Codename Zero

by Chris Rylander

  BECAUSE I SWORE I HEARD IT SAY IT WOULD SELF-DESTRUCT THIS MORNING PLUS YER OBVIOUSLY HIDING SOMETHING IN THERE!!!! WHATS IT FOR? ARE THEY AFTER YOU?

  I flipped his note over and wrote another reply.

  Are you crazy?!?! Why would I bring something like that to school? I’m not that stupid.

  Of course the irony was that I was indeed that stupid. Dillon read the note, and then scribbled his reply and passed it back.

  I NEVER DID THINK IT WAS THAT ANYWAY. I’M ACTUALLY PRETTY SURE IT’S A GREMLIN. YOU GOT A GREMLIN SOMEHOW DIDN’T YOU? I KNEW IT!!!!!!!

  If class were long enough, we would have gone back and forth for hours with Dillon moving from one theory to another. Either way, I was relieved that Dillon was just being Dillon and really hadn’t figured out what I had in my backpack.

  A few times during our exchange, though, I saw the same two guys wearing suits outside again. They were going from car to car in the school parking lot, looking inside the windows. A shiver went up my spine. They were relentless.

  What exactly was in this box that was so important?

  CHAPTER 14

  FINDING TALL JENSEN WAS A LOT EASIER THAN FINDING SHORT Jensen. For one, I knew exactly where he’d be after school. Being the assistant football coach meant he was at football practice every day until at least 5:00 p.m. Which was good for me, since I didn’t get out of detention until 4:15.

  Detention was a whole other nightmare altogether. I mean, no talking is allowed in detention. At all. So I had to do something with Betsy if I didn’t want to get found out.

  I debated storing her inside the evergreen tree right outside the detention room window where I could keep an eye on her, but with those two goons in suits nosing around all day, that didn’t seem like a particularly smart idea either.

  Stashing her in my locker was also definitely out, as there were sometimes even more kids wandering the halls after school than during school. Especially from 3:00 until 3:45 while they were waiting for rides, chatting with friends, and going to and from their various extracurricular activities and clubs.

  I also couldn’t just skip detention. I know that seems silly since this Betsy mess was potentially a major national security threat. But I’d skipped detention before, and Gomez had made it very clear that if I did it again, I’d be suspended for sure, maybe even expelled.

  So where did that leave me?

  Well, it left me with the only thing I could possibly think of: asking Dillon and Danielle for help.

  I didn’t really want to drag them into this, but I had nowhere else to turn. Plus, I trusted them. Dillon was too crazy to be untrustworthy, as strange as that sounds, and Danielle was likely the person I trusted the most outside of my family. Whereas I hated responsibilities and chores and all that crap, Danielle thrived on it. She loved school projects and couldn’t wait to turn fifteen so she could get a job, if you can actually believe that. She liked tasks. Her life’s goal was to be president of the United States. No joke. One time when she and Dillon were at my house, she reorganized my entire game closet because she got so mad when I couldn’t find the board game we wanted to play. After she left that day, my brother had said, “You need to have an intervention for your friend Danielle. That girl is literally addicted to accomplishments.”

  Anyway, the point is that I could trust them. Besides, I didn’t need to tell them everything. Dillon had a pretty open mind, so I could make up pretty much anything I wanted and keep him on a strict need-to-know basis, and Danielle always assumed half the stuff I said was exaggerated or made up, so I could probably just tell her the truth and she wouldn’t even believe me anyway. It wasn’t that I lied all the time or anything. I think she was like that as a byproduct of having Dillon for a twin brother.

  After school, I went to the west entrance, where they always met each day to wait for their mom to pick them up.

  “Hey, need a ride today, Carson?” Dillon asked as I approached.

  I usually rode the bus home, but from time to time, on the rare days I didn’t have detention, I would catch a ride with them.

  “Of course he doesn’t!” Danielle corrected him in that way that sisters love to do. “He has detention today, remember? Don’t you actually need to be there right now?”

  “Yeah, that’s actually why I came to see you. I need your help.”

  “See?” Dillon said, smacking his sister’s arm lightly, “I told you he was in trouble with spies! What did you do, steal some super–top secret plans?”

  “Shut up already about the spies!” Danielle said, smacking him back but much harder. Then she turned to me. “He’s got some stupid theory about spies snooping around the school as a part of some international espionage conspiracy just because he saw some guy in a suit in the parking lot today. I mean, jeez, it’s not like every guy wearing a suit is a spy. Besides this is North Dakota.”

  I was glad that Danielle had spoken up so quickly, because otherwise I don’t think I could have hidden my shock at what Dillon had just said. Sometimes I had to wonder if there were some things Dillon said that he just might be right about. Like, for instance, the last thing he’d just said.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” I said. “Jeez, Dillon.”

  “Whatever, you’ll see someday,” Dillon said, like he always did.

  “Anyway, guys,” I said, “the thing is, Dillon isn’t that far off. You see, I was working on this new prank. It was going to involve me tricking Gomez into thinking he was caught up in some sort of spy conspiracy.”

  “Cool!” Dillon said.

  “Go on,” Danielle said.

  They both loved messing with Gomez as much as I did. He was just so high-strung; it always made our pranks especially fun when he was the target.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “I made this fake self-destructing message device. But apparently I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet because it won’t stop talking. It announces that it’s going to self-destruct every fifteen minutes.”

  “At least that explains why you’ve been acting so strange,” Danielle said. “Let me guess, you want us to take your bag and take it somewhere where people won’t hear it while you’re in detention, right?”

  I smiled and nodded and gave them my best pretty-please look.

  “Okay, fine,” she said.

  “I’m not taking that thing!” Dillon said, stepping back.

  “Dillon, it’s not real,” I lied. “It’s perfectly harmless. I made it using some old computer that I bought on eBay for twenty bucks.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s probably exactly what someone with a real self-destructing secret message would say.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Danielle said. “I’ll take it for you. But you owe me!” She loved doing favors for people, mostly because she loved it when people owed her favors. Favors are the world’s most valuable currency, she once told me. Nobody does anything that matters all on their own.

  “Where are we gonna take it, and what about mom?” Dillon said. “She’ll think we were kidnapped by a gang of Elvis impersonators if we’re not here.”

  I laughed, but Danielle rolled her eyes as she took the bag from me.

  “We’ll just text her and tell her we don’t need a ride until later since we’re hanging out with Carson after school today,” Danielle said. “I think I know the perfect spot to bring this.”

  “Behind the sledding hill is where I was thinking,” I said.

  Our school was built on a big hill, basically, and one side was a particularly popular sledding spot in the winter. The hill was so steep that there was one area off to the side that was like a dirt cliff with a ton of holes in it where a bunch of swallows had made their nests. It was a pretty isolated spot when there was no snow on the ground, and kids hardly ever went down there. We usually didn’t either; there was something about it that just never felt right, so we all avoided it. It was hard to explain. But the point is, it would be the perfect hiding spot for Betsy.

  “Exactly,” Danielle said. �
��Me, too. How much time before it talks again?”

  I checked my watch and then looked up.

  “Ninety seconds. You guys better run. I’ll meet you there after detention.”

  Danielle nodded and grabbed Dillon’s arm, and then they took off running toward the sledding hill.

  “Thanks!” I yelled after them before hustling to detention myself. The detention supervisor hated tardiness—I guess because that’s exactly why most kids got detention in the first place.

  CHAPTER 15

  LATER, AFTER DETENTION BUT BEFORE MEETING BACK UP WITH Dillon and Danielle, I went to the practice football field to talk to Tall Jensen.

  I made my way there with slow plodding steps to buy some thinking time. I faced the same problem I had earlier with Short Jensen: What reason would I have for needing to talk to Tall Jensen? Especially seeing as how I’d never even had Tall Jensen as a teacher? At least I knew that this time I likely had the right guy. There weren’t any Jensens left at the school, unless the guy in the suit had been talking about Lisa Jensen. But a sixth-grade girl obsessed with horses and American Idol was even less likely to be a secret agent than Short Jensen.

  When I got to the football field, I saw Tall Jensen standing on one of those giant football pads on a platform with springs behind it. Sleds, I think the football players call them. He yelled at a group of six or seven players. Then he blew his whistle, and one of the kids sprang out of his stance and into the pad. It barely even moved.

  “Pathetic!” Tall Jensen shouted. “Next!”

  He blew his whistle again, and the next kid tried. When he hit the pad, instead of the pad moving back on its springs, the kid bounced off it and fell back onto his butt like the pad was made of bouncy-ball rubber.

  Tall Jensen shook his head in defeat. “That’s it, ladies, give me three laps around the goalposts, end to end.” The players groaned in unison and started jogging toward the nearest goalpost.

  I approached Tall Jensen, still not entirely sure what I was going to say.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Oh, I just wanted to check out practice,” I said. “See what it’s like. I might try out next year.”

  Tall Jensen nodded and turned his head to watch the seven players he’d been yelling at run the first lap. Some of the other players, who were in several groups with a few other coaches, pointed and laughed at their teammates as they ran by.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “What position?”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “If you played, what position do you think you’d like?” Tall Jensen looked at me from head to toe.

  I’d never really thought about that before. I wasn’t really into sports that much. I mean, I used to play pretty much all of them when I was little because that’s what all little kids do around here, but none of them quite stuck once I got older. Spending my free time planning pranks was always more fun and exciting to me than winning some pointless game that tens of millions of other kids were also winning or losing all across the country. In fact, I only knew the names of a few positions in football.

  “Uh, quarterback, I guess,” I said.

  Tall Jensen laughed and shook his head.

  “That’s what they all say. Which is funny since only one kid can play that position. You don’t look like a quarterback, though—I’ll say that much. Maybe a cornerback.”

  I didn’t really know what a cornerback was, but I suddenly had this image of me wearing football equipment and huddling in a corner somewhere.

  “Well, people don’t always look like what they actually are,” I said. “Like, say, teachers. Sometimes teachers actually look like teachers, and other times they look like secret agents or spies only posing as teachers. Or vice versa. You know what I mean?”

  Tall Jensen squinted at me and then picked something out of his ear, before obnoxiously hawking up a loogie and spitting it into the grass near his feet.

  Gross.

  “What are you talking about, kid?” he said.

  The way he’d been looking at me had changed. Instead of looking at me as a potential cornerback, now he was looking at me like he might want to refer me to the state mental institution in Jamestown.

  “I just meant that sometimes people aren’t what they seem,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly.

  Then we just looked at each other for a moment. A sort of uncomfortable silence passed, during which I debated how to bring up the package specifically.

  “Yeah,” he said again. “Maybe you are more of a wide receiver type. Can you catch?”

  I nodded.

  He walked over to a mesh bag with some footballs in it and took one out. He gave me a single head nod and then threw it at me. I caught it pretty easily. Just because I wasn’t into sports didn’t mean I wasn’t coordinated enough to catch a ball.

  He held up his hands for me to throw it back.

  I hesitated. Throwing a football was another matter entirely. It was something I hadn’t really done much outside of gym class. I gripped it like I remembered and threw. It came out of my hand like a duck missing both a wing and a brain. Still, it floated its way close enough to Tall Jensen for him to jog a few steps and make the catch.

  “You want to be a quarterback?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, well, I guess I just like to deliver stuff. You know, footballs, pizzas, secret packages with sensitive information, whatever,” I said. “You know of any other way I can deliver something to someone in school other than to play quarterback?”

  Again there was a pause before he responded. It probably was taking his brain extra long to digest the weird things I was saying. Pretty soon I was going to get a different reputation than a prankster. I might start to be known as the crazy kid that people say likes to catch beetles and eat them with mayonnaise or something.

  “You’re really a weird kid. I know as a teacher I’m not supposed to say that, but . . .” Mr. Jensen finally said, finishing with a shrug.

  All right. So it wasn’t this Jensen either. I guess I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d expected him to say or do, but I had been so convinced that this was the right Jensen that I hadn’t thought much about what I’d do if he showed no reaction to my clues. His players were finally getting back from their laps, breathing hard.

  Tall Jensen blew his whistle and started screaming at the few lagging behind to hustle. And with that, our conversation was over. And so were my chances of unloading Betsy today. I sighed and headed toward the sledding hill.

  Danielle was sitting against a tree with my bag in her lap. Dillon was standing near the swallow nest holes, gazing up at them vacantly.

  “What’s his deal?” I asked as Danielle stood up and handed me my bag.

  “He thinks he sees tiny cameras or something inside the swallow nests.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  Dillon must have heard us talking because he turned around suddenly, looking pretty spooked.

  “I heard a lens motor, I swear. They’re watching us.”

  “Who are they this time?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Could be anybody, really. But I’m convinced it’s likely the government in some form. I mean, who else would waste money putting tiny cameras in swallow nests that overlook nothing but the water treatment plant across the street and that shed in the grove of trees over there? Unless there’s something secret happening here? Like weird experiments on kids’ brains. You guys ever see that old movie Disturbing Behavior?”

  Dillon watched a ton of movies. His favorites were horror, science fiction, and of course psychological thrillers with ridiculous plot twists and corrupt senators and all that stuff. Pretty much any movies with secrets, double-crosses, and inane plot twists were right up his alley. They’re probably part of what fueled his own conspiracy theories.

  “Yeah, you made us watch it with you, remember?” Danielle sai
d.

  “Oh, yeah.” Dillon finally peeled himself away from the swallow nests. He stole a few last distrustful glances back as he walked toward us.

  “Any problems with the device?” I asked.

  Danielle shook her head. “No, but I almost took it out and smashed it to pieces several times because it got so annoying listening to Dolores talk about fail-safe measures every fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh, well it’s good you didn’t. Ha-ha,” I said. My heart raced. What if she had? Would it have self-destructed right then and there? Had I been that close to inadvertently causing harm to my two best friends, not to mention the whole country?

  “Why did you say that? I thought it wasn’t real?” Danielle asked.

  “No, it’s not. I just need to return some of the parts where I bought them. Can’t do that if they’re smashed, right?”

  She nodded.

  “You named it Dolores?” I asked.

  She grinned.

  “I’ve been calling her Betsy,” I said.

  “Like after Betsy Hummel, that passive-aggressive brat in our math class?” Danielle said.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  Dillon scoffed. “You’re both terrible at naming stuff. Those are, like, cows’ names or something. I’d have called her Isis.”

  “Want to come over?” Danielle asked.

  “No, I have to take care of this thing first. See if I can get it to shut up. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “How about a ride then? You’ve missed the late bus by now,” Danielle said. “My mom is on her way.”

  “How would I explain Betsy to her?” I asked.

  “You mean Isis?” Dillon said.

  “Good point,” Danielle said, ignoring her brother’s remark. “Okay, see you tomorrow at lunch then. Let’s get out of here, this area gives me the creeps for some reason.”

  “Yeah, sounds good,” I said. We headed our separate ways.