It was the day my grandmother exploded. I started my morning off like I do everyday with a hearty bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.
“Where are you going today?” my mother questioned. It is my duty as a spy to travel the lands and scout out new recruits. I’m only 17, but it’s probably one of the best jobs I will ever have.
“To the park,” I delightfully answered. “I need to find some younger recruits for the company.” My mom offered to give me a ride.
“It’ll be more efficient to get a ride with me than to walk,” she tried to persuade me, showing her protective side.
“But I’m going to walk anyways,” I told her on my way out the door. “You know it’s against all rules to get a ride to my station. I’ll be safer this way.” I headed out the door in excitement to see who I could recruit that day.
Most children that I had met so far didn’t even know that spies existed. I know that I didn’t when I was younger. Now that I actually knew what they were and how the company operated, I saw the ups and downs of being one. The most frustrating thing about my job was that my family tried to help in any way that they could. What they didn’t realize is that I had been taking care of myself since I was ten and first was recruited to the company by Jim. Everyday since then, my grandmother had been training me, long and hard, so that I could one day be just like her. I have always felt as though I just landed a role in the latest Spy Kids movie, but I can never tell anyone. Sometimes I wish I could tell someone my secret and have them not tell anybody, but last time I tried that, it ended horribly. I haven’t had a friend since I told Casey about being a spy.
I usually worked with younger kids, mostly because I could relate to them and could understand their thinking more than someone like Jim normally would. As I entered the playground, I got an ominous feeling. Something wasn’t right; something was missing. I decide to go to my station; it was important to contact my boss so that he could know that something was missing from the operation. I strolled past the merry-go-round, the one I had been scouting on for about 6 months, to the swing set. I pressed the subtly discreet gray button on the bottom of the padlock on the 3rd swing from the right. I walked inside the bathroom and took the prolonged elevator ride down to the negative 54th floor. I’ve never known somewhere so well as I knew my station.
My mission was to protect the Russian Ambassador’s son. Zeek was 15 years old; no doubt looking up to me, even though he could never know what I was doing. Sometimes I thought he was falling for me, and as I looked at him, I thought that I was falling for him too. He was sent to America to stay safe from the spies that were trying to find him. The program that I worked in was like a continuous game of cat and mouse; people who are getting chased are chasing someone else. I wasn’t allowed to be around him, though. It was against any and all restrictions that had been put on me.
As I walked into the chamber, the passwords and security systems buzzing around me, I said hello to my co-workers. I soon realized that my mission had changed- drastically. I sat down as I prepared for my next mission: to take Zeek to the airport, get on the plane with him, and go across the country to headquarters. I guess there was some sort of mix-up with whom I was supposed to be helping and how much help they actually needed. I hadn’t seen Zeek for a couple of months, but I have to admit that I did miss him.
As I called my mom I started doing something that I do when I am anxious: bite my fingernails. I started sweating profusely; my mom doesn’t approve when my boss changes the location of my mission. She gets paranoid and it makes me nervous to talk to her. After I hung up, I called my grandmother to let her know. She wasn’t surprised that my boss changed my assignment, but she insisted that she go with me. When my grandmother gets into a mindset, there is no getting her out of it.

When we scheduled a taxi to pick her up to bring us to the airport, we both didn’t think about what we were truly doing. I think we were both too worried about Zeek and his safety. It is my job, after all. When the taxi picked her up, it was an enclosed space, and there wasn’t enough room for all three of us. I let my grandmother and Zeek go ahead of me so that they could get there early. The airport wasn’t too far away, but it was too long of a walk that we needed a car to get there.

About five minutes after I watched them drive off, I heard a loud reverberation ringing in my ears. I silently assumed that it was thunder and lightening until I realized that it was the middle of the summer.
I searched out the window and saw smoke coming from about four miles down the road when I realized the mistake we had made when calling for a taxi. The enemy had found us. They traced our phone calls and had been planning around everything we did that day. The two people that I needed to protect more than anything at that moment were gone. The whole operation was shut down. There hasn’t been a circumstance like mine since the accident, even though there is a plethora of people that we need to protect.

I was told that I might lose everything; and I did. Did they do this to me? Or did I do this to myself? I thought back to when I first started the job.
“You will lose something or someone that you love,” I recall the loudspeaker announcing. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the FBI.”