Kill on Command by Slaton Smith

She had gotten tired of dyeing her hair and had moved to wigs.  Good wigs.  Not the kind you buy downtown.
     
    “I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said aloud. She looked at her fist and flexed it in and out.  She had an adrenalin buzz from the fight.
     
    Rising, she walked over to the old brown couch, flopped down and looked over at the cheap table next to it.  On the table, was a single bulb lamp with a torn cream-colored shade.  She flipped on the lamp – its pitiful bulb produced little light.  A tattered paperback copy of The Fountainhead sat on the edge of the table.   She was trying to wade through it.  She had read it in college, but that had been a while ago.  She reached over and picked up the book, set it in her lap and flipped to the page where she had left off.  An old photo in the book served as her bookmark.  She picked up the photo and placed the book back on the coffee table. 
     
    The picture was of her and her father in the shallow water off the coast of California.  He was in the water up to his waist and she was sitting on a surfboard.  She was seven.  Both of them were smiling broadly.  She had on a crazy rainbow one-piece bathing suit.  His hair was in his face from the waves.  Her wet hair looked like it had a little sand in it.  She could still remember the sunburn he got on his back that day.  He never complained to her.  She leaned back on the couch with the picture in her hand.  She remembered how she had begged him to teach her to surf.  Everyday she asked him. “This weekend?  This weekend?”
     
    One day he surprised her with a board.  She remembers him attaching the board to the top of their old Honda Accord and driving down to the ocean.  He spent all day helping her learn how to get up on the board.  He was able to get another surfer to snap a picture of them.  They had dinner at the end of the day out of one of those wandering taco trucks.  She still remembered what she had - a chicken taco with extra tomatoes, cheese and sour cream.  It was one of her favorite pictures of the two of them. 
     
    When her mother died during childbirth, her father dedicated his life to raising her.  Her father was there for her everyday of her life.  He was the “room mom” when she was in third grade and all the teachers had a crush on him.  He came to the plays, the games and was there to scare off the boys, something he excelled at. 
     
    She sighed and thought about how things would have been different if she had just taken the scholarship to Cal to play water polo.  She never became a great surfer, but she could swim and she was strong.  She might have looked like her mother, but she was strong like her father. 
     
    She also had his eyes. 
     
    Ice blue. 
     
    Piercing, ice blue.
     
    She sprouted to nearly six feet tall by the time she was sixteen and crushed anyone that opposed her in the pool.  Cal had a great program and they really pursued her, but she wanted to go to Yale.  She wanted to come back to California after graduation and become a teacher and maybe a coach. 
     
    The decision to go to Yale had changed her life.  It all happened so fast.  One day she was a regular student preparing to graduate, the next she was part of some deranged CIA boot camp.  It was not her choice.
     
    She was now as far way from being a teacher as someone could get, with one way out, but to get there, everything had to fall into place for her and she was going to need some help.
     
    She put the photo back in the book.
     
    She thought about her assignment.  She remembered when she was like Sean.  She remembered how she loved to laugh and hang out with her friends.  She missed that. 
     
    She doubted her friends would even recognize her now.   First, keeping up with Sean had her in the best shape of her life.  Second, could she even relate to them?  They had jobs now.  They had husbands.  They had kids. She could speak four languages.  She