a hobbies kind of guy. Mostly he just taught me about various forms of weaponry. (Which was useful for espionage, but not really good for making friends and finding common interests with people my own age who weren't also slightly insane. Or, in some cases, very insane.)

I did read plenty of books about what normal girls were like, but they didn't transfer over to my daily life very well. I was never invited to sleepovers or birthday parties or on playdates. I didn't go to a normal school with recess and worksheets and classes that didn't mention spies. There just weren't any stories about kids who had lives as dangerous as mine. (Well, dangerous in the same way. There were a whole lot of diseases spreading all over in some of the historical fiction ones, and there was the occasional murder mystery, but neither of those were all that relevant to me.) Gymnastics and baby-sitting and magic attics and overly long phone calls just don't compare to spy training, but those things were still bizarrely fascinating, even if those normals were way out of my reach. (I suppose I could have achieved the basics of overly long phone calls, but it would have had to have just been with relatives, and that's really not the same as with friends.)

Some of those books would have these pages in the back that you could tear out and send off with a check to receive book subscriptions or related board games or calendars or magazines. The offers were almost always out of date, but I liked to sit sometimes and wonder about the kind of girl who could send off for those things and not have her family worried about the packages containing bombs or neurotoxins when they arrived. (I never sent off for anything, but I knew what would happen if I did.)

Trixie inherited most of those books when I went off to spy school and decided I was too old for them, but I know she didn't see those stories the same way I did. Trixie was like those girls, with friends and petty drama that was forgotten by the next day. She didn't have to deal with the big things the way I did. Her biggest problem was dealing with our parents, but because she was kept in the dark so much, Trixie probably just assumed that their marriage fell apart the same way that anyone else's parents would have had their marriage fall apart. My parents didn't even make up some elaborate story about their divorce. Trixie was too young to know what was going on when it was happening, and our parents just glossed over any questions she had later. And of course that made her frustrated and suspicious and sometimes kind of mad at them, but because of this lying, she got to enjoy just being a kid. A kid who never really saw (or knew) her family, but still a kid.

Despite my unconventional childhood, at least I did learn how to act normally, which has turned out to be quite important for espionage. Not that I could keep that up for very long. It drives me crazy to act so ditzy and stupid and all that, even though it's just an act. Even though, in another life, that could have been my normal. A whole lot of things could have been my normal. I just so happened to end up with the very abnormal normal.