Andrew North Blows Up the World

Secret Agent Andrew “Danger” North moved like a cat through the Forbidden Zone. He ducked around piles of dirty clothes, hopped over stacks of used paper plates, and sifted through garbage. He needed every last one of his spy skills to find anything in a mess like this. All the years he’d kept his own room messy paid off regularly in his line of work.

But, like all good spies, even though his room was messy, his hair was perfect.

Beneath the papers that were piled in the corner, he saw it: the TC-99. To most people, it just looked like a really big calculator. But Agent North knew better. The TC-99 was a super-powerful spy gadget. He didn’t know for sure what it could do, but he believed it could be used to shoot laser beams, send messages to headquarters, and, most likely, blow things up. North was determined to discover its secrets.

He gazed at the machine, with its big screen and strange buttons. Buttons like VARS, COS, and
Y=
. What could they possibly mean? Clearly it was some sort of spy code, but which of them would blow stuff up?

He would have to be careful, of course, but Agent North had never blown anything up that didn’t deserve to get blown up. He dropped the TC-99 into his backpack and slipped out of the Forbidden Zone. The owner of the TC-99 would never even know he had been there …

Lying to Tony Zunker is probably the most popular sport in my whole school.

The day before the music program, someone told him he was on pace to break the world’s record for Most Times Ever Getting Up to Sharpen Your Pencil in One Month. And he believed it.

I was pretending to pay attention in math class—but was really peeking into my desk to look at my brother’s calculator—when Tony Zunker got up to sharpen his pencil again.

“How many are you up to today?” I whispered as he passed by.

“Twelve,” he said.

Poor Tony. Lying to him isn’t really much of a sport, if you ask me. He believes everything he hears!

Personally, I only believe stuff when I’ve thought it over and decided that it really makes sense. Like when my brother, Jack, told me that our dad is a spy and that he was training to be one, too, I didn’t believe him at first. Who would? It sounded pretty crazy.

But then I started thinking about Dad. Sure, he has a huge collection of spy movies, and he loves to watch them with me and Jack, but lots of dads have those. What really tipped me off was his job. He tells people—including me— that he’s an insurance salesman. But he can’t even talk me into eating peas! How could he talk people into buying life insurance? Something strange was going on, all right.

That was when I started thinking about Dad’s spy movies.
In those movies, all the spies have a fake job to tell normal people about—something that sounds really boring, like insurance salesman. That way, when the spy tells people he sells insurance, they don’t say, “Oh, neat! Tell me more!” They just change the subject, because they’re afraid that if they don’t, he’ll start trying to sell insurance to
them
or something, and they’ll be bored to death.

I was beginning to feel like I was really on to something. But how could I be sure? I mean, clearly, Dad has to be really secretive about this whole thing, so he’d never admit it to me out loud. And he’s really good about keeping all his spy gear hidden away—Jack says it’s all hidden in a big secret chamber under our basement, and I’ve never been able to find it.

But one day, when I was digging through his desk, I found something that proved Dad is a spy! It was a bunch of old rings that had all these letters and numbers all over them. A whole stash of
secret decoder rings!

I asked Dad what they were, just to see how he’d cover it up. He chuckled and said, “Oh, that’s just my collection of old rings from cereal boxes.”

Riiiiight
. I knew the truth. Jack taught me this little bit of spy knowledge: when people chuckle before they say something like that, it usually means they’re lying. Those rings were no cereal-box prizes. They were proof that I come from a family of spies!

Really, with a name like Andrew North, I was
born
to be a spy. It’s a perfect name for a spy, or even a movie star, or the
president, for that matter. It has that kind of ring to it. If Tony Zunker ever becomes a spy, he’ll probably have to change his name, because no bad guys will get nervous when they hear that a guy named Tony Zunker is coming after them. But when they hear that Andrew “Danger” North is on their case, they’ll know their days are numbered.

I’m pretty sure Jack got called up to the pros when he turned thirteen. Maybe it was a birthday present. Ever since then, he’s spent all his time just hanging around in his room, acting really secretive. He stopped teaching me spy tricks and telling me weird secrets about our town, Cornersville Trace. I guess he’s not allowed to now.

He told me a lot of weird secrets before. Like how Johnny Christmas, the rock star who died in 1979, isn’t really dead at all. What
really
happened is that he got addicted to hot dogs and had to fake his death, because he was too embarrassed to go onstage when he couldn’t fit into his jumpsuits anymore. He changed his name to Wayne Schneider and moved to the suburbs, where they’d never find him. He lives down the street from us now. It’s awesome to know a secret like that. And I know it’s true, too, because every time I walk past Mr. Schneider’s house, I swear I smell mustard.

Mr. Summers, my teacher, didn’t seem to notice that Tony was sharpening his pencil for the twelfth time that morning. Mr. Summers is a nice guy, but he’d never make it as a spy.

He
did
notice that I wasn’t taking notes about math, though.

“Andrew?” he said, looking down at my paper. “Are you paying attention?”

“Sure I am!” I said.

“Well, make sure I see numbers on your page,” Mr. Summers warned me.

See, he’s a nice guy. He even lets us wear hats in class. He’s young—younger than my parents, even. But I think that because he’s so young, he hasn’t learned that some of us just have too much on our minds to worry about division every day.

I really
was
taking notes, too. They just weren’t about
math
. I was making notes on how I could get enough money to buy a pet monkey. All good spies have a sidekick, and monkeys make perfect assistants. They’re really easy to train. But getting the money to buy a monkey wasn’t going to be easy. Monkeys aren’t cheap. Not anymore.

I also had notes on what to name the monkey once I got him. Some people think it’s really cute to give monkeys a name like Bubbles or Mr. Chee Chee, but I’d give mine a regular name, like Dave. That would show the monkey that I respected him right away.

I knew I should probably get going on my long division, but I was having a hard time concentrating on anything that day. It was the day before the music program. That’s when we have to sing a few of the songs we learn in Mr. Cunyan’s music class in front of our parents. And this year, for the first time, I was going to be singing a solo. It’s hard to concentrate on math with something like
that
on your mind.

Two minutes later, Tony got up again. This time, Mr. Summers noticed.

“Tony?” asked Mr. Summers. “Didn’t you
just
get up to sharpen your pencil?”

“It’s, uh, not as sharp as I like it to be,” said Tony. “I don’t like writing with a dull pencil.”

Big mistake! Any spy would tell you that you have to create a believable lie if you want to get away with lurking around where you shouldn’t be lurking. For example, if you want to get away with taking bonus trips to the pencil sharpener, you have to break the lead in your pencil first. No teacher can stop you from sharpening your pencil if the lead is broken. But Tony’s just about as far from a spy as you can get. He’s the worst liar in school. I guess that’s because everyone else got good at it by lying to
him
, and he doesn’t have anyone to practice on himself.

“He’s gotten up about ten times, Mr. Summers,” said Nicole Washington. “He’s going for the world’s record!”

Nicole Washington is sort of the boss of all the girls in class. She’s one of those people who have never had a cavity, and she brags about it every chance she gets. If she were in one of my dad’s spy movies, she would be the cop trying to foil the spy’s mission at every turn so she could save the world herself. She
lives
to tell on people.

“Take your seat, Tony,” said Mr. Summers. “There is no world record for sharpening your pencil.”

“Yes there is!” said Tony.

If Tony kept talking like this, he was going to get in
trouble. I had to help. He was sort of a dork, but he was also one of my friends. Good spies take care of their friends.

“It’s true, Mr. Summers,” I said. “The world record for most times getting up to sharpen your pencil is four hundred forty in one month.”

“Oh, really, Andrew?” said Mr. Summers. “Who in the world did that?”

“A guy named Mark Lane,” I lied. “He was from Kenosha, Wisconsin. I think it was back in 1989.”

Any time you need to name a city on the spot, you can count on Kenosha, Wisconsin. It can make almost any lie sound real. Dubuque, Iowa, works, too. Those are spy tricks that Jack taught me. He’s a real genius.

“He’s lying,” said Neil Gorblisch.

I turned around and scowled at Neil, hoping Mr. Summers didn’t ask anyone else’s opinion. I knew most people would take Neil’s side, not mine, because they knew that if they didn’t, Neil might pound on them at recess.

Neil is just a plain old bully.
If he
were in one of my dad’s spy movies, he would be the guy who the head villain sends out to do all his dirty work. The
real
villains never beat up anyone themselves—they hire goons like Neil.

Luckily for me and Tony, Mr. Summers ignored Neil.

“Well, I’m sure that Mark Lane’s teacher must have been very proud of him,” he said. “And I am, too, because he’s just given me a great idea for a math problem!”

Mr. Summers is a math nut. If the principal, Mrs. Wellington, got on the intercom and said, “Attention,
students: the world will end in five minutes,” he would probably say, “Oh boy! Let’s figure out how many seconds there are in five minutes!” That’s how crazy he is about math.

He pulled out a blue marker and wrote “440” on the marker board.

“Now,” he said, “how many days are we in school each month?”

“About twenty,” said Nicole, as if Mr. Summers didn’t already know that.

Being a teacher must be really boring. You have to spend all day asking questions that you already know the answers to. Plus, you never get to jump out of airplanes. And only science teachers ever get to blow things up.

“Right. We’ll go with twenty,” Mr. Summers said, writing that on the board, too. “So, if we’re in class twenty days per month, how do we find out how many times per day Mark Lane must have sharpened his pencil?”

“It’s four hundred forty divided by twenty,” said Nicole. “And the answer is twenty-two.”

“That’s right!” said Mr. Summers. “Old Mark must have gotten up to sharpen his pencil twenty-two times every day that month. Very good, Nicole! Now, let’s see how many times per hour that is. This is gonna be a tough one! We’re in school six and a half hours per day, so it’s twenty-two divided by six and a half. This is really at
least
fifth-grade math, so pay attention!”

Mr. Summers spent the next twenty minutes turning my lie into math problems. After we figured out that Mark had
sharpened his pencil 3.38 times per hour, we figured out that that was once every 17.75 minutes. Then someone pointed out that we were only actually in
class
four and a half hours a day, since lunch, recess, and stuff like music, gym, and art took up two hours per day, and Mr. Summers started all over again. He looked like he was having the time of his life. He even asked Tony to sharpen his pencil a few more times so we could find out how many times you have to sharpen a pencil before it’s worn down to a nub. Then he used division and found out how many pencils Mark Lane must have gone through.