Rocky Road

by Susannah McFarlane

  Lemonfizz Media

  PO Box 499

  Elwood, Victoria 3184

  www.lemonfizzmedia.com

  Scholastic Australia Pty Limited

  PO Box 579

  Gosford, NSW 2250

  ABN 11 000 614 577

  www.scholastic.com.au

  Part of the Scholastic Group

  Sydney • Auckland • New York • Toronto • London • Mexico City • New Delhi • Hong Kong • Buenos Aires • Puerto Rico

  Published by Lemonfizz Media and Scholastic Australia in 2010.

  Cover Illustrations by Dyani Stagg.

  Text, design and illustrations copyright © Lemonfizz Media 2010.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, unless specifically permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 as amended.

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group.

  It is our policy, in association with McPherson’s Printing Group, to use papers that are renewable and made efficiently from wood grown in sustainable forests, so as to minimise the environmental footprint.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Emma Jacks and EJ12 will return in BOOK 5

  Did you miss Book 1?

  Did you miss Book 2?

  Did you miss Book 3?

  Book 5 coming in June 2010

  Back Cover Material

  Emma and Elle spun themselves around Emma’s bedroom, singing and dancing to the latest Pink Shadows song. Emma was trying out a new dance move and Elle was singing passionately into a hairbrush. They had raided both Emma’s wardrobe and her dress-up box and the resulting look was a combination of crazy fairy and rock chick: black jeans, old tutu, heaps of bangles and necklaces and, as a finishing touch, sparkling tiaras. They had also been working on a dance routine and when the song reached the chorus, Emma and Elle were back to back, singing at the top of their voices.

  We’re gonna rock.

  It’s our time to shine.

  Yeah our time is now!

  Don’t say don’t,

  Don’t say wait.

  We’re gonna rock,

  We’re gonna shine!

  The song finished and they both collapsed on the beanbag, laughing and exhausted. Emma’s older brother, Bob, burst in.

  ‘Are you two okay?’ asked Bob, with a broad grin on his face. ‘Do you need medical help? Oh, I see, you were singing. Sorry, I thought you were in pain.’

  ‘Hilarious Bob, see you!’ and with that Emma shut the door, perhaps a little too loudly.

  ‘Brothers!’ said Emma. ‘Ugh!’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Elle, who had two of them, ‘but that was fun as, Em, wasn’t it? It was the best.’

  ‘Well, maybe not quite the best,’ said Emma. ‘If it was really the best, we would have been eating chocolate too.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Elle. ‘And we would be going to the Pink Shadows concert. They are playing here this week. How much fun would that be?’

  ‘Tickets sold out months ago,’ sighed Emma, ‘and even if there were some left, I’m not sure Dad would let me go.’

  ‘Mine wouldn’t either,’ replied Elle, ‘but at least we have our band practice tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes! I’d forgotten that,’ said Emma. ‘Maybe we can teach the others our dance routine. It will be great for the band. Come on, let’s do it one more time.’

  So the girls got up and did it all over again, adding a few more moves and loving every minute of it. Elle kept thinking of new bits to add to the routine and teaching Emma, who was amazed how her friend just came up with all these crazy moves.

  Emma loved music, she loved playing it, she loved listening to it and she loved dancing to it. She loved it when she was happy; she would sing at the top of her voice and bounce around the room. She liked it when she was sad; she would listen to slow songs over and over, thinking how terrible everything was, until, that is, she cheered up again. When she was angry she would strum her guitar strings so hard it hurt her fingers. Whatever her mood, Emma loved the way music could match it and how it expressed her feelings.

  She loved playing music with other people too. She and her friends had formed a band. This week it was called Squishy Music but last week it was called Beat Girls and the week before that it was, rather randomly, called We ♥ Penguins.

  The girls’ school had band instruments and students were allowed to book in and use them in the music room. The girls had a regular Monday lunchtime practice. Emma was lead guitar and Hannah was bass guitar, Elle keyboards and Isi, Isi was drums. It was the only instrument that could cope with her excitement levels. All the girls took it in turns to sing, although Emma was happy to let the others take the lead; she was content playing in the background.

  After Elle had gone home, Emma sat on her bed playing her guitar. Her puppy, Pip, and her kitten, Inky, were on either side of her. She started playing the opening bars of the Pink Shadows song but then wandered into playing a tune she was making up herself. She hummed along as one hand moved along the neck of the guitar while she picked through the strings with her other. Pip and Inky were not the most attentive audience, indeed they were fast asleep and that was just fine with Emma.

  Emma much preferred her music to be something she did by herself or, at least, something she shared with just a few friends. She didn’t really like performing or being in the spotlight. She didn’t mind the clapping and cheering that came at the end of the performance, although her mum sometimes got a bit carried away which was embarrassing, but she didn’t really enjoy performing in front of people. It was frightening. Emma would freeze, she couldn’t play a note and she forgot all the words. While her friends, especially Elle, seemed to love performing in public, Emma preferred to keep her music a secret. She liked to keep it as something which was shared with only a few special people. Which wasn’t such a surprise really. After all, she was a secret agent.

  Emma Jacks was Special Agent EJ12, field agent and expert code-cracker in the under-twelve division for the SHINE agency. SHINE uncovered and stopped the plans of the evil agency SHADOW. To do that, SHINE needed agents, code-cracking agents, and EJ12 was one of their very best, despite still being in primary school.

  Emma had been recruited to SHINE when she won a maths competition. SHINE used maths competitions to help them find people who could think well and solve problems. When Emma was introduced to SHINE, she thought they must have made a mistake—she did like maths but she didn’t think she was very good at solving problems at all. In fact, she always seemed to be having problems rather than solving them. However as EJ12, she had solved many problems, cracked lots of codes and stopped SHADOW’s evil plans. She had saved rainforests, shut down SHADOW spy bases and rescued wild animals. SHINE hadn’t made a mistake. In fact, as EJ12, Emma Jacks was one of their best agents and in the top five of the SHINE Shining Stars Spy of the Year competition.

  SHADOW also had good agents and they had them all over the world. They communicated w
ith them via secret messages. They left notes, they sent emails and texts, once they even carved a code into a tree in the middle of a rainforest. They were always coming up with new ways to give instructions to their agents so they could carry out their evil plans.

  If SHINE was going to stop SHADOW, they had to intercept their messages, crack their codes and try to keep one step ahead of them. Normally SHINE managed to keep SHADOW under control but lately they had been having problems tracking down the messages. They suspected that SHADOW must have found a new way to send out their messages but couldn’t discover what that was. It must have been music to SHADOW’s ears.

  SHADOW might have changed their tune, however, if they knew that EJ12 was about to take on the mission.

  Emma had barely entered the school gates the next morning when Hannah, Isi and Elle raced up to her. Isi, predictably, nearly knocked Emma down in her excitement.

  ‘You’ll never guess what has happened,’ cried Hannah.

  ‘It is the best thing ever!’ cried Elle.

  ‘It is so cool, so, so cool!’ shrieked Isi.

  ‘What?’ asked Emma. ‘What’s happened?’

  And then everyone started talking at once.

  ‘It’s a competition,’ said Elle.

  ‘A music competition!’ shrieked Isi, once again getting herself rather worked up.

  ‘We’ve Got Talent,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Well, we are quite good,’ began Emma wondering why Hannah would suddenly declare how good she thought they were.

  ‘No, We’ve Got Talent is the competition! You know, like on TV. The school is having its own talent competition and we have to enter our band. We get to perform in front of the whole school,’ explained Hannah.

  ‘And our families are invited too,’ said Elle. ‘How good is that? It will be like we’re a real band, at a real concert.’

  Emma looked at her friends. Hannah, Elle and Isi were beaming because they were all so excited at the thought of performing at the competition but Emma was worried. She loved playing with her friends but the idea of performing in front of lots of people scared her. What if she messed up the performance? What if she let her friends down? Emma still remembered the Kinder concert where everyone was singing, ‘If you are happy and you know it, clap your hands’. Everyone except Emma, who was not happy and was not clapping her hands. She had just stood there, mouth open, eyes wide with fright, staring out into the audience, not singing a word, and then bursting into tears, ruining the performance. She felt that she’d let everyone down then. Would she do it again at the talent competition? She would hate to let down her friends.

  ‘It’s a fantastic idea, don’t you think Em?’ said Isi.

  ‘Maybe we can wear the costumes we created at your house,’ said Elle. ‘We will rock!’

  ‘Yeah, it’s great,’ said Emma trying, rather unsuccessfully, to sound as thrilled as the others. But it was no good, she had to tell her friends. ‘Except what if I can’t do it?’ said Emma.

  ‘Do what?’ asked Elle.

  ‘The competition,’ replied Emma.

  ‘Why not, are you going to be away?’ asked Hannah looking confused.

  ‘No, I’ll be here but what if I can’t perform, you know, on stage in front of everyone. You guys are all so excited about it but I’m nervous that I’ll get stage fright and freeze and ruin it for us,’ said Emma, her eyes stinging a bit. Oh no, she thought, I am not going to cry as well, am I? What a baby!

  Elle must have sensed her friend was getting a little upset because she put her arm around Emma.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you be able to do it, Em?’ asked Elle. ‘We play all the time and you love it.’ ‘And you’re great,’ said Hannah.

  ‘Yes, but then it’s just us. This is in front of the whole school,’ said Emma.

  ‘And all our families,’ piped in Isi.

  ‘Isi, that’s not helpful,’ said Hannah.

  ‘But Isi is right, there will be lots of people. What if I just freeze and mess everything up?’

  ‘But it’s no different from gym competition, is it? You don’t worry about people watching then,’ said Elle.

  That was a good point and, typical of Elle to be so logical, but somehow it was just different. Emma couldn’t explain why.

  The school bell went and the girls bounced into their classrooms, still bubbling with excitement. Only Emma was a little less bouncy than the rest of them.

  At lunchtime, everyone was still talking about the talent competition. The entire school was completely obsessed with it and almost everybody was going to be performing. In the playground, everyone was arranging groups and talking about what they might do. Some kids were going to dance, some sing a song and some were going to do magic tricks. One boy was going to burp the entire alphabet.

  ‘That is so gross,’ announced Nema who had just flounced by. ‘Of course I don’t know why anyone else is bothering, or at least bothering to try winning the competition. I think we already know who is going to win.’

  ‘Squishy Music!’ cried Isi.

  ‘Oh really,’ said Nema, ‘I don’t think so, Dizzy.’

  Dizzy was one of Isi’s nicknames; she got it because she was always running around so much that people thought she must get dizzy. Dizzy Isi. It was funny when her family and friends used it but Nema made it sound mean. Isi glared at Nema, who glared back.

  ‘Whatever,’ Nema said, ‘my band will just be too, too good, too pretty, too awesome. We should probably be going on the competition on television, not just this silly little school one.’

  ‘What’s your band called, Nema?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘Oh, I thought you knew, I thought everyone knew—Nema and the Nemettes.’ And with that, Nema flicked her hair and flounced off again.

  ‘Aarrgghh, that is so, so...’ Emma couldn’t find the words.

  ‘So Nema,’ suggested Hannah.

  ‘Exactly,’ laughed Emma. ‘Come on guys, let’s do our band practice.’

  ‘Her band should be called Nema and the Nasties,’ suggested Elle as they walked into the music room for their practice.

  ‘Yes! Or how about Nema and the Hair Flickers?’ said Isi, giggling.

  Once in the music room, the girls quickly got their instruments set up and were soon ready to play.

  ‘So, what song should we play?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘How about “Rock ’n’ Shine”,’ suggested Elle. ‘We all love that one, don’t we?’

  Everyone agreed and the girls began to play. Isi began with the really solid drumbeat that started the song, and then Hannah joined in on the bass guitar, building on the beat, holding the song together, solidly in the background. Just like Hannah really. Elle came in next on the keyboards, often adding new bits as she went along. Finally, Emma started in on lead guitar with the song tune. The girls all turned and smiled at each other as they played. It was such a buzz how the music all came together. They listened to each other and let each instrument and girl do its thing. Together they were fabulous. They played the song through to the end almost perfectly.

  ‘That was great,’ said Isi. ‘Who do you think should sing this one?’

  ‘Emma,’ said Elle. ‘She has the best voice for this song.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so Elle,’ said Emma. ‘You do it. You’re the best performer by far.’

  ‘No, Elle’s right, Em,’ said Hannah. ‘You should sing it. It’s your favourite song and it seems just perfect for you.’

  Emma gulped. Things were getting worse. Now she wasn’t just performing, her friends wanted her to be the lead singer. It was true she loved the song but that was singing it into her hairbrush, not on stage. Emma didn’t think she could do that. It would be like the Kinder concert all over again. She wouldn’t shine, she would just be hopelessly shy and mess everything up. And ruin her friends’ chance in the competition. Emma felt her eyes starting to sting. Again. Gee whizz, lemonfizz, this is getting embarrassing, thought Emma.

  Piinngg!

&nbs
p; Saved by the phone! It was a mission alert from SHINE.

  ‘Hey I have to go,’ said Emma looking up from her phone, ‘but don’t wait for me. I may be a while.’

  Emma’s friends just smiled at Emma and at each other—they were used to her suddenly leaving. It was just one of those things that happened when your friend was a secret agent.

  Emma headed towards the girls’ toilets. She had already been there once this lunchtime and hoped no one would notice that she was going again. She didn’t want anyone to get suspicious. Outside the toilet block Nema and her friends were playing jump rope. They had been there all lunchtime. Emma was hoping she could just slip by without them noticing, without them commenting. She couldn’t.

  ‘Hey, weren’t you just here?’ said Nema.

  ‘Oh, right, you know, I have to go to the toilet,’ mumbled Emma.

  ‘But you’ve just been,’ said Nema. ‘Got a problem?’ Nema seemed to like it when people had problems.

  Yes, you, thought Emma but instead answered, ‘Well, you know, I have drunk a lot of water, a lot of water. It’s really good for you, water, you should try it Nema,’ as she was really, really wishing that her missions didn’t have to start in the girls’ toilets.

  But they did. SHINE needed reliable access points for their Mission Tube. The Mission Tube was a secret transport system, a network of underground tunnels that carried agents to SHINE HQ and other locations. The access points had to be somewhere that the agent often went and somewhere that it would be reasonable and easy to go to without attracting attention. When you thought about it like that, the girls’ toilets at Emma’s school made perfect sense—but it didn’t make it any less embarrassing.

  Emma walked into the toilets and checked to see if there was anyone else there. There wasn’t, thank goodness. With the room clear, she headed for the last cubicle on the right and pushed the door open. She went in and locked the door. Emma put down the toilet seat, and sat down and flipped open the toilet roll holder. There, if you knew what to look for, was, besides toilet paper, the SHINE Mission Tube access socket. Emma pushed her phone into the socket and waited. There was a beep then Emma entered her pin code and removed her phone. Another beep and then the usual message flashed up on her phone screen.