My Classified Life

Chapter Twenty-Five: Testing My Terminalogical Inexactitudes

~Lying: Every spy’s forte. Lies keep us out of trouble. Lies guard our secrets. And lying, is an art.~

Three weeks after my… uh ... night with Dylan, we were still working out the bugs in our missions. First, we had buy all the equipment and then figure out how to wire it and use it. The old bluetooths were going through a ‘makeover’ I guess you could call it. Mom was getting new ones that were smaller but the wiring set up was the same. We hadn’t gone on any missions since New Zealand with all the new improvements being made.

Mother had told us that we were going to be working on mission prep-work in the shed today. When I entered the shed, the bare concrete was clean and swept up and cleaned out. In the very center of the room stood three wooden school desks, I felt a pang of sadness knowing there used to be four. Not far in front of the desks was a rolling green chalkboard with a chunk of white chalk ready to be used. I was the first one inside that morning and I slowly sat down into the wooden chair with my old notebook and a pen for jotting down things that my mother said to us. I was wearing the usual attire, sweatpants, tennis shoes, and a t-shirt.

Behind me the door opened and shut quickly, sending an echoing thud through the shed and I turned to see Sammy striding in and taking the seat next to me wordlessly. Not two seconds after, Christina came in also and I checked the mental clock in my head. We were all on time, but my mom was late. My mom being late was unheard of and we all knew it. No one uttered a single sound as we waited an entire three minutes before the doorknob turned and my mom came in.

You could describe her in one word: flustered. I had seen many sides of my mom in the last four months and it was somewhat alarming. She used to be cool, calm, collected, and sometimes like an ice queen. But after that day that everything changed she became worried about me constantly. Her eyes always seemed to be ready to spill out tears and she was very sensitive. Momentarily she returned to her old ways, only now her attitude has taken a new turn. I will wonder around the house looking for something to do and I won't find her. She magically appears at mealtimes and then returns to being a turtle hiding in it's own shell.
She was starting to scare me this way, eluding us all. I knew what she was doing must have been classified but that didn't make it any less tempting to figure it out.

Her dark brown short cut was out of place and her outfit didn't match, just the kind of thing I'm trained to notice. Her eyes scanned the room frantically as if she only just realized that for the first time in her life she was late. All three pairs of eyes in the room followed her figure as she walked to the front of our mini classroom. I noticed her hand was slightly shaky as she picked up the chalk and took a deep breath in and out before turning on her heel sharply and facing her students.

I saw through her disguise. She may have looked like the mom I'd once known, but she was definitely undercover.

Her hand moved in sharp movements across the small blackboard and spelled in her own brand of script; Lying 101. The irony for me was almost unbearable. For very good reasons I'd begun to transform myself into a better lier even fooling the one person in the world who knows me better than myself, Christina.

For me, the key to lying successfully was convincing yourself that one day you would be telling the truth, a work in progress for me. I secretly hated lying to people that trusted me which was why one day I would make all those big lies I told come true... hopefully.

My mom's voice cut me away from my thoughts “..for being able to lie, many reasons. Lie detectors are becoming more and more accurate which means we must study harder and harder to fool them. Although, Polygraphs are not always accurate, we must learn how to make sure we pass their tests. The first things to do consider when lying is to be sure you keep a steady pulse. A calm person is much more believable than a jumpy one. An Example,” she paused slightly and became relaxed. “I once met a purple walrus who told me where to find the lost city of Atlantis.”