When we were little, Mom used to read stories to us. It was back when we were still boucing between D.C. townhouses and I shared a room with Matt. Every night, we'd spent too much time arguing over which book we'd make her read until finally, Mom would pick one for us and tuck us in, alternating whose bed she sat in. I always liked it best when she sat in my bed because that way, when she left, I could still feel her snuggled up next to me until I fell asleep.
Most of our books were fantasy. You know, knights in shining armor with princesses and evil witches. All the things you'd expect a six-year-old and a four-year-old to get excited about. Honestly, it didn't really matter what we read as long as she was the one reading it, but we liked the fantasy ones because she'd make the silly voices for the trolls and sing all of the withces' spells. Plus, there were dragons and, if we played our cards right, sometimes Dad would sneak into the room, shooting imaginary flames from his mouth and twisting his hands into claws. Claws that were too busy tickling small children to take part in average claw-related activities, of course.
I remember Mom rolling her eyes at him every time he did it, but she was always smiling, too. I think she liked it deep down. Especially when the tickle-claws came after her.
Those nights seemed so much more precious to me now that I was older. I thought about them a lot more in those months following my mother's death. I thought about how much I had hated sharing a room with my brother and how silly that seemed now that he was halfway around the world. I thought about how it felt to be crushed under the weight of an overdramatic dragon, splaying out on top of my bed after being slain. About Matt and I counting how many times we could roar at each other before Mom and Dad caught us or about Mom and Dad laughing at us from the livingroom because they could actually hear the whispered roars the whole time. I thought about trolls and monsters and all of the princes named for their charm, but most of all, I thought about my mother and how, even at sixteen, I desperately wished that she would come home before bedtime and read me another story.
Usually the memories would hit me at night, sending me into an overwhelming nostalgia that I would kill to be a part of again. Sometimes it didn't even take a lonely night to trigger them. Sometimes I could be walking down the hallways or eating lunch with my friends. Even just sitting in the library was enough to do me in as I thumbed through the pages of a books that had far more words than my mother would've had time for and far fewer dragons than my father would have demaded.
"Goode."
The word snapped me out of the past, landing me back in a cushy seat where I sat surrounded by some of the most sensitive information known to man. I heard the jingle of keys and the zip of a jacket, looking up from my Advanced Encryption homework to see Professor Woods standing before me.
I expected some sort of lecture. That was how we did things—I screwed up something and she lectured for screwing up said thing. It was a nice pattern we had going. I didn't know what I had done this time around, but It wouldn't have surprised me to find out that I had inadvertently broken a plethora of school rules. I had a real gift for that sort of thing.
But Woods didnt lecture. She didn't scold. Instead she just turned away and started towards the doors, not even bothering to turn around before asking, "Are you coming?"
Well, the thing about following Woods into the unknown is that you're either blindfolded or you're probably about to be, so you can see where my hesitation might've been coming from as I asked, "Where are we going, exactly?"
"Your father informs me that you've made dinner plans with him," she said, cutting a look at me without turning her head. "And I don't think he's the sort of man you want to stand up."
PROS AND CONS TO RIDING IN A CAR WITH CHARLOTTE WOODS
PRO: Woods is an excellent driver. I'm serious. I've spent my fair share of time riding in a car with professional drivers at the wheel and Woods is better than each and every one of them.
CON: As you may expect, Woods is not the type of person to pull into a convenience store and go halvesies with you on a bag of gummy bears.
PRO: Woods has the keys to the faculty Porsche.
CON: She doesn't go a single tick over the speed limit, so the Porsche is severely underutalized.
PRO: Classic rock.
CON: The music is only playing to drown out the silence.
Okay. I've heard a fair amount of silence in my day. A girl doesn't hear as much as I do without hearing nothing some of the time. Silence is the official sound of the shadows and I am the unofficial listener.
Some silences are calm and thick, easy to shuffle through for hours on end. Others are charged and unbearable, but this? God this was worse than anything I'd ever heard before. The awkward silence to top all other awkward silences. There are mimes who have done more talking than we did in that car. Mimes.
It wasn't that I didn't want to say something. I just didn't have anything to say—or at least, nothing that I thought I could get away with saying. Woods was the sort of person who had answers to questions I didn't even know about yet, but everyone knows that you don't ask questions like that unless you've got an escape route and something in my gut told me that opening the door and bashing my head in against the pavement of Highway Twelve was impractical (though, not entirely undesireable at this point because no body had said anything in the past twenty miles).
It wasn't until a new song blaired over the radio that the silence was broken. "I love this song," Woods said under her breath.
It was classic rock, just like the rest of her collection, but this one was familiar to me. Something about the drums and guitar and the rough singer made me think of my father, trying but failing to hit the higher notes as he sand along. "My dad loves this song too."
Woods smiled, checking her mirrors. "He'd better," she said. "I'm the one that introduced it to him."
She said it just like that. As if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if Woods and Dad always got together and listened to each other’s iPods or something. She had given my dad music? When? How? What?
This opened up a whole new world of possibilities. How close were Dad and Woods? You don’t just give music to someone you hardly know. Giving up music is like giving up a piece of your soul. You’ve got to trust the person you’re giving it to. Did this mean that Woods trusted Dad? And if that’s the case, how did it happen?
Did they go on ops together? Was Woods some long lost distant aunt that I didn’t know about? Dad hardly ever talked about his side of the family. Oh my god. What if Charlotte Woods was my aunt?
“Relax, Goode,” she said, a smirk finding its way onto her lips. I mean, I fully admit that the aunt theory was a little out there, but you might not think so if you saw how similar Woods and Dad looked when they smirked. “Your Dad and I used to spend a lot of time together, is all.”
What was that supposed to mean? Why would they spent—oh my god. What if they dated? I wanted to throw up just thinking about it, but wait. Woods was, like, at least ten years younger than Dad. And he had been dating Mom for an eternity. There was no way.
Woods didn’t offer up any additional information and I decided not to ask. It was probably all classified anyways and so I let my mind wander, conjuring up all sorts of imaginary missions that I could picture Zachary Goode and Charlotte Woods running together.
But the silence must’ve finally gotten to Woods because she cleared her throat and asked, “How’s your training?”
And just like that, Woods went from family friend to CoveOps teacher one again. “Fine.”
“That’s it? Just… fine?”
“Good,” I corrected, maybe a little too quickly. “It’s good.”
“Not too easy?”
I shrugged. Gross. When had I become the sort of person who shrugged? “No.”
Woods was bobbing her head to the music. It was a strange sight, I have to admit. Until then, I had always associated Woods with the kind of movement that came with hitting a punching bag or taking out an armed guard. Not the kind of movement that came with AC/DC (though, now that I think about it, there really isn’t much of a difference).
“Does he still make you guys do night drills?” she asked with another one of those smirks.
I nodded, remembering the brisk summer nights that I had been rushed out of bed and thrown into a series of drills harder than any that were run during the day. I had ruined my favorite pair of slippers that way. “Yeah,” I groaned. “The first time we did them, I was wearing pants with a stain on the butt and my shirt was see-through. It was traumatic.”
“Boy, you have really got a hard life, Goode,” she said, except she didn’t sound all that sympathetic.
“I had to wear a sports bra to sleep every night,” I admitted. “He never gave us any warning.”
“Night drills are designed to catch you off guard,” she said. It almost felt like she was reciting a well-rehearsed fact. Repeating a well-known speech. “There are going to be times when you wake up to the sound of bullets hitting your window and you’re going to have to run five miles before you can even think about getting a coffee.”
“I know, it’s just—”
“Hard?” she guessed.
I thought about my nights at Blackthorne. My strict rules and guidelines. All this time I had thought that the Gallagher Academy was harsh, but the truth is, nothing prepared me for the military practices of our brother school. There were rules about eating. Rules about walking. Beds had to be made. Lights out was at ten. We weren’t even allowed to talk about our curriculum to anyone who wasn’t in our group because everything we were learning was classified. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s hard.”
She huffed. “If it weren’t hard, you wouldn’t be there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked because honestly, did Woods ever say anything that wasn’t barbarically cryptic? A girl can only take so much before she starts to snap a little.
But I had snapped a little too much. I could tell. I could hear the grit in her voice as she said, “If it weren’t hard, then I wouldn’t have spent so much time convincing people that you needed to be there.”
She sighed like she hadn’t really wanted to get into it, but now she was too far to back out. “Your grandfather is a stickler, both with extra curricular programs that run in his school and with his grandchildren,” she explained. “Trying to get him to deal with both at the same time is nearly impossible.”
She looked at me for a spit second before turning back to the road. It was like she could get my clearance level with a single scan, checking her words to make sure that none of them went above where they were supposed to. “Blake told me that when he tried to get permission to have you train over the summer, Joe kept denying him. He kept insisting that you needed to take a break, which was a good point. It wasn’t a bad idea to have you rest…”
She trailed off. “But…” I prompted, hoping to get her going again.
“But you don’t rest,” she reminded me, which was true. I would have trained this summer no matter where I was. At least I had some structure to it with Mr. Hughes. “Not to mention…”
She kept trailing off, which I could help noticing was completely uncharacteristic of her. Woods never started a sentence she didn’t know the end to. “The Gathering for Good is an extremely elite group, Morgan,” she finally said, a new level of seriousness to her voice (which is saying something, because Woods is almost always serious). She was suddenly shakier, though. Less assertive than usual. Like she really wanted me to hear what was coming next, or maybe, like she really wanted herself to hear it. “It takes the best of the best and trains you in ways that average curriculum doesn’t allow. You’re really lucky to be a part of it.”
“I know.”
“I can’t teach you some of the things Blake teaches you—the trustees wont allow it,” she didn’t sound like she was trying to convince me. She sounded like she was repeating something. A train of thought, perhaps, or something that someone had once said to her. “But you’re going to need to know some of this stuff. It’ll give you a head start in the agencies.”
“I know.”
“Good,” she said, sneaking one more glance in my direction. “I’m glad you know. Because one day you’re going to need to run an op with these people and they’re going to expect you to take this training seriously.”
“I will.”
“I know you will. It’s just—” she checked over her shoulder and moved into the left lane. I noticed the speedometer slowly creeping up. “You need to be ready. When you get out there, you need to be ready.”
70…75…80. The speedometer crawled upwards. Woods didn’t sound like herself as she spoke. Gone was the woman I feared and suddenly my mind flashed back to a cold fall night nearly a year ago. To the woman in the windowsill, holding on too tightly to a scrap of paper and insisting that we don’t have to do what our families do.
I fiddled with the pendant that hung from the chain around my neck. It had been Matthew Morgan’s first. Then Mom’s. Now, I guess, it was mine. Two missing operatives and now it had found a third neck to live around. Another branch to the Morgan family tree. That little pewter pendant started to feel less like a piece of jewelry and more like the kiss of death.
“I’ll be ready,” I told her. “I will.”
“I know you will,” she said, sounding more like a demand. I was going to be ready for the field. Charlotte Woods was going to make sure of that even if she had to drive me to Blackthorne herself. “Which is why when Blake came to me at the Blackthorne graduation last year and asked for help with convincing Joe, I told him that you’d be training with me over the summer.”
The seatbelt zipped as I turned my whole torso to face her. “You lied to Grandpa Joe?” I asked, more amused than amazed.
This time, she bit back a guilty smile. “Just a little lie,” she defended. “If you remember, I was training you some of the time, so technically you did train with me.”
I had to admit, I was impressed. Until then, I hadn’t thought that anyone, not even the great Charlotte Woods, could get away with lying to Grandpa Joe. But even through the amazement, one question filled my mind. “Why was he okay with you training me and not with Mr. Hughes?” I asked. “Doesn’t he trust Mr. Hughes?”
“Of course he does,” Woods spat. She seemed to realize the acid in her tone and cleared her throat. “But your grandpa and I have a longer relationship than he and Blake do. He trusts me more—but that doesn’t mean he distrusts Blake.”
Again with the relationships! Did Woods know my whole family? How long had they all known each other? The world may never know, or, at least I wont anyways.
“Blake is your teacher,” she said as if that were the answer to everything. “He trained you like a teacher over the past summer and I knew it would be good for you. Even if your family thought you needed a break after losing your mother.”
She said it. Just like that. For weeks, people had been dancing around saying that word, but Woods brought it up without any hesitation. My mother was dead. It was a fact.
“And so I lied for you,” she concluded, sounding like the perfect teacher. I half expected her to give me detention, just because.
I tried to imagine my summer without Mr. Hughes would’ve been. What would’ve happened to me if Will and Bill hadn’t been around to make me laugh? How screwed up in the head would Morgan Goode be if she hadn’t spent the summer after her mother’s death training through dawn and after dusk? I didn’t even want to think about it. “Thanks for that,” I told me teacher, so quietly I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me.
But Woods heard everything. Of that, I was sure. “Yeah,” she said back. Then she cleared her throat. “Well, it is my job, after all. I need to make sure that you’re pushed to the best of your abilities, and The Gathering will do that. It will help you in ways that our sisterhood can’t. ”
Wait.
“Our sisterhood?”
In that moment, the hard exterior of my professor cracked, revealing a slim smile. “Yes, Goode,” she said. “Our sisterhood.”
We fell back into silence again, listening to the purr of the engine and the roar of Journey, as I pondered what the words meant. I suppose I should have known. Charlotte Woods was too good not to have a little bit of the Gallagher Academy in her. I turned my head towards the window again, the afternoon coming to a close as my most mysterious teacher and I sat in uninterrupted thought, this silence slightly more comfortable than the last.
Neither one of us spoke until we were sitting idly at the gates of Blackthorne, waiting for a guard to let us in. I was the one to start this time. “You like him, don’t you?”
She glanced at me, amusement in her expression. “Who?”
“Mr. Hughes,” I said and almost instantly she looked away. I had a feeling that if it weren’t starting to get dark, I would’ve been able to see her cheeks turn red. “You like him.”
“I hardly think that’s any of your business,” she told me, but she was smiling and I knew she was thinking about him. About the way he looked at her. About how every time they were around each other, he would get close. Sometimes he would run her fingers through her hair or kick his shoe to hers. It was like the keys on his piano. He couldn’t stop fiddling with her—couldn’t stop making that glorious music.
I had to smile, too. “That’s okay,” I said. “I get it. Some things are supposed to be classified.”