“I know,” I replied, even though I didn’t believe her. Not for a single second.
“I don’t want to put pressure on you, my love,” Sam said, picking at the errant fuzzies on my bedspread. “But if you suffer from panic attacks, we’ll need to tell your parents and they may want to stop your training. Or at least think about not having you train for rescues and take-downs.”
Sam explained that panic attacks and anxiety would cloud my brain and alter my judgment, making it unsafe for my teammates and me in the field. She never said it out loud, but I could read between the lines. Have another panic attack and I’d be out of the Black Angels.
“Please,” I said, grabbing Sam’s hand. “Don’t tell them. Not yet.”
She didn’t. And I learned to bury the fear.
That panic attack was my first and only. But what’s taken its place are the daymares. They creep into my brain, sometimes without warning or even a trigger. I’ve coined them daymares because they’re like the vivid nightmares that startle you straight up in bed, panting and sweating, except I’m awake. I haven’t said a word about the daymares to anyone. Perhaps it’s normal. Perhaps everyone has these worst-case scenarios play out in their minds. Just not as vivid and violent as mine. I could ask, but I don’t think I want to know the answer. Because then it’s just one more thing on a very long list that makes me abnormal.
We’ve been perfectly safe in New Albany for over a year now. So what would I even tell them? A janitor looked at me funny today? A van pulled down the main street slowly? People do that all the time, gawking at the million-dollar homes. No. I won’t say a word. It’s all in my head. Again.
“Mom, Dad?” I call out. Nothing. I walk down the hardwood hallway. The heavy strike of my heel is the only sound. My natural walk (or as natural as a walk can be when you’ve been trained to walk a certain way since practically your first step) is silent. I’m a sidler. I scare the shit out of people when I show up at their side in stealthy silence. So to alert Mom and Dad to where I am in the house, I walk hard. Like hear-you-two-stories-and-five-rooms-away hard. When I walk hard, Dad likes to call me Elefante, the Spanish word for elephant. When he hears me coming down the hallway, the bone of my heel slamming into the floors, he sings out “Elefanteeee.” It always makes me laugh.
I stick my head inside the kitchen, then inside the family room. The only two rooms they’re ever really in. I swear I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve stepped foot in the living and dining rooms. I stop and listen again for the hum of a TV or the shuffling of feet somewhere in the house. It’s silent.
The garage door opens with a whiny creak. I walk down three concrete steps and stand in front of locked steel cabinet doors. I flip open the keypad and enter in our six-digit code. I hear the steel beams unlock. I pull hard on both of the metal handles, separating the heavy cabinet doors and revealing wooden steps. We’ve had a secret door in every house we’ve ever lived in. CORE always finds us a house with an unfinished basement so they can transform it into our gun range, weapons room, martial arts studio, and, of course, panic room.
“Hello?” I yell down the stairs, and the sound of gunfire answers me. I close the secret door behind me and bounce down the steps. I stand on the last step and smile as I watch my parents in their Ralph Lauren knit sweaters and jeans. They look like just your average mom and dad except for the pistols they hold in both hands. My mom’s blond hair is bobbed. Not a soccer mom haircut or anything, but an I’m-totally-in-my-forties-and-too-busy-for-anything-high-maintenance haircut. She’s thin and tall like me, but that’s really the only thing that we physically have in common. I don’t really look like my dad either. He has chestnut hair and big, light brown eyes while mine are deep brown and more almond-shaped. Our family pictures are always funny because I look like I don’t really belong. I’d swear I was adopted if it wasn’t for the family photos of me actually coming out of my mother. Gross.
Bang. Their shots rip through the paper target. Right to the heart and head.
“Nice shot,” I say loudly as they go to reload. They both turn around and smile when they see me.
“Hi, Reagan,” my mom says and takes off her protective headphones. “When did you get home?”
“Just walked in,” I say, crossing the room to get to work. There’s no such thing as idle time in the basement. When I’m down here, I should always be training. I grab my M4 carbine off the counter that holds my weapons and kiss Mom’s waiting cheek. “Harper and I went to Starbs after school and she just dropped me off.”
“What’s Starbs?” my father asks, wrinkling his brow. “I don’t speak teenager.”
“Starbucks,” I say and smile.