“We cannot have a repeat of your behavior from the last session. Unlike the first twelve weeks of your training, these next sixteen weeks must be taken seriously. That means no tardiness, and you need to keep your grades up,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it took for me to get you in here? What strings I had to pull, and what promises I had to commit to in order to make this a reality for you?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. I’d heard this speech before, and it always ended with whatever my mother wanted for me was right and whatever I wanted or said was wrong. It didn’t matter that I had no interest in becoming an FBI agent, nor did I want to live with her and her cheating ass when she and father divorced. Yet, I was forced to do that as well, and now I barely saw my father and was shoved into a career I had zero interest in doing.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“What do you want me to say, Mom? I didn’t want to become some special secret agent in the first place. This is all your idea. I’m only here because you didn’t like my choices and forced me to attend.”

My mother leaned against the desk and stared at me with the same look I was sure she used in her interrogation of killers.

“Really, Kirby? Okay, then tell me, what did you want to do? You’re twenty-three now, and the bachelor of science degree you insisted on completing was doing nothing for you. You had top grades, yet you worked at a Denny’s making peanuts. You have thousands of dollars of school debt that your father and I have been paying for, but you seemed perfectly happy to sit back and enjoy the lifestyle we’ve provided without you contributing a dime.”

My Mother pointed around the room.

“This is what is going to give you a career. It will pay the bills, and it may not seem like it yet, but it will be a rewarding job rather than where you were headed.”

I looked down at my shoes and sighed. “Nothing about this place feels right for me. I wanted to be an artist. I’ve always loved to paint.”

“Great answer, Kirby. A worthless, dead-end career.”