But I never even got the chance to fight back against Gus, because the lunchroom aides were closing in on us now. Which, to be honest, I was pretty happy about. Three teachers swooped in and grabbed both Gus and me and then marched us out of the cafeteria while the fourth teacher tried to calm the cheering students and herd them back to their lunch tables.
Gus and I were taken to Mr. Gomez’s office. Or, his former office—it wasn’t his office anymore. The nameplate on the door had been replaced with a new one:
MS. JAYNE PULLMAN
Ms. Pullman was behind the desk beyond the open door as we were led to the two chairs just outside the office. She sat there calmly and smiled at me as we passed. There was something about that smile that rattled my bones. I tried to shake it off as I took a seat outside. Gus was led directly into her office.
As I sat there and waited for my turn, all I could think about was that smile. It was a smile that told me all at once that she knew everything about me, had some sort of evil plan already in place, and that there was nothing I could do to get in her way.
It was the exact same smile I’d seen on Medlock’s face.
CHAPTER 18
A FRESH START
I DIDN’T HEAR ANY SCREAMING OR SHOUTING AS I SAT OUTSIDE Ms. Pullman’s office. In fact, I heard nothing at all coming from behind the wooden door. If it had still been Mr. Gomez’s office, I’d have heard plenty of sputtering and shouting. Gomez was a classic screamer.
The attendance secretary looked at me as I fidgeted nervously. “Back again already, Carson?”
I shrugged. I had gotten to know Mrs. Bradshaw pretty well over the past year and a half. After all, I had probably spent a good third of my time at this school in this office. She was a nice lady, and I don’t think she disliked me as much as most of the other adults at the school did.
“Well, don’t worry.” She smiled. “Ms. Pullman is real nice. I think you’ll find her to be quite . . . different. She’s even already approved a plan to get us a heated parking lot that Mr. Gomez had been rejecting for years. How neat is that?”
“Oh, yeah, sounds cool,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “Thanks, Mrs. Bradshaw.”
What she couldn’t possibly know was that I wasn’t nervous about whatever punishment was headed my way. I was nervous because it was a distinct possibility that Ms. Pullman was a diabolical secret agent working for one of the most evil criminal masterminds the world had ever known.
But there wasn’t really enough time to explain that properly to the attendance secretary.
A short time later, the door opened and Gus walked out, and I saw something I never thought I ever would. Gus was crying. Tears ran down his cheeks and he wiped at them sheepishly. How in the world had Ms. Pullman managed that?
He looked at me and then looked away quickly. He turned back to Ms. Pullman.
“Thank you again,” he said.
She just smiled and waved and then he bolted out of the administration office area before I could say anything to him. I was almost too stunned to notice that Ms. Pullman was beckoning for me to head inside her office now. Slowly, I stood up and followed her in.
“Close the door please,” she said.
Her voice was soft and soothing. Like, you could listen to a recording of her reading aloud at night and it’d lull you into the most peaceful sleep of your life. It also made you want to obey every word without question.
I closed the door and then sat down across from her.
She’d already made a few decorative changes. It seemed brighter and somehow larger than the tiny death trap that had been Mr. Gomez’s office. She’d even gotten the broken window fixed. For several weeks under Mr. Gomez, it had been covered by cardboard and duct tape. And now after less than a day in charge, she already had it replaced with a real new window. A pot of white lilies sat on the corner of the desk, enjoying the sunshine. I tried to focus on the flowers rather than look into the face of my new enemy.
Ms. Pullman was probably around my mom’s age. She was pretty and had large eyes and never seemed to blink. She smiled at me patiently. I attempted to smile back.
“So,” she began, “Gus tells me you two had a sort of misunderstanding today?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
It was such an unusual thing to hear from the person sitting across from me in this office that I almost didn’t understand her words at all. Mr. Gomez had never, ever asked for my side of the story first. He usually started things out with shouting and wild, paranoid accusations.
After taking a few breaths to calm my nerves, I explained to Ms. Pullman that I had been following Gus. I told her I was convinced that he had stolen a textbook of mine but was too afraid to confront him. Then later, I found it in the messy depths of my locker. At lunch, I had merely been daydreaming and was looking the wrong way and he thought I was staring at him. A small skirmish had ensued.
“Well, that more or less matches the account he gave me,” she said. “Do you wish to add anything else before I officially close this matter?”
I froze for a moment. Was this over? Just like that? What was her game? I was baffled. I just shook my head.
“Great!” she said brightly, as if we were discussing cute puppies instead of a school fight. “Well, I see no need to issue any detention in this matter. At least for you—Gus will be serving some detention, of course. Punching another student will not go unpunished. But, ultimately, Gus assured me that the whole thing is over now. Unless you feel otherwise?”
“Uh, no, ma’am,” I said.
“Wonderful! Now, you and I have another matter to address.”
My mind reeled. Was she going to tell me she knew who I was and then pull out a silenced pistol and plant a bullet in my forehead? I grabbed the arms of the chair and tensed, waiting for the possible arrival of a bullet. Would I feel it, even for a second? Or would there just suddenly be nothing?
“I’ve reviewed Mr. Gomez’s file on you,” she said. “It’s quite extensive. Impressive, almost. The sheer size of it, and also the detail with which he documented your activities. That said, I’m not entirely certain that it was very fair or healthy or warranted for Mr. Gomez to obsess over you the way he did.”
“Ms. Pullman, you don’t underst— Wait, what?” I said.
“That’s right,” she said, smiling. “I think he had you pegged as a bad apple from the get-go. But there isn’t much in the way of hard evidence linking you to any of the incidents he discusses. It reads more like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, to be honest with you. It appears as if he never really treated you fairly. Do you not agree?”
“No . . . I mean, yes,” I said, not sure what to say. The fact was, I did agree . . . somewhat. He never had any evidence, but to his credit, I usually was the guilty party. Somehow I suspected Ms. Pullman knew that as well, in spite of what she was telling me. Not that I was going to admit to any of that. “Yeah, I suppose it wasn’t fair.”
Ms. Pullman nodded. Then she picked up my massive file from her desk, it was at least five inches thick. She dropped it into the trash can next to her. It landed inside the metal bin with a thump that almost sounded like a gunshot. I flinched.
“I want you to know that as of this moment, you have a clean slate,” she said. “I want to give you a fair chance. Trust can be a very powerful and empowering thing. But, in order for it to work, it has to go both ways completely. I will always be honest and straight with you, and give you the benefit of the doubt in any future run-ins you and I might have. But I need the same in return. It’s vital if we’re going to make this work. You strike me as a good person, Carson, and I have a feeling you mean well. But if any evidence comes to my attention that you, say, let goats loose inside this school, and you lie about it, then whatever trust we have built will be destroyed, and you will find me much more unpleasant to deal with than Mr. Gomez. Do I make myself clear?”
Her tone was still mostly pleasant, but I got
the sense that Ms. Pullman didn’t deal in lies and empty threats. Once again, I’d been struck dumb.
“Yes, it’s clear,” I said. “Thank you for the second chance.”
“It’s not a second chance,” she said. “In my eyes, you’ve yet to do anything wrong. But let’s not ever get to second and third chances, right?”
I nodded.
“Okay, dismissed, Carson,” she said.
I got up to leave, more confused than ever. She didn’t seem at all like an evil enemy secret agent. Maybe Director Isadoris’s hunch was completely off? Maybe her background check was squeaky clean because she actually was squeaky clean? But if that were the case, then why would Medlock go through all the trouble to have Mr. Gomez removed from school?
As I walked to my next class, I realized that the only way I would get an answer to that question was to find out who had framed Gomez. And so I turned my focus back to my first mission objective: locating the enemy spy.
Gus Agriopoulas was officially crossed off. And so it was probably time to go back to the first name on my list, Mr. Lepsing. I had to find a way to get inside his supply closet and see what he was really hiding in there.
CHAPTER 19
GOOD LOCKS HIDE GOOD TREASURES IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOLD
I KNEW MR. LEPSING WOULDN’T BE IN HIS CLASSROOM AFTER school. He was an odd guy, sure, but he was also somewhat predictable. Every kid knew he had a routine that he always stuck to: Every day after school, he went out to his small car parked across the street, off school property, and smoked a pipe. He smoked a really long pipe with a small bowl at the end, kind of like the one Gandalf uses. It looked kind of ridiculous. Once the first kid in school saw him out there years ago, the word spread quickly. Now every kid in the school had taken the time to go see him smoking his wizard pipe by the end of their sixth-grade year—it was sort of like a rite of passage at Erik Hill Middle School.
Then he’d come back in and grade papers or do other work until 5:00 p.m. All teachers pretty much stayed at school until 5:00 p.m. It might have been some sort of rule. Not that all of the teachers followed it all the time. But, either way, I knew that from 3:16 p.m. to around 3:39 p.m., Mr. Lepsing would be in his car, smoking his weird pipe.
Danielle had agreed to help me make sure the hallway stayed clear by causing some sort of commotion around the corner. As I lurked near Mr. Lepsing’s classroom, I heard a few kids talking to each other as they hurried her way.
“Dude, some girl is giving away prewritten essay papers and book reports.”
“Hurry up,” the other kid said as they rushed past. “I got one due in a few days.”
And then I was alone in the hallway. For now. Her distraction probably had an expiration date. Most things did.
Mr. Lepsing’s classroom was locked, but my skills picking standard locks were getting pretty sharp. It didn’t take very long to get inside. I closed the door behind me and kept the lights off.
I moved toward his supply closet. Up until this point, picking a school lock had never been a problem. Every interior door in the school had the same type of lock: a simple four-pin tumbler lock, which is both common and easy to pick.
But Mr. Lepsing had installed a custom lock on his supply closet door to help conceal whatever was hidden inside. It looked slightly different from all the other standard school doorknobs. I inspected it. Just because it was a different model didn’t mean it would be any harder to pick.
I got to work and quickly identified that one of the pins was a spool pin, which can make picking it a lot harder, especially for a relative beginner like me. Agent Nineteen had given me a little bit of spool-pin training, but not nearly as much as with standard tumbler pins.
I cursed even though nobody was around to hear me.
The trick was to release all tension on the lock in order to get the spool pin past the shear line. I gave it a few tries. They were unsuccessful. I silently wished that I had an Agency fruit roll-up with me. Not for a snack, of course, but for blowing this lock up. But that wasn’t going to happen now. They’d made those things specifically for me and I didn’t even know if they had any left, let alone how I could get my hands on one. There weren’t any in the stash of other gadgets I’d gotten from Chum Bucket’s storeroom the day before either.
I closed my eyes and tried to envision the inside of the lock. It was pickable. I knew that because I’d seen Agent Nineteen do it a few times back during my initial training. I’d also watched YouTube videos of people doing it. If some yokel who had time to post videos on the internet could do it, then so could I—I was a secret agent, with a codename and everything.
A few deep breaths later, I was back at work. I tried it again and again with varying levels of tension and angles, but just couldn’t get the pin to move. If only I had some graphite powder to loosen everything up . . . sometimes that’s all a tricky lock needed.
That’s when it hit me.
Everything Mr. Lepsing had was old. Which mean he likely still had good old-fashioned graphite pencils in his desk. I dug around in the top drawer and found a few ancient, yellow number two pencils.
I scraped one rapidly across the wood grain of his desk for five or six seconds until two parallel lines of graphite powder developed. I used a piece of paper to gently scrape them onto a notecard. Then I made a single crease in the notecard down the center, creating an upside-down tent so all the graphite powder collected in the valley of the fold.
I slowly moved back toward the door, cradling the notecard in front of me like a tiny cup of radioactive waste. I steadied my hands as I positioned the front of the crease right next to the lock opening.
A very slight inhale was followed by a gentle exhale into the notecard’s valley. I watched as most of the graphite powder disappeared into the key slot. I was still shocked it had worked, when, a short time later, I heard a click as I got all of the pins to finally slide into place. I grabbed the doorknob, careful not to move my equipment inside the lock, and turned. My heart leaped at the unlikely success of my makeshift lock lubricant.
Mr. Lepsing’s supply closet door swung open in front of me, and then I was face-to-face with darkness.
CHAPTER 20
LARGER THAN LIFE
I WAS ALMOST AFRAID TO SWITCH ON THE LIGHT, AFRAID OF WHAT I might find. So many rumors, so much speculation. What if one of them ended up being true? I knew there was only one way I would find out.
After feeling around on the wall for a few seconds, I located the light switch and flipped it up.
As it turned out, one of Dillon’s theories had been right yet again. I found myself staring at a small table covered in little sculptures. They appeared to be made of wax, and right away I had a feeling that they were earwax, as evidenced by the little wispy gray hairs sticking out of some of the figures.
The wax sculptures were mostly unidentifiable, but several of them appeared to be people dancing in groups of five, each a few inches tall. Even at that size, it was hard to mistake the tiny wax microphones in their hands. How in the world could Dillon have possibly guessed that? Earwax sculptures of boy bands?
I stood there and stared, completely dumbfounded. I didn’t know whether to be amazed, disgusted, relieved, or disappointed—disappointed that Mr. Lepsing wasn’t the spy, putting me right back to square one. Then again, I was now able to cross another name off the list, which was progress at least.
Turns out, Mr. Lepsing was so secretive because he was a legitimate weirdo with legitimately weird habits to hide. I switched off the light and closed the supply closet door behind me, and snuck back out into the hallway.
Just as I was turning to head toward the nearest school exit, I saw a dark figure running from a room at the end of the hall. It was someone in a black hooded sweatshirt, just a dark blur as they ran out the emergency exit.
The room they had just come from was Agent Nineteen’s music room.
It took me a few seconds to act, but eventually I unplanted my feet and ran toward t
he room. Whoever the figure had been hadn’t even bothered to cover their tracks. They’d left both the music room door and Agent Nineteen’s office door wide open.
The office was completely trashed. Papers were scattered everywhere, all the equipment broken and smashed. The piano was even partially dismantled. I knew right away that the dark, hooded figure was my enemy spy. And I also suspected that I knew exactly what they’d been doing in there. They’d been looking for the entrance into Agent Nineteen’s secret back office. Thankfully, the intruder had clearly failed. I turned to leave, to go running out the same emergency exit to see if I could pick up the trail.
But when I spun around, I found myself looking directly into Ms. Pullman’s unsmiling face.
CHAPTER 21
GROWING GILLS
“I KNOW IT LOOKS BAD, BUT IT WASN’T ME,” I PLEADED.
We were back in Ms. Pullman’s office. Neither of us had spoken during the long walk there from Agent Nineteen’s music room.
“Why were you even in that area of the school at all?” Ms. Pullman asked.
Her demeanor was different from the way it had been after the fight at lunch, but it was still calm. Controlled. Not at all the sputtering, shouting mess that Gomez always turned into when dealing with a disciplinary situation. It was sort of unnerving in an odd way. Like when your mom, instead of getting mad over something you did, just told you she was disappointed in you.
I wasn’t sure how to answer Ms. Pullman’s question. So I shook my head. Like an amateur. Sitting there shaking my head, opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish, was basically as good as an admission of guilt. That was me right then: Carson with gills and beady unblinking eyes, struggling to breathe.
The ultimate question was: If she actually was in cahoots with Medlock, then she knew darn well it wasn’t me who had ransacked the office, and if that were the case, then why had she gone down there at all, considering that a spy was trying to complete a mission there? More and more, the signs pointed toward Ms. Pullman being innocent, which raised the possibility that Mr. Gomez hadn’t been framed at all.
Crisis Zero Page 7
