City Spies Oneshot Collection

The Problems of Being a Spy Applying to College

Because of the end of the book profile in City of the Dead where Paris is mentioned wanting to apply to college in the US but also not wanting to do it because he doesn't want to let his family down.

The first thing Paris realized about applying to college is that the number of emails from colleges increases quickly and without any real warning. He wasn't quite sure exactly where they had gotten his email address from. Maybe College Board when he'd made an account there a few months ago. No matter where the colleges had gotten his email, Paris wished they'd all just quit emailing him. He didn't have much hope for them stopping, though.

Paris's plans to go to college in America had begun not because he really loved getting a million emails every day from schools but because he really. . . Well, he really wasn't quite sure how it had started now that he was actually applying and everything suddenly seemed terrifying. The chance to experience something new, maybe, explore some different interests away from the constant reminders of his work at MI6.

Whatever his original reasons for applying to American schools had been, the whole thing was becoming a lot to deal with. Paris felt a little strange filling out his activities section, seeing as he couldn't list his many years of experience at MI6 as his top extracurricular. There was no spot to explain that his excessive absences were because he had been sent on secret spy missions. How was he supposed to explain how he'd been adopted years apart by two people who weren't married to each other, one of whom was actually technically dead? Spying was the biggest part of his life, and he couldn't talk about it at all.

It was no wonder, really, that Paris had no good ideas for his essay. There was just so much Paris had to leave out of whatever he tried to talk about. His parents, his siblings, how he'd even wound up in Scotland in the first place.

How was Paris supposed to talk about not wanting to let his family down when he couldn't talk about his fear of failure on missions? How could he show leadership when he couldn't talk about the pressures and responsibilities of being the alpha? How was he supposed to talk about a person he admired when the reasons he admired the people that he admired all had at least something to do with espionage, if not everything to do with it? Everything Paris tried to write about, he could only come up with a few sentences before running into a big, huge, classified roadblock.

Paris knew that his college applications probably would have been a little stressful even if he weren't a spy, but being a spy added a whole new layer of complication and frustration to everything. MI6 was going to have to review everything he tried to submit in his application to, just to be sure he didn't let anything that was supposed to be classified slip, and Paris was quite sure none of the other applicants would have their applications reviewed by intelligence agencies.

In the back of his mind throughout the whole thing was that Paris wasn't actually quite sure he was ready to leave the FARM. He loved it there. It was where his family was. And he was the first to leave. He wouldn't be there to help out on missions because he would be busy being at college on his own in another country. He knew he could come back on school breaks, but the odds of the rest of his family being out of town on missions was always high when school might be off, even if his school calendar would no longer match up with Kinloch's. That would be true no matter where he went, but if he was closer he might have been able to come home on long weekends. That wouldn't be possible if he was in America.

Paris listened to some virtual tours of different colleges with Monty, Mother, and whoever else happened to be around looking over his shoulder. After a few tours the schools all started to sound the same, and Paris started forgetting which college was which. At a certain point in the process, he kind of wished someone else could just start making his decisions for him.

Sadly, Paris had to make his own decisions about his future. Which was maybe a good thing, but the amount of decisions he was having to make was a little bit overwhelming.

After about fifty tries at writing an essay that didn't mention anything classified, Paris came up with something that he deemed hopefully good enough, then made his current English teacher, his English teacher from the year before, Monty, Mother, Tru, and all of his siblings proofread it just to make sure it really didn't have any typos in it before copying and pasting it into his application and making Sydney hit the submit button.

Sydney thought it was kind of stupid that Paris was too nervous to submit his own application, but she did it for him anyway, because what else would a good sister do?

"Are you going to make me open all of your decision emails too?" Sydney asked Paris.

"I don't even want to think about that," Paris said.

"I'll take that as a yes," Sydney said.