Cross My Heart Bonus Chapter
Ever wonder what the first day of spy school is like?
A/N: I always wondered what Cammie's first day at the Gallagher Academy was like, and I know that I am not the only one. I hope you enjoy.
I don't really know where this came from, all I know is that my friend found this and gave it to me and that it was written by Ally Carter. I read it a few times before I actually realised that a few bits didn't make sense, so anything that is bold and underlined is what I added so that it would make sense to anyone reading it. I hope that you enjoy and will leave a review! Criticism is welcome, but absolutely NO flames. Thank you!
Disclaimer: I do not own this. It belongs solely to Ally Carter. (Although I wish I did own it). Anything that is bold and underlined is mine though =)
I'M NOT A GIRL WHO lives in mansions. I don't summer at the Vineyard or ski the Alps. Sure, my mom is always saying that I'm an extraordinary young woman, but moms aren't really the most impartial judges of these things. Especially when they're holding open the door of a limousine and trying to convince you to crawl inside and leave behind the only home you've ever known.
Sure, I knew where we were going. Technically speaking, I had been preparing for this day my whole life. Still, 'm pretty sure I held my breath for the entire two-hour ride through the Virginia country side – right up until the moment the limo slowed, and these great big gates swung open and we started down a long, winding lane. At that point, I'm pretty sure I wasn't breathing . . . at all.
We drove past a guard shack by the gates that looked normal enough – but when one of the guards opened the doors, I saw the largest bank of security monitors I'd ever seen. We continued on, passing this huge lake, where a glass dome rose from the center of the water. Three women were walking toward it – you know, across the lake. I glanced at my mother, because even though I might be exceptional in her eyes, I've never walked on water, and I really didn't know how I was going to start now.
I wanted to stop and study everything. And I wanted the car to go faster.
I wanted to ask a million questions. And I wanted nothing to interrupt what I was pretty sure was the coolest moment of my entire twelve-year-old life.
But most of all, I wanted my mom to tell me it wasn't all a dream. That I really was going to follow in her footsteps. That I really was about to enrol in the best school in the world.
That I really was going to a school for spies.
"Welcome to the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women," my mother said as we climbed out of the car. I turned to face her, but she was busy gazing up at the limestone walls that seemed to belong to another world, with stained-glass windows straight out of a cathedral. She wasn't staring at the building as if it was a mansion, or a school. Or a job. Instead, she stood there, staring as if she were . . . home.
PROS AND CONS OF LIVING IN A REALLY, REALLY BIG MANSION:
PRO: It turns out mansions come with chefs!
CON: Chefs don't like it when you sit on the counter and make suggestions like you do with Grandma Morgan.
PRO: the Gallagher Mansion comes with acres and acres of grounds perfectly suited to goofing off.
CON: Acres and acres of grounds are the perfect home for approximately nine trillion ticks, chiggers, and other things that find my ankles delicious.
PRO: Every grade has its own common room with a huge TV and comfy couches.
CON: Common rooms can be pretty lonely when you arrive two weeks before classes start and are temporarily the only girl in the entire school.
PRO: There is an entire portion of the library dedicated to Television: covert uses of.
CON: All those corridors mean that it takes FOREVER to get anywhere! (Note to self: see if there might possibly be shortcuts of some kind.)
For two weeks I wandered the halls and browsed the library. I helped my mom hang pictures in her office and explored the grounds. But on the Sunday before classes started, I woke up and rolled over in bed, listening. It didn't take long to realise that this day was different.
Screaming. There was a lot of screaming. For a second I wondered that the Gallagher mansion might be haunted. I got dressed,stepped outside my room, and three girls rushed past me so quickly they were almost a blur. That's when I remembered what day it was – those weren't the screams of Gallagher Girls past, they were the "Welcome home" cries of Gallagher Girls present.
And I was supposed to be one of them.
For two week I'd been lost and alone inside the huge halls, but as I started downstairs, I couldn't help but think that the Gallagher mansion was nowhere near as intimidating as the girls who lived there.
I mean, seriously. Almost every girl that passed was speaking in a totally different language. I saw one girl run up to hug her friend from behind – but instead of turning to hug her back, her friend spun around and flipped the girl through the air as if she weight about ten pounds. And that wasn't even the crazy part. The crazy part was that the other girl (the flippee – not the flipper) landed on her feet and didn't even act mad about it!
I squeezed myself up against the dark-panelled walls because even though my mom had been teaching me self-defence for years, no way was I ready for full-contact hugging before classes even started. Instead, I tried really, really hard to be invisible as I moved down the stairs. It must have worked, because somehow I don't think anyone even noticed me. Well, not until it was too late.
"Oops!" A very tall, very pretty girl with dark shiny hai and big brown eyes practically knocked me off my feet. "I'm so sorry!" she cried, catching me before I could stumble. "I didn't even see you there."
She looked at her friend, an even taller redhead, who shook her head as if she hadn't seen me either. Maybe there was a ghost inside the Gallagher Academy's walls – me.
"That's okay," I said, staring up at the faces in front of me – and I mean way up. I've always been a perfectly average height for my age, but standing there I felt like a little kid, especially when the dark-haired girl leaned down and said, "You must be a newbie!" She looked around as if something was wrong.
The redheaded girl turned to her friend and said something in a language I had never heard before. Her friend laughed and replied in something that sounded like Farsi, but I couldn't be totally sure because I was standing there . . . talking to Gallagher Girls. And they were looking at me as if they knew I didn't belong there.
You might think I was imagining this, but I wasn't. I know, because the red-haired girl looked at me then and said, "You don't belong here."
"But the admissions committee said I could come!" I blurted. Which must have been hilarious, because they laughed.
The girl with the dark hair put her arms around me. "No, I mean the seventh graders are supposed to be downstairs for orientation. No wonder you're lost, poor thing."
They started back down the stairs. The girl with the red hair looked at me,"Come on, we'll show you. I'm Neha, by the way. That's Jen."
It occurred to me that girls like Neha and Jen had once been newbies, too. "It's nice to meet you," I said. I smiled, but drew back. "I'm on my way to orientation right now, actually. My mom and I moved in a couple of weeks ago. I can find it."
"Oh. Okay," Jen said slowly, looking e up and down. "I guess we'll be seeing you around."
"So that's the new headmistress's daughter?" I heard Neha whisper.
"I guess so," Jen said. "I'd forgotten how tiny they are." And from her tone I knew what was coming next. "Poor thing. I don't think I'd look that good if I just lost my dad."
As I walked through the halls, every girl seemed to be staring, every voice seemed to be whispering – and I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone in that entire building already knew about me About Mom. And most of all, about Dad.
I wanted to be invisible again. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. I wanted to do anything but go to a stupid orientation. But then I heard my mother's voice.
"It's so great to have you here," Mom said as the door of her office opened. Even though she's one of the best spies (which is frequently synonymous with liar), I knew that she was telling the truth. "I hope you'll be very happy here, Rebecca – "
"My friends call me Bex," a girl with a strong British accent interrupted.
I didn't know if it was instinct or training (or maybe some mother/daughter psychic connection), but for some reason, in the next instant, my mother was calling, "Cammie!" as if she could see me from where she stood. Which she couldn't. But spies (not to mention mothers) have their ways.
Walking toward my mother's office, I tried to remind myself that there had been tests to get into the Gallagher Academy. And committees and reviews. But looking at the girl who stood beside my mother confirmed that I was right and there had been some terrible, horrible, soon-to-be-reversed oversight, because she and I were absolutely nothing alike.
She was tall, with graceful arms and strong legs. I looked like taffy that had been stretched out at the country fair.
Her dark skin glowed so radiantly that she looked like she must have been painted by Michelangelo or something. I had a blotchy red spot on my chin that was about to become my very first zit.
She stood at the epicenter of the single greatest covert training ground in the world as if she were finally meeting her destiny, and I knew the universe had made a mistake. Rebecca Baxter was the one who was born to be a Gallagher Girl. Rebecca Baxter had been on a plane for nine hours to get here, but she was the girl who was truly home. She was everything I'd ever thought a Gallagher Girl would be; I didn't even compare.
An older lady I'd never seen before appeared in the doorway behind my mother. "If that's all, headmistress, I believe the seventh graders are waiting."
My mother waved her away. "Of course, Patricia. "Don't let me keep you."
The woman swept past me and down the stairs, but Rebecca hardly seemed to notice her. Instead, she looked at me with a kind of curiosity.
"You're Cammie?" she asked as if I couldn't possibly be the Cammie – daughter of the woman who stood beside us. "You've been here two weeks already?" she asked.
Immediately I felt like an idiot. Why had I spent all last Friday rearranging the furniture in my room instead of learning Arabic? Rebecca probably would have already memorised half the library. Just when I was sure she would write me off as a total waste of space, she yelled, "You have to tell me everything!" and flung herself toward me, wrapping her arms around me and nearly cutting of the circulation to my arms. Rebecca had no doubt already mastered two years worth of Protection and Enforcement curriculum. Luckily, I didn't have to respond because a loud, clear voice boomed from the foyer beneath us.
"Welcome, ladies, to the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women." Rebecca and I glanced over the railing to see the older woman from Mom's office standing at the base of the massive staircase. She peered out over a group of girls who looked just as terrified as I felt. "I am Professor Patricia Buckingham. And in the next two hours we will touch only a fraction of the history of the sisterhood that each of you are about to enter."
Beside me, I heard Rebecca whisper, "Brilliant."
As we followed Professor Buckingham from room to room on the first floor, she rattled off facts and figures about the mansion. "This is the Grand all. It was built by the Gallagher family during the second – and largest – of the family's renovations to the mansion itself."
Meanwhile, beside me, Rebecca – I mean Bex – was full of questions.
"So, is it true they've got Albert Einstein's brain and are using it to power an supercomputer in the basement?" Bex asked me, her arm looped through mine.
Was that possible? I shrugged, feeling even dumber than before.
"I heard there was an entire hidden floor where they keep the really classified stuff. Will we see that? You think?"
"I . . ." I wasn't really sure what to say, but luckily, at that moment, Professor Buckingham stopped in the center of the long room near my mother's office and announced, "The Hall of History, ladies."
For the first time I really looked at the room that stood between my mother's office and the world. "Here lie just a few examples of what makes up this school's exceptional past. I bring you here today because you represent the future." She swept her hands out wide.
"In 1865, Gillian Gallagher was a girl not much older than each of you." Professor Buckingham looked at us all in turn. "She was everything a young woman of the age was supposed to be: intelligent, well-read, accomplished, and beautiful. She was also more than a century ahead of her time. I will not tell you the entire story of Ioseph Cavan now – there'll be plenty of time for that later – but it is important that you know now that you are not here by accident. You are here because Gillian Gallagher founded a school where young women who are ahead of their times would have a place to learn, achieve, and be exceptional.
In the next instant Professor Buckingham reached out and touched a pedestal that stood in the centre of the hall. A strange red light covered her palm as if her hand were on fire, and yet she didn't jerk away. Instead, she watched calmly as the base of the pedestal opened and a sword rose out of it, reflecting the eerie light.
As the sword glowed behind us, Bex turned to me and whispered, "This is going to be an incredible year. I'm really glad to know you, Cammie." Something in the way she said it made me think that maybe I'd just found my first best friend.
"Um . . . excuse me?" The voice was so soft we almost didn't hear it, and the accent so Southern that I couldn't place it. I turned around, and right then discovered I wasn't the shortest Gallagher Girl in history.
I'd seen her, of course, standing quietly in the group, but until I saw her up close, I couldn't appreciate how tiny the little blond girl really was. Her small hands grasped a pink notebook as if her life depended upon it, but she didn't move to write. Instead, she just looked at Bex and me as if we were as cool as Neha and Jen. I really didn't have the heart to tell her she was mistaken. About me, anyway.
"Hi," the girl said again, "I'm Liz. I don't mean to bother y'all, but . . . I mean, I wanted to introduce myself, you see, because . . . I guess . . ." She stopped and seemed to gather herself before blurting, "I'm your roommate!"
"I'm Cammie, and this is –"
"Oh, I know who you are." As soon as the words left her mouth, the girl turned the brightest shade of red I'd ever seen on a human being. She turned to Bex. "You're the first U.K. student in Gallagher Academy history. And you're a second generation Gallagher Girl," she said turning to me. "And you're mom's the headmistress and your . . ." But then Liz trailed off. She gave me the look that people always give when they're about to say "your dad" and then realise too late that it's a mistake. "You wouldn't know me though," she said quickly. She blushed again. "I'm a nobody."
I thought about what Professor Buckingham had said about accident we were here. "Somehow, I doubt that," I said.
Liz smiled and walked toward the pedestal while the rest of the class moved to look the artefacts that filled the room. "Wow!" Liz said. "It really is the prettiest thing I ever –"
Just then her shoe caught on the rug, and sent her hurtling toward the sword's protective case with every ounce of momentum her seventy-pound body could muster.
"NO!" Professor Buckingham cried and lunged toward us, but a bright light had already filled the room. A sharp crack echoed through the hall. And Liz's hair was starting to smoke.
A goofy look crossed her face, and I could have sworn she whispered "Oopsy daisy" as she crumbled to the floor.
Well, the good news was that Gillian Gallagher's sword was only charged with enough electricity to knock a person out. The bad news was that our seventy-pound roommate counted as only half a person.
Liz's this hair was still sticking almost straight out from her head. Small bandages covered both of her small hands. Her pale skin had a sort of cooked look about it, but she didn't seem to notice, and neither did Bex. They were sitting cross-legged on their beds, looking around the totally cool room where I'd been sleeping for two weeks, and I felt like I was seeing it for the first time too.
"We're really here, aren't we?" Liz asked.
"Yeah. It's brilliant," Bex replied.
"I wonder who'll go there. Liz pointed to the fourth bed that sat in the corner of the room, just a bare mattress and box springs. A clean slate.
"Ooh," Bex said, loving the game already. "Maybe a diplomats daughter who is being chased by terrorists and we have to protect her?"
Liz laughed and scooted forward on her bed. "Or maybe a girl who is some kind of science prodigy –"
"Like you," Bex added, but Liz talked on.
"– and she has to come to the Gallagher Academy to finish her research for . . . something cool."
"Yeah," Bex said, turning to me with wide eyes.
I'm pretty sure I was supposed to supply my own crazy theory about our future roommate. I was supposed to wonder what was going to come next. But instead I sat listening to the laughter and thundering footsteps that filled the corridors.
For the last two weeks, I'd been roaming the halls of the Gallagher Academy by myself. I'd been an only child for twelve years. And though the Gallagher Academy had basically been part of me for my entire life, it wasn't until that moment that I felt like a member of the sisterhood.