Spy-in-Training (6 page)

S
o I told my mom everything. About my real dad. His secret identity. Section 23. My recruitment. The bagful of gadgets. And she totally got it and was completely supportive.
JK!!
J absolutely and positively K to the
n
th degree. These lips stayed sealed. At home. In school. With Joanna. Bridget Wilder's little—and by little I mean HUUUUGE—secret stays locked up tight. No one sees anything different about me. I'm just That Girl who's friends with That Other Girl and that's the way I like it. But inside it's a different story. Inside me, there's a volcano waiting to erupt. When do I meet Carter Strike?
What will my first mission be? How long before I hear from Spool again? It's been a whole week since he last made contact.

“Miss . . . uh . . . miss . . . uh . . .”

“Call her Midget.”

The sheeplike laughter of Room A117 distracts me from my constant monitoring of the Spool-phone. I look up, ignoring Brendan Chew, and focus on . . . what's his name? He introduced himself to us at the start of the class. He scribbled his name on the board. I think it starts with a D? Maybe a B? No, can't remember. Like it matters. He's a substitute, a round, doughy, red-cheeked guy who's sweating his way through a cheap white nylon shirt that's stretched close to bursting. Wow, listen to me. It's like Joanna's rubbed off on me. I'm sure Mr. D-or-B is a perfectly adequate person, but he's just a substitute, whereas I am a fledgling spy eager to take wing and prove my worth. He waddles toward me.

“Miss . . . uh . . . miss . . .”

As he gets closer, D/B has what can only be described as a flustered look on his face. Not a people person? Uncomfortable around kids? Seems like he made a perfect career choice.

“Your phone,” he says.

I stare at him. He's not getting his stubby fingers on
my super-sophisticated communications device.

“Could you, uh, not look at it while I'm talking?”

“Oh my God,”
yelps Brendan Chew. “You just said what we've all been thinking. Someone finally had the guts to stand up to her.”

A117 erupts. Casey Breakbush and her coterie of slim, pretty friends with perfect lives have their hands up over their lovely mouths. Joanna dabs a pink tissue to her eyes in an effort to stem the tears of laughter. The sub stands awkwardly in the middle of the room. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. Not sure what level to pitch his voice. And his lack of classroom leadership makes the laughter grow louder.

My phone vibrates.

I glance down.

There's a picture of Spool's pink face.

I jump out of my seat.

“IfeelsickIneedtoseethenurse.” I say it that fast and fly out of A117.

“The midget's got a small problem,” says Chew seconds before I depart the room. The laughter is still ringing in my ears as I duck into the girls' room.

“Hello,” says Spool.

“Is there a job?” I ask.

“How have you been?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say. “Are you calling about a mission?”

“We felt, your father and I, that we should give you time to process . . . ,” he says.

“Mission!”
I snap, a little louder than I intended.

“There's a pre-mission,” he says. “Nothing too taxing. It gives us a chance to see what you can do in the field.”

“Training wheels, in other words.”

“You can choose to look at it that way. Or you could choose to seize this opportunity with both hands and commit to showing your father that his faith in you is not misplaced.”

“What's the pre-mission?” I ask.

“We've received credible intel that an enemy agency is about to engage in a game of misdirection.”

“Is that a board game?” I say. “Because I'm not great at those. I don't have the attention span.”

“A piece of incriminating information is going to be secretly planted on someone in your school. That piece of information may be no bigger in size than a postage stamp, but it will be imprinted with a secret code. If an unauthorized person is in possession of that secret code, that person will look like a traitor to his-slash-her country. The authorities will be informed about this traitor. The individual will be removed from school and subject
to lengthy, painful, and humiliating interrogation. Life-ruining interrogation. And while this is happening . . .”

Spool leaves a significant pause.

I take a wild guess. “Aliens attack?”

He shakes his head no. “The real information will be passed on to the real enemy agent based elsewhere in this state. And no one in authority will notice because they'll be too busy congratulating themselves on the traitor they believe they caught.”

“Obviously I completely understand the pre-mission,” I say. “But let's pretend I don't. Is what you're asking me to sort of do the same as Nola Milligan slipping Brendan Chew a note telling him Casey Breakbush really likes him? Demented, I know, but hear me out. Casey's boyfriend finds out about the note and beats Chew to a pulp, which would be a joy. But while the boyfriend's attention is directed toward Chew, he doesn't notice Casey giving another, this time genuine, note to the boy she really harbors a secret crush on. The Dale Tookey figure. Or whoever. I picked that name at random. . . .”

I feel myself getting flustered. For once, I'm actually waiting for Spool to interrupt me, which, thankfully, he does.

“The scenarios are similar,” he says.

Oh my God! I kind of thought I'd be entrusted
with stopping kids from tracking dog poop onto school property, but this is an actual case with intrigue and importance.

“What do you need me to do?” I say.

“Monitor your surroundings. Observe your fellow students and your teachers. Think like the enemy. Who would you choose if you had to pick someone to frame as a traitor?”

Where do I even start? My mind is reeling with possibilities.

“Is this going to be too much for you?” Spool asks. “We can find you something less demanding.”

“This is the exact correct level of demanding,” I reply.

“So you're in?”

I'm actually physically tingling with excitement. “I'm in!” I shriek. “I'm all the way in!” My voice echoes around the bathroom. I try to control myself but this is a colossal deal.

“Calm down,” he says. “For you to be an effective operative, it's important you do not draw attention to yourself.”

“Dude, I've been working on that for the past thirteen years.”

“Good,” he replies, missing my biting sarcasm. “Stay focused, blend in, and keep a close eye on everyone
around you. You'll soon start to notice if people begin to deviate from normal modes of behavior.”

“And if they do, I take them down with maximum force,” I say.

“It's not a takedown,” he says, immediately sucking the fun out of the pre-mission. “It's about gathering information. Can we use the victim for our own campaign of misdirection? Can we make them believe they're doing vital security work when in reality they're simply being used as a means to an end? Find out and report back before anyone is framed or subject to painful interrogation.”

I throw him a salute. I'm
so
into this.

I know what you're thinking. I'm going to be spending today and possibly many other days sneakily patrolling Reindeer Crescent in search of suspicious behavior. I'll be forced to insinuate myself into the extracurricular clubs and observe the loose cannons in their natural habitat. I think you're thinking wrong. Someone else might do those things, someone without spy blood running through their veins. Let Bridget Wilder of Section 23 explain how a
real
spy handles a mission of this magnitude. She doesn't go down the
obvious
road. She takes big, bold deductive leaps and she asks herself a series of questions. Questions like:

       
1.
  
Who has no idea what is going on in school?

       
2.
  
Who is easy to manipulate?

       
3.
  
Who would authorities believe to be powerless and resentful enough to work against their own country for an enemy agency?

At lunchtime, I knock on the door of the teachers' lounge. A shy, cautious knock. I hear a “What?” from inside. I open the door and nervously look in. What a dump. Old carpet with holes in it. Old furniture. Old teachers covered in crumbs. Tiny fridge. Tiny microwave. Teachers separated into cliques shooting disparaging looks at one another's groups. This place should be renamed the Traitors' Lounge!

A few heads turn and stare in my direction. They have no idea who I am or why I have a lumpy silver triangle in my outstretched hand. They do not know the silver triangle houses a carrot cake I made several weeks earlier in cooking class that I literally would not feed to a dog.

“Hi, I, um, I had this left over from my b-b-birthday and, um . . . ,” I stammer and flush.

“You brought this for us?” My social studies teacher, Miss Helena Hartsock, comes to my rescue. “That's so nice.” I catch sight of some of the other teachers, who are embarrassed and uncomfortable having their little refuge
breached by one of the inmates. Nate Spar, the physics teacher, doesn't even try to hide his disdain.

“I didn't know it was your birthday. You never said.” Miss Hartsock looks genuinely sad for me through her cat-eye glasses.

“Learning is your present to me,” I say.

I know.
I know.
Carter Strike would be proud.

I see Nate Spar smirk. But Miss Hartsock swallows hard, and she's not the only one.

“We'll all have a piece and thank you so much.”

I back out of the lounge, my head down. I don't have to see the teachers' faces to know that they will guiltily gnaw their way through a brutal mouthful of my awful carrot cake. And that none of them saw me sneakily place a Tic Tac camera in a position where I will able to monitor everything they say and do. But it's for their own good. If a teacher is about to be set up as a traitor, I will see it and put a stop to it.

I leave Teacherville and hurry to my next port of call. Suddenly, I'm intercepted. Joanna is waiting for me and she has questions.

“What were you doing in the teachers' lounge? Where did you disappear to? What aren't you telling me?”

These lips, however, stay sealed. I try to fob her off with a shrug and a mumble. She is not to be fobbed off.
“I tell you everything,” she says. Like that's a plus.

“I gotta go,” I say, and scuttle away I can feel those tiny eyes boring into my back. I know she's mad I'm hiding something tiny and insignificant from her. I should feel bad. But:

       
A)
 
I don't.

       
B)
 
My plan has a second step that needs to be executed perfectly. And for that, I need a boy.

I head toward the main hallway, hoping to bump into Dale Tookey. Instead, I see the flustered substitute, Mr. D-or-B.

I plaster on an expression of deep concern and trot toward him. The look on his face is like I'm contagious or I'm about to mug him for his lunch money.

“Mister . . . um . . . I think there's going to be a fight in the boys' room. I heard word that something's going down.”

“A . . . uh . . . fight . . . Are you . . . uh . . . sure?” He stares at me.

“I'm more than sure. You need to get in there and squash the beef!”

As soon as I say that, I find myself thinking,
He looks like he's squashed more than his share of beef.
Which makes
it very hard to keep the grin off my face.

“Please, Mister . . . um, violence is tearing our school apart.”

The sub looks like wading into the boys' room carnage is the very last thing he would ever want to do. But I make my eyes really wide and I'm working on squeezing out a tear. So the sub does my bidding. He opens the boys' room door. The aroma wafts out and everyone in the hallway immediately drops dead. I'm exaggerating—but not by much.

The sub holds the door open. “Whatever's going on, it needs to stop right now,” he says into the echoey space. His speech is greeted with a moment of silence, and then he's attacked with a hail of wadded-up toilet paper and sneakers. He backs away from the door. The expression on his face suggests that he's just seen something he will never be able to unsee. I do not know exactly what goes on inside those stalls but I've heard noises coming from the boys' room: screams of pain, sobs of despair, demented laughter. Sounds terrifying enough to turn any normal, well-adjusted boy into a fake traitor. I give Mr. D-or-B a friendly pat on the arm. “Great job,” I tell him. And I mean it. Mr. D-or-B created the perfect diversion for me to roll a Tic Tac camera inside the boys' room.

S
omebody picked the Tic Tac off the floor in the boys' toilet and swallowed it.

Spool has left me ten messages, looking for updates on the progress of the pre-mission, each showing increased agitation. I am not going to reply. I do not want him to know about the awful fate of his expensive surveillance technology. I want to spare his pink-faced feelings and also I cannot bear to think about it without feeling like I will never stop puking. And now I'm thinking about puking, which makes me want to puke even more.

“Bridget. Dinner's on the table,” yells my dad,
displaying the worst timing in the world.

“Coming,” I yell back but, guess what, I'm not coming, I'm holing up in my room and studying the hours of surveillance the teachers' lounge Tic Tac captured. Luckily nobody ate
that
one.

You know how you'd go on family outings to the zoo and you'd get all excited to be so close to wildlife and then you'd get there and spend ten minutes staring at a monkey sitting on a rock or a tree frog that may or may not be dead and you'd wonder,
How long am I supposed to keep staring at this until something happens?
Now you know what surveilling the teachers' lounge was like. Sure, there was the controversial moment when it looked like Nate Spar had eaten the Spanish teacher's salmon wrap, but it turned out to be obscured by someone's bean curd soup, so
that
international crisis was narrowly averted.

But as mind-numbingly, eye-crossingly tedious as monitoring the teachers' lounge is, I do not stint from my task. I do not fast-forward. I pause the footage every time I take a snack or bathroom break, and I force myself to stay awake until the bitter end. Why? Because this is my pre-mission. This is where my spy worthiness stands or falls, and I do not want to disappoint Carter Strike or—and it pains me to admit his opinion matters to
me—Spool. I want them to know they didn't make a mistake with Bridget Wilder. I am the right girl for the job.

What if
Joanna's the fake traitor?
It hits me suddenly as we're walking to school the next day and I'm half listening to her new list of rumors and outright lies. As soon as the thought pops into my head, I can't shake it. She'd be easy to frame. (She's got a motive: Joanna hates everybody.) I feel the need to protect her from the enemy agency that—in my mind—wants to frame her for a crime she didn't commit. But could!

As she's yammering about some supposed offense for which she'll never forgive the Belgian exchange student, I take a step back. I pull out my lip balm and squeeze. . . .
Wait, was it once for laser, two for smoke, three for Taser?

I squeeze once. A beam shoots out and slices through the straps of Joanna's black backpack. It falls to the ground and the contents spill everywhere. I rush forward, making “Oh my goodness, let me help” noises.

Joanna crouches down a second or two after me and grabs at the bag of almonds, the rolled-up socks, and the semi-chewed Sharpies rolling onto the concrete. I snatch up various erasers, loose buttons, and shoelaces, all the while looking out for . . .
something
, some incriminating
item that might have been planted on her, something no bigger than a postage stamp. I don't see anything fitting that description. I let out a sigh of relief. My pre-mission has just begun and I've already saved Joanna from a lengthy and painful interrogation. I gather up the last of her stuff and return it to the damaged backpack. There's an old notebook lying a few feet away. I go to pick it up. Joanna makes a sudden, wild grab at it.

“Give me that,” she shouts.

My spy suspicions are aroused.

My sneakers kick up some dust as they shoot me a few yards ahead of her. I look down at the notebook in my hands. I see the words
My Best Friends
in Joanna's faded scrawl. There are ten names written on the page, girls who were in our third-grade class. Girls she hoped might befriend her. Girls she decided to hurt before they hurt her. Girls she now slanders on a regular basis on her Tumblr. My name is second to last on the list. Joanna pulls the notebook from my hands and throws it in her backpack. I want to say something about what I just saw but the glare of doom she's shooting my way renders me speechless.

We walk the rest of the distance to school in painful silence, Joanna dragging her backpack along the ground by the severed straps, me pondering the fact that I'm the
only one of Joanna's friends who turned out not to be imaginary. She may be a fake hater but the good news is she's not a fake traitor.

The tension between me and Joanna has not faded now that we've reached Reindeer Crescent. Rather than endure any more discomfort, I mumble something about how I'm dying of thirst and scuttle off in search of refreshment. I speed toward the gym and then groan out loud. I'd forgotten the friendly red vending machine, cheerful dispenser of pretzels, chocolate, gum, and soda, is now the Big Green Machine, home of vegetable snacks, protein bars, and mineral water. A student gives Big Green a loud kick as he passes. He is not the only one. Students chomping chips and guzzling cola go out of their way to register their hatred of Big Green and its displacement of Friendly Red. Loud metallic
clank
s echo around the hallway after each kick. I stand and watch my fellow students leave dents and scratches in the helpless chunk of metal.

“Stop that!” bawls Vice Principal Tom Scattering, rushing to Big Green's aid. The students scatter as he approaches. “The next student who abuses the vending machine is looking at a suspension!” His words stay with me later while I'm supposed to be paying close attention to my science teacher Willy Cyprus's PowerPoint presentation on Earth and the solar system.
Vice
Principal Scattering thought he was doing a good thing when he installed the Big Green Machine
, I think.
Instead of thanking him for filling the school with healthy nutritious treats, the students kick his machine and their parents protest it because it makes them look like they don't care about what their kids are shoving down their throats.
And then I find myself further thinking that he totally matches the criteria for someone who'd be super easy to set up.
Everyone already thinks Vice Principal Scattering's a fake traitor!

Now maybe this is a case of me putting two and two together and making five, but my spy senses—which completely failed me with Joanna—are once again aroused. When lunch break rolls around, I do not head for the fro-yo place. Instead, I go to the gym, where I find the vice principal rubbing a white handkerchief across the scratched surface of the Big Green Machine. I'm standing a few feet away so I can't quite hear what he's saying but he seems to be making sympathetic, cooing noises to the machine, like a pet owner would to an old, slow dog approaching its final days. I want to laugh but I also don't. Veep Scat is a tall, skinny, balding guy who doesn't look like he gets a lot of wins out of life. He tried to do a good thing with the Big Green Machine and the student body repaid his efforts by symbolically kicking him in the face. Friendly Red was empty every day. Students
lost their minds if it hadn't been refilled at the start of the next school day. Big Green has
never
been refilled. It's been kicked and scratched and slammed around but I have never seen a single human being press its selection buttons and slide a dollar bill into its slot.

Until now.

Veep Scat is doing just that. He's tapping in a combination of numbers, smoothing out a crumpled dollar bill, and pushing it into Big Green. A granola bar tumbles down into the delivery compartment. My spy senses are fully engaged. I run toward the machine and snatch the granola bar from Veep Scat's hand.

“Hey! What are you doing? That's my bar!” I hear him spluttering with outrage but I don't have time to explain. I need to unwrap this log of pressed brown flakes and prove to myself that my spy senses aren't just a figment of my overstimulated imagination. They're not!!!!

Embedded into the brown flakes is a postage-stamp-size piece of clear plastic with various dots and squiggles on the surface. I start to peel it off when a hand clamps down on my shoulder.

“My office. Now.”

I feel fingers digging in. I look up at Veep Scat's bright red face. How do I explain this?
I saved you from
being framed as a fake traitor by an enemy agency?
Would he buy that?

I flick the plastic square from the surface of the bar and cram a big chunk of granola into my mouth.

Bleh.
I can't believe he replaced Friendly Red's tasty treats with this chunk of gravel.

“I really love healthy food,” I say, spitting out bits of granola as I talk. “I can't get enough of it.”

I see a tiny little seed of doubt grow in Veep Scat's eyes. Maybe I'm not one of the anti–Big Green masses. Maybe I actually appreciate what he's tried to do for the students of this school. I feel the pressure on my shoulder decrease. He
wants
to believe I'm a convert to the Big Green Machine and I'm happy to let him think that because it means my pre-mission is a success. I saved an innocent man.

“Tastes good, doesn't it?” smiles Veep Scat. I nod enthusiastically even though I
so
want to spit this cardboard granola thing out of my mouth.

“I think the other students will come around to the benefits of the Big Green Machine,” he says. “It's just a matter of time.”

I nod enthusiastically again. This guy has
no
clue.

And then I hear a rumbling sound. Is it coming from under the school? Is it coming from inside the gym?

No. It's coming from the vending machine. Big Green is vibrating.

Veep Scat cautiously approaches the machine, his white handkerchief clutched in his hand.

The machine vibrates louder as he gets closer. It's like there's someone inside trying to get out. The machine is
shaking
and tipping back and forward.

“Go get Nash Nixon,” he tells me. Instead of running to fetch the custodian, I stand rooted to the spot, watching fascinated as the vice principal starts making those cooing noises to a machine that sounds like it's about to explode.

“Good boy,” he singsongs. “You're doing fine. I'm here.”

He goes to give one of Big Green's many dents and scratches a rub with his handkerchief and a bottle of water
shoots
out of the machine and
smashes
Veep Scat full in the face. He staggers backward until he hits the wall and his legs give way. He
slides
down the wall until he's sitting on the ground, which is when he tips over on his side.

The machine doesn't stop. It blasts a yogurt carton at him. The carton hits the wall just over his head. Yogurt—rhubarb flavor, I think—dribbles down onto the shoulders of his dark jacket.

For a second I don't move. I just stand there staring as the Big Green Machine blasts healthy treats into the face and body of its biggest champion. I could watch this all day. But I don't. The enemy agency has control of the Big Green Machine. An innocent man is in harm's way.

Get in the game, Young Gazelle!

I rush in front of the fallen vice principal. A bottle of mineral water is shot from what I now see is a compartment just above the cash slot.

The bottle flies straight at me. I jump in the air. My sneaker-clad right foot kicks out
hard.
I slam the can back at Big Green, causing a spider web of splinters to appear in its glass screen. Another yogurt pot is propelled at me. Once again, I take flight and repel the attack. Fruity drinks. PowerBars. Kale chips. I kick them all back in Big Green's broken face.

As suddenly as the assault started, it ends. The vending machine stops vibrating. No more food flies out. I lean forward, hands on thighs, breathing hard, not quite ready to trust this cease-fire. But the gym corridor is silent. I tiptoe toward the wreckage of Big Green—and it
is
a wreck; there's glass and bits of food everywhere—and take a peek around the back. With one yank, I pull the plug from the wall.

And then I feel the hand on my shoulder.

“You're suspended,” says the vice principal.

I'm what?

I squeeze out of his grip and turn to face him.

“How could you do this?” he says, his eyes filled with sorrow. “I thought you liked granola.”

“What?” I yelp. “Didn't you see what happened? The machine went crazy!”

But as I look at his face, I can tell he either blacked out when the water bottle hit him or he refuses to believe what he saw actually happened. He shakes his head. “My office. We're calling your parents.”

At that moment, a phone rings. The vice principal's phone. He takes it from his pocket and stares at the screen.

I hear a tinny voice from the phone. Veep Scat's voice. It says, “Good boy. You're doing fine. I'm here.”

More tinny sounds follow. I stand next to the vice principal and we both watch footage of me kicking snacks back at the out-of-control machine. For a second, I wonder how that film made its way into Veep Scat's phone, and then I remember Spool playing with the traffic lights on my street.

“Oh,” says the vice principal when the clip ends. “I guess someone's been tampering with the machine. I'll have the custodian take a look at it.”

He stands for another moment gazing at Big Green's shattered front and then he walks away, swaying slightly from side to side like he's on a boat and the water is a little choppy. I watch him go and I feel a tiny burst of sympathy. But I also feel a big burst of pride in myself because I just saved an innocent man from being framed as a fake traitor, which is to say, my pre-mission can be classed as a success.

I hear the sudden clamor of voices both high and screechy and low and rumbling. A group of girls from the volleyball squad and a group of guys from the football team are returning equipment to the gym. Or at least they were. They stop a few feet away from me. One guy drops his ball. Eyes bore into mine. These aren't the dopes from Doom Patrol. These are the cream of Reindeer Crescent's athletically adept. And there are a lot of them. If they decide to rumble, this could be a challenge for the Young Gazelle. Finally, someone breaks the silence.