Deadline Girl rides again

It's crunch time. Seriously. I mean it.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy will go into copyedits next week (for those of you who may not know, copyedits are when an editor with very keen eyes and excellent grammar reads your manuscript and sends it back to you with about a billion little red marks on it.) Copyedits are the light at the end of the tunnel.

But Deadline Girl is starting to feel her powers drain. She's like Superman when he hasn't had enough sunlight or...well...some other superhero or heroine when they've been too long without the source of their power.

So I'm doing something bold.

I'm doing something drastic.

I'm posting here--for the first time anywhere--the opening paragraphs of Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy even though it isn't necessarily *final* and might change between now and September 25.

Still, Deadline Girl needs power and she draws her power from readers and this is the best way she knows to blatently beg for positive feedback and fire up her energy reserves once more.

So, I give you...

CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO SPY

“Just be yourself,” my mother said, as if that was easy. Which it isn’t. Ever. Especially not when you’re fifteen and don’t know what language you’re going to have to speak at lunch or what name you’ll have to use the next time you do a “project” for extra credit. Not when your nickname is “the Chameleon.”

Not when you go to a school for spies.

Of course, if you’re reading this, you probably have at least a Level Four clearance and know all about the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women—that it isn’t really a boarding school for privileged girls, and that, despite our gorgeous mansion and manicured grounds, we’re not snobs. We’re spies. But at that moment even my mother…even my headmistress… seemed to have forgotten that when you’ve spent your whole life learning fourteen different languages and how to completely alter your appearance using nail clippers and shoe polish then being yourself gets a little harder--that we Gallagher Girls are far better at being someone else.

(And we’ve got the fake IDs to prove it.)