Chapter 5

After James left, Amanda tried to go back to sleep, since she felt tired (which was somewhat ironic since she had slept the majority of the past three days), but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t fall asleep. Her mind was racing, trying to make sense of all of the information she had been told. She couldn’t believe how much her life had changed in so short an amount of time. Just three days before, she had been a normal teenage girl, living a normal teenage life in southern California, with (what she thought) was a normal dad. But then, just three days later, she was on the verge of moving to a new city, a new school, and a new life as a secret agent.

She didn’t like the idea of moving at all. Especially to Boston. That was just too far away, and she wasn’t certain she would like life on the east coast very much. Wasn’t it really cold in Boston in the winter? Amanda didn’t like that at all. As such, like James, she was already leaning toward Seattle, but really only because it was closer. She hated the thought of leaving her friends, her teachers, and her life in southern California behind. And she had no idea what life would be like in Seattle. Were the schools up there any good, would she meet new friends, and how would she fit in (or would she)? Were teenagers in Seattle the same as teenagers in Anaheim? Would they like her? Just thinking about it all made her head spin.

At the same time, however, there was one thing that really intrigued her and she couldn’t stop thinking about it no matter how hard she tried. Being a spy. Or what had James called it? An agent. Amanda had always been the adventurous type and she loved trying new and exciting things. It didn’t get any newer or more exciting than being an agent in a top-secret intelligence agency. She wondered what her training would be like and how long it would take to complete. And after she completed it, what kind of missions would they send her on? Would she get to go to exotic, foreign locales, and meet other agents, and save the world from super villains like they did in all of the old spy movies she had seen? She doubted it, and James had said espionage work wasn’t nearly as glamorous as many people thought it was, but she was excited nonetheless.

And there was one more thing that intrigued her, and it was actually the one thing she spent the most time thinking about. Her new name. She had never really liked her name. Amanda Anderson. It was so plain. So simple. She might as well have been named Amanda Williams, or Amanda Jones, or Amanda Smith. And her middle name didn’t help any. It was Beatrice. Ugh. She had never liked the name Beatrice at all. It was so formal and old fashioned. But now she was being given a chance to start all over and to change her name to something she liked. That was actually pretty cool, and how many people got to do it? Most people were stuck with the name their parents gave them their entire lives. So Amanda tried to think of some new names, and she wanted something that went well with the name Cruise, which apparently was the new last name they had been given. She would have preferred something other than Cruise, but at the same time, it was better than Anderson since it was a little less plain, and ultimately, she was more concerned with her first name.

She asked the nurse for some paper and a pencil and she started a list:

Chloe.

Cassandra.

Kristi.

Hailey.

She had always liked the name Chloe and it definitely sounded good with Cruise. Chloe Cruise. She liked the alliteration and it just seemed to roll off of her tongue. But so did Cassandra, and it even seemed a bit more exotic. At the same time, however, it was quite a bit longer so she wondered if she would get tired of writing it. In addition, people might shorten it and give her a nickname like Cassie or Cass. She didn’t like that at all so she removed Cassandra from the list. Kristi was good, too, but, like the name Amanda it was a little too common. Hailey got crossed out quickly because it made her think of Hailey Wetmore, a girl at her high school who was a complete witch. So Chloe was the frontrunner until she thought of a few more possibilities:

Kristen.

Jennifer.

Molly.

Maggie.

Kristen sounded nice, especially combined with Cruise, but like Kristi it seemed too simple and too common. She wanted something more exotic, something with some flair. She thought about Jennifer, since her favorite softball player was Jennie Finch, but again it just didn’t seem exotic enough. Molly and Maggie met the same fate. They were good, but not good enough.

And then it came to her. Seemingly out of nowhere. The absolute perfect name.

Kiana.

She loved it the minute she thought of it. It was short, exotic, and it looked great when you combined it with Cruise. Kiana Cruise. She kept saying it over and over in her head and finally tried it out loud a few times, just to see how it sounded. The nurse gave her a strange look from across the room so she put a quick end to vocalizing it. She then started working on her signature, and although it took quite a few tries to perfect it, she eventually got it just right, with a really fancy K, an equally fancy C, and a small heart above the ‘i’ in Kiana. She contemplated adding a second heart above the ‘i’ in Cruise but decided that might be a little too much.

Picking her middle name, by contrast, was simple. She picked the name Danielle since that had been her mom’s name, and never a day had gone by that she didn’t think about her and miss her terribly. Especially days like that one, when she had nothing to do but lay around in bed all day.