A/N1 Here's something a bit different from me. Not claiming originality for it, just noting that it is something I have not done before.

The idea had been languishing in notebooks, in the form of a title, chapter titles, and partial sketches. While I was in Germany, I found myself with some rainy-day time on my hands and this one of the things I wrote as the rain fell.

This begins a story, in one sense, a meditation, you might say, in another. It is a series of 'chapters', some short stories, others longer, involving some experiments with form or content, but each and all telling the story of the (mis)education of Sarah Walker. Think of the stories as a story sequence. Most will be in temporal order (with gaps). Some will be pre-canon, some post-canon, others canon or inserted into various nooks and crannies in canon. (A Table of Contents is available in my profile.)

These 'chapters' are not meant merely as one-offs but are collectively to add up to something, to create 'a moving X-ray image', as it were, of Sarah's head and heart as they are formed and reformed. Occasionally (not this time, however), the 'chapters' may be followed by a short remark.

My title is a nod to the famous book by Henry Adams, and to the classic Lauryn Hill album.

Don't own Chuck. And so we begin...more or less quietly.

The (Mis)Education of Sarah Walker

Book One: Sarah vs. the Spy Life

CHAPTER ONE

From Okay to Good?

Driving her car in the San Diego sunshine, Jenny Burton felt okay. Her day at the high school had been like lots of others: mostly lonely, with a few nasty, brutish moments, but luckily, they had been short. She did not fight back, and she did not react strongly, and so her tormentors, chiefly Dick-Dick (she always thought of him as Double Dick) and Heather Chandler, usually bored of teasing her after a few minutes.

Enduring the teasing was strange since so much of what was said was predicated on the idea that Jenny was naive, clueless and helpless. But that was wrong. Jenny had been her father's right hand in con after con. True, for many years, her father's right hand had not realized what his left hand was doing. She had thought it was a game: one she and her father were good at while others were not, but she did not really understand that what they were doing was legally and morally wrong. It was just what they did; it was their way of having adventures together.

But at a certain point, younger, really, than she liked to admit, she had an inkling of what was happening, of what they were actually doing, and the inkling quickly turned into a full-on certainty. But the passing of her ignorance did not keep her from participating in the cons, and, to some extent, willingly. It was hard (it was really hard) for a young girl, just entering puberty, still admiring her father, and still so unsure of herself (and her own judgment), to stop participating. Setting aside her admiration and her unsurety, she also had nowhere else to go. I've been trapped in...adventure. She had been out of communication with her mother for several years, so far out of communication that she was no longer sure whether her mother still lived where she had lived when Sarah last saw her. Her grandmother had died two years ago, and she and her father had not known until after the funeral. Jenny had found the obituary online. It listed her mother as surviving the death of her grandmother, but it gave no address for her. Jenny was not mentioned.

The one place where all their travels had not taken Jenny and her father was near her mother. Jenny had furtively slipped away and tried to call her a couple of times, but the number she remembered was out of service. She sometimes wondered if her grandmother or her mom had ever even tried to find her, or if her father had ever been in contact with either, told them that Jenny was okay, that she had grown into a teenager, that she was now not so far from becoming a woman.

Over the past couple of years, the pace of cons and of relocations had increased steadily. She had not been in any one place for as long as they had been in San Diego. That was because her father was deep in a long con, one that he kept telling her could set them up for life. He had kept her out of it for once, allowing her, for the first time since she had reached high school age, to have a relatively normal day-to-day life. Relatively: she still came home to an empty rental house almost every evening, and she never knew when, or even if, her father would return. Sometimes, as darkness fell, she reluctantly turned on the police scanner they kept at the house and listened in slow-gnawing fear, expecting to hear Jack Burton's name.

ooOoo

She turned her car and pulled into the parking lot of a small hamburger restaurant, Ground Chuck, that she and her only friend, Gale Gant, often visited after school. Jenny was always on her own at meals and Gale sometimes was too. They had planned to meet today.

Jenny smiled as she always did as she gazed at the sign, a crazy picture of a grinning hamburger patty resting atop a globe of the earth, obscuring the North Pole from view. It made no sense. I admit it, I like the nonsense of it. She chuckled to herself, shut off the car and got out.

As Jenny pushed open the front door, she heard the usual bell jingle. She entered the restaurant, the smell of burgers and fries and fresh-baked fruit pies (blueberry?) crowding around her in comforting witness. The proprietor, a squat, round man, Morty Arthurs, looked up from his elbow-greased counter-scrubbing. Morty kept the place spotless and he served the best burgers in town, even though Ground Chuck somehow managed never to get the clientele it deserved. Jenny believed it was probably the sign, but Morty refused to listen.

"It's surrealist," he whined whenever Jenny explained her belief.

She then studied him with narrowed eyes as her tone pancaked: "Like that makes it better, Morty?" That's where the argument always stalled.

ooOoo

"Jenny!" Morty barked in warm-hearted good humor. He was happy to see her; she was happy to see him. Truth be told, he had become like a father to her in the past few months, more than her own father had ever been. (Not that Jack had set a high bar. But that's not fair to Morty.) Morty had never questioned her, never even looked at her askance, but she knew he knew that she had no home life, no real home. He had taken her in, welcomed her, and given her a place to spend most of her afternoons. Because of him, she felt less lonely than she had in a long time, maybe forever. Well, not just because of him, but because of Gale too. Gale was perched gracefully on a stool at the counter, just down from the spot where Morty had been scrubbing. She waved, smiling metallically at Jenny, her shiny retainer showing.

ooOoo

That was how they had met. Jenny had gone to the dentist to have her braces adjusted, and Gale was there to get a retainer. Gale had gotten up and crossed the dentist's waiting room, sitting lightly beside Jenny.

"Hey, I...know you. I've seen you...around the school, right?" Gale smiled small, hesitantly.

Jenny had not been able to say anything in immediate response. Almost anytime someone talked to her directly, kindly, she slipped into silence or misdirection. No wonder: she'd been taught to converse by an inveterate con man, a man to whom truth was a professional nemesis. He had taught her by his own conversation that conversation was all taking, no giving. Stealin ', Darlin', not charity. Never charity. Luckily, Gale had chattered on, haltingly but charmingly, and Jenny, charmed by Gale's kindness, eventually found her voice. She eked out a few sentences, enough to make a friend. It helped that Gale was lonely too, and that alone had called to alone in the waiting room.

ooOoo

Gale patted the stool next to her just after Morty yelled Jenny's name. Jenny sat down.

"Hey, Gale, how was your day?" Gale and Jenny did not have any classes together and rarely saw each other at school. Only in the hallways, if that. Gale gave Sarah a smile, but there was a hitch in it, something in her brown eyes that suggested that the day was not great.

"What'll it be, Jenny?" Morty broke in before Sarah could ask Gale a follow-up question. He grinned at her, his gray crewcut standing out beneath his old-fashioned paper hat. His blue eyes were kind as always, solicitous. "The usual, Mort, Coke, double burger, fries and a stack of pickles on the side." She held her hand high above the counter.

Mort grinned and winked at her. He left the counter, turning to the grill and putting a burger patty on it beside one already sizzling, presumably one for Gale. He got out another bun, separated the halves and put them face-down beside two others, already toasting on the back of the grill. Jenny turned from watching him to see what was up with Gale.

"So, something happened today?"

Gale looked down at the counter and rearranged the silverware atop her napkin. She opened and closed the slim volume of poetry she had on the counter beside her. She had long, shiny, straight black hair that framed her delicate, pale face. Somehow her hair always looked like she had just brushed it but like it still needed to be combed. She took a moment longer, then looked at Jenny. "Robert asked me to the Spring Dance…"

Jenny leaned eagerly toward Gale, put her hand on Gale's shoulder and smiled in joy at her friend. "That's so great! I know you'd been hoping…" Jenny's delivery slowed and softened. Gale hunched down and did not seem joyous about the news. Not at all. "...Gale, what's wrong?"

Gale's eyes dampened. "I...think...I think it's a trick."

"What do you mean, 'trick', Gale? I don't understand."

"I saw Heather talking to Robert before he asked. They didn't know I saw them. They were...conspiring." Gale said the last word in a whisper, almost lost beneath the sound of frying burgers.

"Conspiring? I still.." Jenny was scrambling to catch up.

"Heather put him up to asking, Jenny. I don't understand their plan, but I don't...He didn't ask me because he wanted to take me."

Jenny turned, absently watched Mort flip the burgers.

Gale had been hooked on Robert for a long time, even before Jenny had started at the high school. It had seemed a doomed sort of crush since Robert moved in very different circles at the school. He was a football player, a good one, and a smart guy. His family was wealthy. He had only dated girls in the Heather Chandler crowd, and Gale was certainly not in that crowd, no more than Jenny herself was. Gale was lovely in her small, sloppily elfin way, and she was likely to be valedictorian of the class, but she had never seemed to attract Robert's notice. She had been in a class with him her freshman year, and that had been that. She'd been hopelessly in love with him ever since. Gale wanted it to be a secret, but she gave herself away any time Robert was around. Jenny had known as soon as she first saw Gale look at Robert.

Robert did not really seem like a bad guy. Not like the others in the group he tended to spend time with. But he did spend time with those others, so maybe he was a bad guy after all. He had never participated when they made fun of Gale or Jenny, but he never stopped them either.

Heather, however, was a bitch. Pure and simple. It would be just like her, wanting to humiliate someone already as humble as Gale. In some backwards way, Heather knew the virtues she lacked, and she especially hated anyone who had them. The plot was exactly the kind of puerile deviousness that Jenny had come to expect from Heather.

Mort plated the prepared burgers and fries, and Jenny's extra pickles, and put them in front of the girls. His pained smile suggested to Jenny that he had overheard them.

"Someday, each of you will find a man who will love you and work to understand you, because he will believe-absolutely believe-you are worth loving and worth understanding. Mark my words!" Mort seemed surprised by his sudden vehemence and he turned and went to work scraping the grill. Gale looked at Jenny, raised her eyebrows despite the pain lingering in her eyes, and smiled.

"Well, at least Mort believes in us," Gale said through a half-smile. Jenny thought for a moment about what Mort had said and then she filed his words away. She had no reason to think Mort could see her future (even if he was a sweet man), and she was pretty sure she could. It would resemble her past. No such man would ever be part of it. She could not even conjure him up in her imagination or in her dreams. No, if she ever found someone, it would be someone like her dad, someone who would see her as a means to an end, but not as a person. She turned her back on the inner hurt that prediction caused and picked up her burger. Gale had already started eating.

Jenny gave Gale a couple of minutes as they both ate, then she put her burger down and asked the question that had been hanging over them since before Mort intervened.

"So, did you say yes?"

Gale stopped dipping her fry in the ketchup pooled on her plate and closed her eyes for a second. She opened them and said: "Yes. I said yes."

"But why, Gale? If you know he's not really into you, even worse, if you know this is some Heather-bitch trap, why would you say yes?"

"Because I'd rather have him pretend to like me than to be indifferent to me. Because I have loved him since I saw him and I will take what I can get, Jenny. Even if it means Heather gets the last laugh, I will get to go to a dance with Robert-sort of, anyway. Maybe she'll get the last laugh, but maybe I will get the first dance. And even if he's pretending, he'll still be dancing with me. I never thought I'd ever have Robert pay any attention to me. Like I said, I'll take what I can get, even if it's not all I want, even if it's not exactly...well, real."

Jenny nodded. But then she had a thought.

"Say, Gale," Jenny pushed her plate away for a moment, the stack of pickles toppled, "didn't you once tell me that Robert kept a journal?"

"Um...yeah...he mentioned it once, slipped I guess, in the English class we both had as freshmen. He seemed embarrassed by it, but he never took it back." Gale lowered her voice and leaned toward Jenny, her eyes alight, "I am almost sure Robert secretly wants to be a writer. Like me."

Jenny's thought morphed into a full-scale plan. "Say, do you know where Robert lives?" Gale gave her a you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me nod. Jenny slid her napkin toward Gale. "Write it down for me." Gale gave Jenny a searching look. Jenny kept her face neutral. She was a conman's daughter, and sort of a con man (con woman, con girl?) herself. It was better if Gale was not sure what Jenny was planning. Gale wrote the address down. Jenny looked at it carefully, then shoved it into her pocket. "Do you have any idea if he will be home tonight?" Gale started shaking her head but stopped. She was embarrassed to admit she knew but she began nodding. "Yes, I know...I know...his schedule. And I know: stalker much? Anyway, this is the night when he and his parents eat at the Club."

Gale waited for an explanation, but Jenny just shrugged and pulled her plate back to her and started to eat the toppled pickles, finishing her dinner. Jenny knew that Gale was used to her silences. No one could be her friend who expected much talk. Jenny had never found it easy to voice her feelings, even to acknowledge that she had them, even around Gale. That had been true since she was very small and friendship had not changed it. Her dad had taken her, a pensive, introspective girl, romantic but not given to emotional display, and had then dungeoned her inside herself, coerced her to mute her emotions further, to silence their voices, so that her repressive consciousness always inserted itself between what she felt and what she said, or, mostly, did not say.

ooOoo

When she left Morty's, she went to the house. Her dad was not there, of course. But he had at least called to tell Jenny that he would not be home. He did not explain. He did not ask if she had eaten or how she would spend her night. He just told her he wasn't going to return until the next day. Or maybe the next.

She stood in her room (the only room that she had ever dared to call my room, even though she knew it could be taken from her at any moment, knew that her dad could pull up stakes and go any time) and looked at herself in her mirror. She had on a black sweater and black jeans, a black beret on her head, and she had tucked her hair up into it. Looking at herself, she laughed; she could not help it. She looked like...a spy.

She had always hated spy movies: all the lying and betrayal was too close to her life, her abnormal life, the cons with her father. The films made her stomach hurt. But she was going to do a little spying tonight, she realized.

She got in her car and drove for a little while, stopping when she got near the address that Gale had given her. She had driven by it on her way home, so that she had a well-lit image of the large house, its surrounding brick wall, and its gated entrance. Her father had taught her what to look for, so as she drove by she spotted the security devices. Expensive but primitive. They depended on not being noticed, but they were easy to notice if you knew what to look for.

Not that she and her dad had ever been straight-up burglars or anything like that. That would have seemed much like real work to Jack Burton. He loved the game of conning, the play. But they had needed to be prepared to get in or out of places without alerting anyone, so her father had taught her how.

She got out of her car, grabbing the gray backpack she had prepared. She walked casually along the sidewalk until she reached one corner of the brick wall that enclosed Robert's house. She stopped in between pools of light from streetlights, checking to ensure that no one was watching her in the gathering darkness. She slipped quickly off the sidewalk and scaled the wall. Jenny was strong and athletic. No one knew that about her, no one except her and a couple of gym teachers who had recognized her innate physical grace and power. One, a gym teacher who coached the girls' soccer team at a previous school, had tried over and over to get her to play soccer, but Jenny knew it would never work. She had been right. A couple of weeks later her dad had moved them on to the next town under the cover of darkness.

Under the cover of darkness. She did not like it, but that was when she felt most comfortable, even if not when she felt most happy. She loved the sun-drenched beach. but as much as she did, she eventually felt exposed there, out-of-control. She did not trust herself when she had her toes in the sand. In the dark, her self-control seemed invincible. She liked it when people had a hard time seeing her, so that they could not make out who she was or the sorts of things she had done with her father.

She was under the cover of darkness now. Before she scaled the wall, she had located the security camera for that section and the sensor it interacted with. She tossed her backpack over the wall, high enough to keep it from breaking the invisible beam between the camera and the sensor, then she scaled the wall. Just like that, she was past the wall. Now she needed to get inside the house and into Robert's room.

She skirted the house, making her way to the rear. She found a ground floor window that was unlocked. Using a trick her dad had taught her, she foiled the sensors in the window and raised it. She had to break the glass to do it, which she wished she could have avoided, but it was necessary. Inside, she opened her backpack quickly, retrieving a small flashlight. She could see well enough not to need it, but she might need it soon. She padded quietly through the house and up the large central staircase. She knew before she got to the second-floor landing where she was going. Robert, an only child, had a REM poster on his door. At least, it seemed likely that was his door and not his parents'.

She was right. Inside, his room was surprisingly un-guy-like. There were posters, of bands (Joy Division, The Cramps, Echo and the Bunnymen) and writers (Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Sartre), not of bikini-clad women. (In fact, there was a small picture of a woman, of Virginia Woolf (a postcard?) thumbtacked over Robert's desk. But she seemed to be wearing her clothes-and someone else's.) Not the room Jenny expected at all. The room was neat and smelled clean. Jenny made herself get over her surprise (she never liked surprises, her dad taught her that: a surprised con is a failed con). Gale needed her help.

Jenny opened the largest of the desk drawers. Pencils and erasers and last year's school yearbook. She grabbed the yearbook and turned on her flashlight. She thumbed through it. It looked like a new book, pristine. But she had a second thought. She put it on its spine on the desk. She noticed that it wanted to fall open to a particular page. Opening it there, she saw a photograph of a girl circled in light pencil. It was a photograph of...Gale. Nothing was written on the page. There was only the circle. But Jenny smiled. That, she thought, is a good sign.

She put the yearbook back in place, then she opened the first of the smaller desk drawers. A couple of stacks of old football cards, a set of Dungeons and Dragons dice (really?) and, under a stack of Harvard Lampoon, a leather notebook. Bingo!

She picked up the notebook and opened it. Robert's name on the flyleaf and the designation of the current year. It was full of dated entries. It was his diary, this year's model, anyway. She turned to the last entry, which turned out to be written earlier that very day.

ooOoo

God, Heather is a bitch. [Jenny liked Robert more already.] She wants me to ask GG to the Spring Dance and then to abandon her once we get to the dance, to spend the dance with a friend of Heather's who's coming to town.

Where does she come up with this stuff? It's like she goes to Mean Girls school but takes the short bus.

Popularity tracks nothing worth anything.

I am such a shitty coward. These are not my friends. They're the kids of my parents' friends.

But I'm stuck. I'm expected to go along and do what they do, the way my parents do with their parents.

And now if I ask Gale out, like I have wanted to since that freshman English class (she's so smart, so sweet, so perfect, but so not aware of it!), I do it with Heather's damn plan hanging over my head. I want to take her to the dance, not pretend to take her.

Maybe I can pretend to be pretending to take her? That way, I would take her, but I would keep Heather and the crowd off my back. I have to figure out how to show up with Gale and stay with her, stay away from Heather's friend. Her friend's name, believe it or not, is Paris. Shit!

ooOoo

Jenny shook her head in disbelief. Gale had good instincts. Robert might have been a coward, but he wasn't a dick. He was a coward in the face of peer pressure; not the first person to cave in. And if he had head and heart enough to care about Gale, there was hope for him. The real problem was Heather's friend. Take her out of the equation, and Robert and Gale might be able to have their pretend-pretend date, their actual date. Gale's patient longing would finally be rewarded. Robert's too.

Jenny put the book back in its place, but not before she looked quickly through the rest of it. Sure enough, 'GG' was on almost every page. Jenny shook her head one final time. These two had been crazy about each other for almost three years and neither knew it or was sure of it. Some of Robert's earlier entries suggested he suspected it, but he was too diffident to feel sure that he could trust the possible signs he saw in Gale's behavior.

Jenny heard a noise. She quickly rearranged things and retraced her steps out of the house. She went back over the wall and got to her car. Whatever the noise was, she had gotten away clean.

ooOoo

It was the day of the Spring Dance.

Heather and some of her awful friends (Robert was not there) had tormented Jenny in the hallway, but she had gotten through it. Knowing something about them, and knowing something they did not know, made her feel less vulnerable, less weak.

She took her time at her locker, even though it meant enduring extra cracks about her braces and her hair. But Jenny was waiting. The moment came. Heather and her girlfriends went into the bathroom, leaving their bags with the guys, as they did every morning. The guys fell into a loud conversation about the upcoming game. They stopped paying attention to their girlfriends' bags.

Jenny walked quickly to Heather's. She bent down beside it as if to tie her tennis shoe. Instead, she quickly rummaged in Heather's bag. There, near the bottom, was an address book. She grabbed it and stuffed it in her bag. She looked up. No one was watching. That was the one good thing about being her. Mostly, no one noticed her. She headed down the hallway. She needed to put in a call to Paris, the girl, not the city.

ooOoo

She had done it. She had left a message for Paris (claiming to be Heather's housekeeper) that Heather was very sick and contagious, and that she would not be going to the Spring Dance. Paris should stay away from Heather for a few days until she was no longer a danger to spread her illness. Jenny had added that Heather needed sleep, so it would be a good idea not to call. It was not a perfect plan, but Jenny thought it was likely to allow Robert and Gale their night.

Jenny had not told Gale about what she found in Robert's diary. She had interfered enough. Those were Robert's secrets to tell Gale. Jenny thought that he almost certainly would tell them to Gale once he was dancing with her.

Jenny had made things more likely by calling Heather's house and leaving a message on the machine about Heather needing straightaway to come to the clinic for consultation about worrisome test results.

There was a decent chance Heather herself would never make it to the dance.

ooOoo

Driving home in the San Diego sunshine, Jenny felt good. The radio was playing, and even though she had no plans to attend the dance (no one had asked her), she imagined Gale and Robert dancing together, twirling in her imagination, twirling her imagination. Yes, she felt good.

Until she got to her house. She saw law enforcement officers outside, everywhere. Dad!

Her father had instructed her; they had a contingency plan. She drove past the house. Never had a home, now I have no house. So much for my room. Once out of sight, she raced to a wooded area not far away. She leaped from the car and plunged into an overshadowed path through the trees. Money was hidden down the path, money to finance her running, to keep her going. Her dad told her how; he taught her to run. She had contacts, although she loathed the thought of contacting any of them.

She had to go. She had nowhere to go.

She would never know how Gale's night turned out.

A/N2 Tune in down the road for Chapter 2, "Girl in the War": the aftermath of Graham's recruitment and the first few weeks at the Farm.

Thoughts, observations, comments? How about a review or PM?

A playlist for this story is available on Spotify. Look for (Mis)Education.