Andrew North Blows Up the World (4 page)

It would have been pretty cool if it had, though.

Mr. Summers walked over and took the calculator from me. “I’m going to have to put it someplace safer for the weekend,” he said. He stepped out into the hall and shouted, “Excuse me, Hank!”

I heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, and a second later, Mr. Gormulka was standing in the doorway. He glared in at us. I could see his M-shaped scar from clear across the room!

“Got a confiscated item for the weekend,” said Mr. Summers. “Can you put this in Storage Room B until Monday?”

Mr. Gormulka nodded and took the calculator without a word, then disappeared into the hall. I could hear him whistling as he walked away.

“Oh man,” Tony whispered. “You’re a goner!”

I began to panic. Mr. Gormulka, being an evil spy
himself, would probably recognize that the calculator was a spy gadget. And as soon as he turned it on and saw my message, he’d know who the spy in school was!

If what Ryan said about Mr. Gormulka was even
halfway
true, I was as good as dead!

None of the other people gathered around the piano knew that the kid with the perfect hair and the really sharp suit, the one with a voice like an angel, was really Andrew “Danger” North, international superspy. As far as they knew, he was Thaddeus Arthur III, the wealthy heir to the Arthur Badminton Equipment fortune, who had arrived at the party unannounced and thrilled the other wealthy guests with his incredible musical talent.

Little did they know that when Thaddeus sang the next song, the high note in the bridge was the signal for Dave the Monkey, his trusted companion, to arrive on the scene and throw a net over Dr. Cringe, the oil executive who was secretly plotting the destruction of the United States and who was watching the whole party from the balcony, wearing a hat to cover up his famous scar. …

It was too bad I didn’t have a monkey yet. Everyone knows that monkeys are natural lock pickers, and I could sure have used some help picking the lock of Storage Room B. But even if I could get the lock open, getting the calculator out of there might not be easy. I knew that if he caught me, Mr. Gormulka might
kill
me! And even if he didn’t, I could fall into a shark tank the second I stepped inside. Or a spider tank, maybe. Those are even worse than shark tanks. He probably had the room rigged with all
kinds
of booby traps.

I was so caught up with worrying about getting the calculator back that I almost forgot about the music program coming up until we went to music class. We had music on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and gym the other days, so this would be our last class before the program the next night.

Mr. Cunyan, the music teacher, had been teaching music at the school ever since it opened. He was probably pretty young then, but now he was really, really old. He had a face that looked like a crescent moon when you saw it from the side—his chin and nose stuck out more than most people’s. He also had so many wrinkles that I was afraid one day he’d just turn inside out.

The first song we were singing as a class was called “Hello Central, Give Me No Man’s Land.” It’s what they call a “parlor song”: an old song about a dumb kid who tries to call his dad on the phone, even though his dad had died fighting in World War I. Mr. Cunyan says he used to sing it when he was a kid. If any kid went around singing a
song that depressing nowadays without a teacher making them sing it, they’d get sent to the guidance counselor for sure.

“Okay, everybody,” said Mr. Cunyan. “Now, I know that ‘Hello Central’ is a sad song, but I want you smiling really big. In the song, you’re just little children, not big children, like you are right now. Your father is off fighting in the war. Maybe he’s dead. You don’t know. But suddenly you’ve had this idea—you can call the operator, and they’ll let you talk to him on the phone! Soon, when the operator hangs up on you, you will be very sad, but during the song, you are happy!”

I smiled, but I felt kind of weird about it. The song was really depressing!

And anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Gormulka having the calculator. What if Ryan was right about him hunting for a spy in the school? How are you supposed to smile knowing that you could get blown up at any second? I tried to just focus on the music. All spies have to be able to separate their normal lives from their lives as spies, you know. But it wasn’t easy.

After “Hello Central,” we started working on the next song: a rap that Mr. Cunyan had written himself.

“Now, for this one, you don’t need to smile,” said Mr. Cunyan as we got started on it. “Because rappers don’t smile. You should look either really cool or really tough when you rap. So frown if you want to!”

I didn’t know much about rap music, really, but I was pretty sure I knew more about it than Mr. Cunyan. I mean,
the guy was about a hundred and fifty! He was probably the least funky person I had ever known in my life. The rap started out like this:

See? Even
I
know a lame rap when I hear one. Plus, I knew that Mr. Cunyan was probably having the kids at Cornersville North, where he taught on Wednesdays and Fridays, say that
they
were the coolest kids in the USA at
their
program. So the rap wasn’t even honest. It was just big talk.

“Now, don’t forget to count silently to yourself to stay on tempo!” Mr. Cunyan said. He clapped his hands in rhythm to the song and said, “One, two, three, four …”

“Hey, Mr. Cunyan,” asked Ryan, “did they have that many numbers when you were a kid?”

Mr. Cunyan smiled. Out of all our teachers, he seemed to be the least bothered by Ryan’s insults. In fact, he sort of got a kick out of them.

“One through four? Well, sure we did!” said Mr. Cunyan. “We had about twelve numbers back then. The rest of the numbers were discovered when I was in college.”

“Wow,” Ryan said. “Math must have been easy back then!”

“Nothing was easy back then,” said Mr. Cunyan. “I lived on the nineteenth floor in a one-room apartment that we shared with four other families. And there was no elevator, either. We had to walk—upstairs, both ways!”

Mr. Cunyan, in case I didn’t mention it, was a very strange person.

When we finished working on the rap, Mr. Cunyan called the three of us who were singing solos on “Kids Are Music” up to the front to practice.

“Kids Are Music,” the song I was singing a verse of by myself, was not a very cool song, either. In fact, it was pretty silly. It was all about how kids are full of music from head to toe and how singing makes them want to jump up and down. But I was glad to sing a solo. It was going to give me a chance to wear a suit onstage, and if anyone from the spy company happened to see how sharp I looked in a suit, they’d almost
have
to hire me right on the spot.

If Mr. Gormulka hadn’t killed me yet.

I sat patiently through the opening chorus, which the whole class sang, and then through the verse that Madison sang. Could I sneak into Storage Room B after the last bell rang? Maybe I could steal some raw meat from the cafeteria to distract the sharks or construct some sort of suit of armor to protect me against spiders?

But would armor even work against spiders once they caught me in their web?

Maybe I could convince Tony to come along with me and distract the sharks and spiders? It was really more of a job for a monkey. Monkeys were fast and could jump out of the spiders’ way, but Tony would probably end up getting eaten.

Suddenly, everything went quiet. The whole class was staring at me. I had been so busy thinking about getting the calculator back that I had missed the cue for my solo!

Mr. Cunyan stopped the recording of the background music. “Andrew,” he said, “pay attention, please!”

I blushed. Big time. My face probably went from peach to pink to red and straight into red-violet. You have to be pretty embarrassed to get all the way to red-violet.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just got kind of lost, I guess.”

“Okay,” said Mr. Cunyan. “Let’s try this again.”

He restarted the music, but this time when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I froze up!

Mr. Cunyan stopped the recording again. “All right,” he said. “I want to try that one more time, okay? I know you can do it, Andrew. You’ve done it plenty of times before.”

I nodded and tried again. That time, I sang it when I was supposed to, but I did a terrible job. I sang all the lines, but I think I got every note wrong. I sounded awful!

“Okay,” Mr. Cunyan said as I sat back down on the risers next to Tony. “That was fine.”

“No, it wasn’t!” said Nicole. “Andrew was really pitchy!”

I gave her a dirty look, but not
too
dirty, because I knew she was right, for once. I had really stunk!

“I’m not worried about that,” said Mr. Cunyan. “I know you can do it, Andrew. Are you nervous?”

“Maybe a little,” I said. “Not really, though.” Good spies
never
admit that they’re nervous. It’s unprofessional.

“He’s just nervous because his brother’s calculator is in Storage Room B,” said Tony.

I gave his foot a quick kick under the seats.

“I’m sure everything will be fine tomorrow,” said Mr. Cunyan. “And even if it isn’t, the important thing on this song is that you just keep smiling!”

It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I might screw it up. I had imagined bringing the whole crowd to its feet and maybe having a couple talent scouts offer me a record deal. I hadn’t been nervous before, but I was now!

After we finished practicing, Mr. Cunyan gave us a little pep talk.

“Now, I know you guys know these songs very well,” he said, “but Mrs. Wellington asked me to tell you how important it is to behave. She wants me to say that anyone who isn’t on their best behavior will be in serious trouble. I know you’ll all behave, though. I just have to tell you to, anyway, because if there’s any trouble, I’ll probably be fired. Either that or she’ll put me on cafeteria duty for the rest of my life.”

“Can you cook?” asked Ryan.

“No,” said Mr. Cunyan. “If you have to eat my cooking, you’ll all probably die. Of course, if that happens, you’ll all get your pictures in the paper for dying in school, and I’ll be in there for killing you, so at least we’ll all make the news!”

Yep. Mr. Cunyan is a pretty sick person, all right.

Would he really get fired if I messed up my solo? I didn’t want to be responsible for something like that! Between worrying about Mr. Cunyan’s job and worrying about Mr. Gormulka blowing up the world, I didn’t know how I was going to sleep that night.

“Number Twenty-seven, you’re a genius!” said Andrew “Danger” North as #27, the ultrasecretive weapons designer, showed off his latest creation. To the untrained eye, it looked like an ordinary whistle.

“Give it a try,” invited #27.

Agent North pointed the whistle at #29, the agent whose job was to fix the pinball machines at headquarters.

Zzzzzap!

A beam of light shot out at #29 and hit him square on his belt loop. The belt unbuckled itself as if by magic, and #29’s pants fell to his feet.

“Works every time!” said #27.

Cheese bags everywhere were going to have to be careful around Agent North now!

When I left school that day, I walked past Storage Room B, which was in the second-grade hall, but Mr. Gormulka was there, whistling while he mopped up the floor outside the room. That creepy kind of whistling.

Since the whole afternoon had gone by and I hadn’t heard any explosions, I wondered if maybe Ryan was wrong. Maybe Mr. Gormulka wasn’t really a spy; maybe he was just a scary-looking jerk who kept some sort of deep dark secret in Storage Room B. Maybe he wouldn’t mess with the calculator. I still had to get it back before Jack found out it was gone, of course, but at least I didn’t need to worry about getting blown up. I just had to worry about screwing up the solo.

That’s what I told myself, anyway. But all the way home, there was a little voice in the back of my head saying, “What if Ryan’s right? What if Mr. Gormulka is just waiting for prime time so he can go on TV and brag about blowing up the world?” If I’ve learned one thing from all of Dad’s spy movies, it’s that supervillains usually don’t want to blow up the world before they’ve bragged about it a little. Maybe Mr. Gormulka was just biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

As I walked home, I took a shortcut through this little tunnel that went under Tanglewood Parkway. It had a really neat echo when I practiced my solo there. The tunnel was part of a bike path that went up to the pond near the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood, but Jack told me that the tunnel was originally built as an escape route during the Civil War. They
didn’t fight any battles in our state, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t build escape routes just in case, right?

Jack used to tell me all sorts of secrets like that. There are guys who used to work for the Russians, back when they were the bad guys, living in the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood. One of them is our mailman now. And there are dead bodies buried in a house a few houses down from ours, which is on Sanders Street. Jack showed me the exact spot in the backyard where they’re buried. I held my breath as I walked past that house, since it’s bad luck to go by a cemetery (even a secret one) without holding your breath.

There’s weird stuff everywhere in Cornersville Trace. Some of it is pretty obvious, like the statue of the naked angel on a trike at the mall. But most of the weird stuff looks totally normal to people who don’t know better. Like Wayne Schneider’s house, for instance. It doesn’t look like a place where an old rock star who faked his own death would live. It just looks like a regular suburban house. Only people who are in on the secret, like me, would ever suspect that it was anything else.