YESTERYEAR
*Abigail*
“Oh what a selfishly beautiful thing this life would be
if I were to actually live,
love, and breathe for none but me.”
Melody Manful
I’d been on this road before. I’d driven on it more times than I could count. My personal trainer, Logan, and I drive on this very road every month.
I was no stranger to this drive, but today, I didn’t even recognize the road signs we passed by, although I knew each and every one from memory. I made it my mission to look nowhere but out the passenger side window, but I still felt like the car was crawling at a snail’s pace. The ride only took forty minutes when I rode with Logan: today, however, it felt like it was taking years.
Maybe it was because I was nervous, or that I had a chunk of schoolwork waiting at home for me, or it might be the fact that I was sitting next to my father, Brian Cells, a man who everyone believed had died fifteen years ago.
The story was that my father died in the army when I was just two, but that story was a cover-up.
“How was school?” my father asked, and I turned my head to look at him. The moment my eyes met his, I looked back out the window.
“Same old, same old. They talk, I listen,” I whispered.
“That sounds like fun,” he said, and then more awkward silence followed.
The real story also happened fifteen years ago. My father, who worked for the CIA as a secret agent at the time, had his identity compromised. He was followed to the house he shared with my mother and me and had almost been killed trying to protect us; my mother had been badly wounded from a gunshot.
After the incident, my parents and I received new identities. In the reports the police released afterward, both my parents and I were pronounced dead. My mother and I moved to San Francisco, away from our home in Beverly Hills, and the CIA hooked my mom up with a job at one of the biggest fashion houses in San Francisco. Three years later, she opened her own boutique, and twelve years later, she was one of the most well known designers with her own fashion empire, Cells. The public called her “the goddess of fashion.”
My mother wasn’t worried that my father’s enemies might recognize her, always touting that she refused to live her life in fear. I loved my mother’s bravery.
My father, meanwhile, had received a new identity from the CIA and promised to stay away from us for our safety. He was working on an important case at the time and couldn’t stop anyway. Eventually that case led to another and another, until he decided to stay with the CIA for good.
“So, how has training been going with Logan?” my father asked to close the awkward silence that had ensued his earlier question. At this point, I wasn’t even sure we were on the right road, although I was pretty sure the road to the training center hadn’t changed since the last time I was on it.
Logan McCartney was my personal trainer. He was in his mid-thirties. Before my father hired him as my trainer, Logan worked for the U.S. Marine Corps. He wasn’t built like some of the troops I had seen before; however, he was a good trainer and very handy with technology.
The coolest thing he’d taught me, aside from how to shoot a soda can with an arrow and a gun, was how to hack into computers. It wasn’t in his job description for training me, but I’d begged him to teach me, and he couldn’t resist showing off.
Our training sessions mainly took place in a field behind our house. Logan and my father had installed reactive targets there for archery and gun practice. Once, Logan made me stand in the rain for hours shooting arrows: luckily for him, my mother was at one of her charity events. When I wasn’t shooting arrows or bullets, I was throwing up my fists during combat training.
“Good.” I finally answered my father. “Logan is a really good teacher.” Expect for the time he’d made me run a marathon while he followed in a car, eating and drinking water I’d begged for.
“It’s good to hear you say that.” I wanted to continue the conversation, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to respond to that statement.
It wasn’t because my father and I had nothing to talk about or that I was surprised to have my allegedly dead father in my life. Frankly, the thrill of having a secret father was gone: my mother told me the truth about my father when I was eight, and ever since then I’d been more than happy to have him around the few times he was able to visit.
My father came to visit once every three or four months. He’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and we’d sit and talk for hours. Sometimes he’d stay for months, but other times he had to leave minutes after he arrived.
During his long-term stays, we tried to act as if we were a normal family, as if he were always around. We’d go ice-skating, he’d help me with my schoolwork, and he even taught me how to play the piano. He had loved music when he was young. One time when he came home several months ago, there had been a problem with my mother’s car. He and I decided to fix it for her, but when we were done, the car wouldn’t even start. We still laugh about that.
The longest time I’d ever spent with him was three months, during a vacation at a remote resort in Mexico. We were away from everything and all the distractions, and I had loved it.
Today, however, I was nervous because I knew what awaited me at the end of our car ride. One disadvantage of being in the CIA was the fact that he had enemies and would always have them, enemies that he had to protect my mother and me from, so that what happened years ago wouldn’t repeat itself.
My father’s fear of either me or my mom getting hurt again had driven him to hire Logan to train me, so I could protect myself if anything were to happen while he was away. I was thirteen when he came to visit with Logan. My father told me that although I was watched twenty four hours a day by my live-in bodyguards, he needed to be sure that I’d be able to defend myself if his safety got compromised again and if someone found out the truth about my mother and me. From that day onward, Logan trained me in combat, guns, archery, and anything else he thought I’d need to survive if I were kidnapped.
I seriously doubted I’d get kidnapped because my bodyguards followed me everywhere I went: the only place Felix and Ben didn’t follow me to was, well, school.
“Are you nervous?” my father asked, and again I made the effort to turn to him and keep a conversation going. My father looked different every time I saw him. Scanning him now, he appeared to have lost weight. A bandage tightly circled his left bicep.
“I’m all right,” I lied. All right was the last thing I was.
I should have stayed home with my mother. She didn’t want anything to do with training and the CIA. She even told me I could stay home with her if I didn’t want to come out with my father. I couldn’t tell her I wanted to stay because I knew she, too, wanted me to be able to defend myself if something were to happen.
The road we were on led to a CIA training center somewhere east of San Francisco. Logan took me there once a month so I could practice my skills and use the advanced training facility they had. Shooting paper targets and soda cans at the back of our house was nothing compared to the CIA’s technologically advanced targets. Sometimes, I faked being ill just to get out of going, but Logan always saw through my pretense.
“You know you didn’t have to agree to come with me.” My father had sensed the deceit in my voice. “We could have stayed home and played a game of cards or watched football—I hear Jake and Danny talked you into becoming a fan of football.” It was amazing sometimes how much my father knew about my life, especially since he was never home. But then again, I could hardly be surprised, not when I knew that the gold wristwatch I wore twenty-four-seven had a tracking device embedded in it.
“I’m fine, dad.” Another lie I hoped was believable. “And Jake and Danny are pretty convincing.” Jake and Danny were two of my best friends.
“So, Ronaldo or Messi?” he asked. I didn’t understand why guys thought girls only liked football because of Cristiano Ronaldo.
“I’m a Barcelona fan, dad,” I said, finally finding a little energy in my voice, although I could tell I sounded defensive. “Barça is a good team, and that’s why I like them. Though it doesn’t hurt that Messi is an amazing player.”
“So it has nothing to do with how hot you girls think Ronaldo is?”
This time I allowed myself to catch his gaze, and I held it. “Seriously dad, it’s all about the game.” Again, my voice sounded defensive.
My father smiled, and I couldn’t help asking, “What?”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you take an interest in anything and talk about it with a little passion.” Wasn’t it a shame, though, that all we could talk about was football? But then again, what were we supposed to talk about, the fact that I walked around waiting for something bad to happen because he imprinted that idea in my head?
“I talk about a lot of things I’m passionate about.” I looked away from him again. I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t truly passionate about anything, because he took that right away from me when he handed me one, one that involved guns.
Suddenly, the car came to a stop. I glanced out of the window and saw the familiar old, seemingly abandoned warehouse. Suddenly all the air in the car seemed to have disappeared. I couldn’t breathe for fear of collapsing if I did.
I didn’t want to disappoint my father. Logan and I had been training really hard, and from what I’d heard, my father was this brilliant, hard-working, awesome secret agent, and I was pretty sure he expected me to be just as good as him—or at least appear half as good. He needed assurance that I’d be able to take care of myself, and if he found out that all those years of training were a waste, he’d be disappointed in me. I definitely didn’t want him to be disappointed in me or worried about my mother and me.
“You coming, princess?” the door to my side of the car opened. I hadn’t even noticed that my father had stepped out and walked around to my side.
I swallowed my fear, got out a “yes,” and with shaking hands pulled myself out of the car. I had put on my training outfit before we left.
I followed my father into the warehouse. The outside of the warehouse didn’t look like much. It seemed old and abandoned. A tall, chain-link fence surrounded it on all sides, and rusted barbed wire clung to the top. Signs warning of Danger and No Trespassing littered the fence. The inside of the building, though, was a different story. The first time Logan brought me here, I had refused to believe this was where we were supposed to be before we entered.
“Just relax,” my father said as he pulled open the door to the warehouse. When we stepped inside, we entered a musty, ruined space. Broken pieces of wood and bricks surrounded us. I watched expectantly as my father pushed aside one of the slabs of wood and a hidden keypad appeared on the ground.
First the keypad asked for my father’s thumbprint, and after that his password. He punched in the password, and I turned just as the hidden door into the training center opened. My father took my hand in his, and together we entered.
The moment we stepped into the hall and the door closed firmly behind us, all the lights turned on and machines roared to life.
“Welcome, Agent V,” a machine voice announced my father’s arrival.
I followed my father down the hall. The training hall was divided into three sectors. We stood at the forefront of the second sector, where the more advanced training equipment was located. The first sector had excise machines, boxing bags, mats for push-ups, sit-ups, or whatever work out one chose, as the first sector was the warm-up sector.
The last sector was the all-in-one sector. The sector was made up of different-sized rooms, some of which contained broken electronics that the agents had to fix. I was pretty convinced that there were bombs somewhere. There was also a swimming hall. The first time Logan took me there, I thought swimming laps was the only thing I’d have to do, until he asked me to hold my breath under the water. That day, I found out that one minute and five seconds wasn’t good enough.
There was also an indoor shooting range. A small emergency room was filled with shelves of medicine. There was one room that contained only metal spikes fastened to the walls, and the only way to go from one end of the room to the next was to swing by them.
Logan and I usually stuck with the basics, but on days when he wanted to push me to my limit, he gave me more advanced tasks.
“You ready, princess?” my father asked.
Saying no would have been an understatement, so I simply went with a nod.