When Dr. Steve told us that there were more than thirty-seven motion sensors under the grounds of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, I was not impressed. With its perfectly manicured lawns and neatly-trimmed bushes, it looked like what it said on the tin: a posh all girls-school full of the rich and the innocent.
I knew better. Perhaps I knew better than any guy in the jet. I’d been studying the Gallagher Academy for what had felt like a year now. I felt antsy, but I pushed the feelings down with a reverence. This was child’s play, I reminded myself.
What made me different from every other male sophomore in the jet was that I hadn’t come here to embrace the collaborative nature of the exchange program: I had come here with a mission.
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Cammie Morgan, was spelt out in single-spaced bold capital letters on a plain, brown file. I remembered looking down at it, and then looking back up at Mother. She had smiled a wide red-lipsticky smile. “I have a mission for you, Zachy,” she’d whispered – as if it were our secret, and our secret only.
I was interested, then. I’d picked up the file and flipped it open without any inquisitions whatsoever. A photo of a girl, whom looked to be around my age, stared back at me. Dirty blonde hair that went to her shoulders, dull green eyes, a nose that was slightly too big for her face – she was as normal as you could get. She was a spy, I realised immediately. Or at least one in training. Pavement artist? I guessed.
I didn’t furrow my brow or ask any questions; I just looked back up at Mother and slid back in my seat. “So what do you want me to do?”
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Dr. Steve rattled off the “interesting” facts and trivia (that I already knew, of course) about the all-girls academy, in that – fake – excited-sounding voice of his. “A moat!” he said to Wilson beside him, who nodded disinterestedly. He was a little crazy, Dr. Steve. But I guess he had to be. He taught young men from all across the world how to shoot a sniper and where to plunge the knife to kill a guy. How he managed to seem happy all the time was a mystery to me.
Grant nudged me with his foot, and I shook my mission out of my head (Tip number Seventy-Four: when thinking about a mission, you look like you’re thinking about a mission), turning to him as he slid up closer to whisper, “Spy girls” into my ear with a happy glint in his eye.
I grinned back.
“Have you got your mission yet?”
I furrowed my eyebrows – how did he know about that? – before I realised he was talking about the other thing. The tailing thing.
“Yep,” I said with a half-shrug.
“Can I see your girl?”
I smiled again. “Now that’s what we call classified information, Grant.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve definitely been spending too much time listening to Solomon. And besides, I have to check. I need to find my partner.”
“Partner?”
“This is an exercise which requires partners, sunshine. Has Star Boy been listening at all these last twenty minutes?”
“Cammie Morgan,” I just said in reply, refusing to let him see my file. I wasn’t allowed to, anyway. Mine had notes in red biro that said things like “Mention Suzie!” and “Be suave!” all over.
He opened his own file, grinning a little to himself at the girl’s picture (hot, Egyptian and British – I couldn’t exactly blame him) and skimming over the text that told us everything we needed to know. “Rebecca Baxter, best friend of Cameron Morgan, daughter of MI6 Agents Abe and Grace Baxter.” He looked up at me. “So I guess we’re partners then.”
When the jet landed on the freshly-mowed lawn of the Academy an hour later, and I had jumped out from the side with the rest of Blackthorne, I felt ready. I didn’t realize the importance of what this mission would entail. I didn’t realize that this, a last-minute decision made by the principal of my school and my own Mother, would be anything even remotely significant. It’d all be over by the end of the semester, I was sure.
“Earn the trust of Cammie Morgan,” they had told me. They never mentioned anything about falling in love.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a What If kind of thing. Like, what if Zach was actually only partnered up with Cammie because she was his mission to get close to her and gain her trust and find out things for his mother yadayadayada. I won’t tell you whether I was right or not (spoilers!!), but yeah this is just a quickie fanfic I wrote because I need to get back into the swing of things before I start with the GG6 fanfics!
P.S. Votes, comments and feedback are all very appreciated!
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Mini Stories and One Shots
Short Story“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”—William Carlos Williams. So I write things sometimes; have a guess where they go.
