CHAPTER TWELVE
Cosmic Girl - or, as everybody else knew her, well-liked local girl Peggy Potter, perky schoolgirl, and star of her local football team's junior cheer squad - was doing what any other girl her age was doing. She was going to school!
Except, she wasn't.
She had followed the same routine for most of her life. She would get up, have breakfast with her parents - today eggs, bacon, maple pancakes, and an inadvisable quantity of coffee, which she could drink without any apparent side effects, as her super metabolism seemed to turn caffeine into an entirely benign compound - and then she would put on her school uniform, pick up her school bag, and head out to where the car was waiting. Everybody could see her being driven off to school.
She never arrived.
It was all a very complex ruse. Since her birth, she had been an assett of the government. The life of her family was an incredibly detailed sham. And every morning on a weekday, she would be ferried away from her home, and taken to an entirely unremarkable building, within which she would be subjected to tests, training, and... unfortunately... education.
Yes, she did not have to go to an actual school. But the tutors she had been assigned by the US Government were probably far more demanding than any high school Principal would ever expect.
And so there she sat, staring at her textbook, and wondering for the millionth time, why she would ever need to know the gross domestic product of the leading nations of the world. She had been raised to fly about and shoot down supervillains. She seriously doubted any of them were going to pause to ask her the top five imports of West Germany before unleashing a horde of buzz-saw toting attack meringues, or whatever the crazy fool had hidden away.
Her tutor watched her impassively. He was an archetypal MiB type. Just once, she thought, it might have been nice to be a normal girl. But then, she would probably still have geography finals to pass. Maybe the biggest evil mastermind of all was whoever set the curriculum...