Codename Zero

by Chris Rylander

  Anyway, later that week I had the modified lyrics distributed around the school so kids could learn them. For the next several assemblies every kid in the school sang the new lyrics instead of the real ones. Now, they don’t even play our school song at assemblies anymore. But we all still sing “Beneath a Mist o’ Corndog” at every sporting event. Although Gomez would never admit it, I think it actually gave kids more school spirit than the old lyrics did. Besides, the old lyrics were the same as when my parents went to school here.

  As the bus finished the fourth verse of the song and everyone laughed, I realized that I had been loud enough so that even I hadn’t heard Betsy give her most recent time update. It had worked. Of course, the bus would be the easy part. The bus driver didn’t much care what we did as long as we stayed seated. Hiding Betsy’s constant updates during school would be a whole different challenge.

  “Why you sing song on bus?” Olek asked.

  “A school custom,” I said.

  He made a face like we were all crazy. “Ah,” he said. “Okay. In my country we sometimes sing, too.”

  I nodded. “Yeah? Cool.”

  “Yes, but our songs much better. In our country we mostly sing Jimmy Buffett song.”

  “Who’s Jimmy Buffett?” I asked.

  Olek’s jaw hung open. He looked as if I’d just told him I didn’t know who Abraham Lincoln was or something.

  “You not know Jimmy Buffett?”

  “No, should I?”

  “Yes, of course, he is like American cowboy plus hippie on desert island. In my country he is hero. Jimmy Buffett song replace our national anthem and he has statue in Logan Square in our capital city.”

  “Wow, you guys really love this Jimmy Buffett dude. He must be pretty good.”

  Olek nodded wildly. “Yes! Yes, he is like . . . like musical diamond sauce!”

  I looked at him and even in spite of the device under my seat I laughed and then clapped Olek on the shoulder to make sure he knew I wasn’t laughing at him. After a few seconds, he grinned and then started laughing himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  DILLON WAS WAITING FOR ME AT MY LOCKER WHEN I GOT TO school.

  “That was so hilarious yesterday,” he said with a grin. “You were right about YouTube. There was one video posted that shows Mrs. Kingsley tripping over one of the goats and doing a full somersault. Her long jean skirt flipped all the way over her head and you could see her old lady granny underwear! It was so gross! But funny.”

  I laughed, but I was barely listening. I glanced at my watch. I only had ninety-seven seconds before the next update.

  “Hey! Last night, I think I saw a bearded lady smuggling a cache of weapons into the Burger King near my house. How weird is that? You want to come check it out with me after school?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said. He usually gave up pretty easily since I basically never went with him to investigate his crazy theories.

  “What’s wrong? You’re acting weird.”

  “Nothing, just distracted by this test I have in a little bit,” I said.

  “What? Since when have you ever been worried about a test?” Dillon asked, clearly not buying my terrible lie. “Did it finally happen? I knew it! I knew it was inevitable. They finally got to you, didn’t they?”

  “Not now, Dillon,” I groaned. “Of course they didn’t get to me. Look, I gotta go.”

  I shoved my bag into my locker and started walking away, desperate to get him away from Betsy’s countdown. He followed me, but then stopped when he heard Betsy’s voice drifting out of my locker, much louder than I would have expected. The acoustics inside the small metal locker were apparently concert-worthy.

  “You now have thirty-seven hours and thirty minutes to initiate fail-safe measures before self-destruction.”

  Dillon looked at me, his mouth gaping open. “What was that?”

  Well, that answered that, at least. There was no way I could keep Betsy in my locker today. Someone passing by would hear her for sure at some point. I was starting to think that bringing Betsy to school might have been the stupidest thing I’d ever done. Even stupider than opening Betsy in the first place. At least then I hadn’t known what I was going to find. But with this, I’d known exactly what I was getting myself into.

  “Hey, seriously, what was that?” Dillon repeated, as he walked back toward my locker.

  I put my arm around his shoulder and tried to turn him back around. “It’s just a little something for my next prank.”

  “Yeah, but did it just say something about destruction?”

  “No, no, it said instruction. You’ll see what that means when the time comes.”

  Dillon nodded as we walked away from my locker, but he still seemed unsure and kept sneaking glances back.

  “When are you going to execute it and what can I do to help?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said as we parted ways down opposite ends of the hallway toward our first classes. “See you at lunch.”

  When I got to homeroom, everyone was standing outside the closed door. Our teacher, Ms. Larimore, was pulling on it furiously and it wouldn’t open. That’s because it had been one of the ones they’d gotten glued shut yesterday. The kids cheered when Ms. Larimore finally gave up.

  “Wait here, all of you,” she said and then marched off down the hallway.

  I noticed that several other classes were standing around in the hallway, their doors glued shut as well. Kids were talking and laughing and I saw several of them wave at me. I just gave them a subtle nod in return.

  Ms. Larimore returned a few minutes later with the janitor, who had a bucket of smelly goo with him. It must have been some sort of glue solvent because a short time after he painted the goop all over our door, our teacher was finally able to open it.

  As we filed inside the classroom, I glanced at my watch. I had just over nine minutes to get back to my locker and get Betsy out of there before the next update. Homeroom still didn’t let out for eleven minutes, which was obviously a problem.

  I walked up to Ms. Larimore’s desk. She glanced back and forth between the class and her computer, taking attendance. I could tell she was already in a bad mood from the door thing.

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, can you?” she said without looking at me.

  I rolled my eyes. “May I go to the bathroom? Please.”

  “No.”

  Ms. Larimore was ancient. Therefore she had an old-school style of teaching. Which meant no talking, no bathroom breaks, no doodling, no doing anything that might remotely be fun and/or humane. She’d probably still whack kids in the face with a heavy oak stick like my grandpa used to talk about if the administration would let her get away with it. Pretty much the only things she hated worse than kids having fun were rodents. This one time a kid brought his pet gerbil to school, and when Ms. Larimore saw it in her classroom she screamed so loud, her coffee cup supposedly shattered. Then she kicked the kid and his pet out of her class, but not before giving him two weeks’ detention.

  “But . . . ,” I started.

  “You can wait ten minutes until class is over, can’t you?” she said, finally looking at me.

  “No, I really can’t . . . I have to go . . .”

  “You will, or else you’ll be marching straight down to the principal’s office.”

  I took a breath and glanced at my watch again. I had no choice. There was only one way she was going to let me out of here in time. I had to do the unimaginable. I clenched my teeth and waited.

  Then I started to well tears in my eyes to draw her attention back toward me, like all good pranksters know how to do on command. At first she made a face like she was going to tell me to “grow up and stop blubbering” as I’d heard her say to other kids who had cried in class before. But then her eyes drifted down to my newly peed-in pants and she gasped.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! It’s, that’s, I
mean, good heavens!” she sputtered, having a hard time grasping the reality of what had just happened. This was definitely outside the realm of a typical school day in North Dakota. “Get out of here and go clean yourself up, Carson! That’s utterly revolting.”

  I turned and left the classroom. Thanks to Ms. Larimore’s reaction, most of the kids in class had figured out what happened. Some laughed, some covered their mouths, and others just looked too shocked to react at all. But the ones laughing weren’t laughing at me, at least not in that way. Most of them were likely laughing at my antics, assuming this was all part of some elaborate prank. It’s one of the perks of being the school’s best prankster; it gives you a long leash for actually making a fool out of yourself. If it were anyone else but me oozing out of class with wet pants right now, they’d be committing social suicide.

  Nonetheless, having urine-soaked pants still felt disgusting.

  I looked at my watch as I left the classroom. I had just enough time to run to the boys’ locker room, throw on an extra pair of jeans and boxers I kept in my gym locker (sometimes pranks get messy), and get back to my normal locker before Betsy’s next warning.

  After changing clothes, I arrived at my locker with forty-six seconds to spare.

  But my arrival just happened to be at the exact same moment as Mr. Gomez’s.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I HEARD YOU HAD AN ACCIDENT IN HOMEROOM,” HE SAID THE way someone might say it if they suspected it wasn’t an accident at all.

  I looked at my watch. Forty-two seconds.

  “Yeah, too much OJ this morning,” I said. “It was pretty embarrassing.”

  “Was it, though?” he asked, his shifty eyes bouncing back and forth inside their sockets like Ping-Pong balls.

  I tried to casually check my watch, because, I mean, after all, what kid checks their watch every five seconds? Not that many kids even wear watches at all for that matter.

  Thirty-four seconds.

  “Yeah, it was horrible,” I said. “I mean, I knew I’d have to go but I thought I could wait until after class. But, man, then I got there and realized I was wrong. Way wrong. More wrong than a kid could ever be, you know?”

  Mr. Gomez looked like he had no idea what to say to this. As his eyes darted around the hallway, I peeked at my watch again. Twenty-eight seconds.

  “Anyway, so I was sitting there and I knew I couldn’t hold it,” I continued. “I tried crossing my legs, I tried thinking about sand, about the moon, about anything and everything but water. But then Zack, this kid who sits next to me and drinks way, way too much water, took out this massive jug of water and started drinking it. And I just, well, I lost control! I ran up to the teacher’s desk, but she wouldn’t let me go! And so then the urine just started . . .”

  “Carson, I don’t think this is appropriate. . . .” Mr. Gomez interrupted.

  But I didn’t give him a chance to finish. Because we were down to six seconds. I had to finish my story right now.

  “And then, then it happened for real, right then and there,” I said, gradually raising my voice. “I mean, do you know what it’s like? Can you know?!”

  I was practically shouting now, and for just a split second between my words I heard Betsy talking inside my locker. So that’s when I started pounding my fist on my locker door.

  “Why me? Why me?! Why? Why? Why!?!?” I kept yelling and pounding. “Nobody will ever like me again! How can this happen?” I wailed in anguish.

  Mr. Gomez stood next to me and raised and lowered his hands a few times in an awkward attempt to quiet me. I finally did stop yelling after I was sure that Betsy was done with her warning. Then I buried my face into my arm and pretended to sob quietly in shame as best I could.

  “Um, okay, then, Carson. I’ll, uh, I’ll just leave you alone then,” he said.

  Good old Mr. Gomez. He was horrible at dealing with crying kids. He was pretty good at disciplining, and great at being a paranoid weirdo, but if any kid ever had a real-world problem like a parent dying or some other tragic thing, then Gomez would always clam up, start stammering, and flee as soon as he got the chance.

  After Gomez retreated back to his office, I took my backpack from my locker and checked my watch. Already just under thirteen minutes until the next warning. That meant it would go off twice during my first class. Could I really keep this up all day? I guess I would find out; I had no choice now. I didn’t even have time to start thinking about how I would figure out which Mr. Jensen was the right one. This was turning into a much bigger ordeal than I had ever imagined.

  The bell rang and kids poured out of their homerooms and flowed past me like a school of fish or something, totally unaware that they were encircling a device that could potentially save or destroy the whole country. A strange device that I had maybe compromised by bringing to school.

  Like an idiot.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE KIDS AT MY SCHOOL MUST HAVE EITHER THOUGHT I WAS losing my mind that day or in the middle of some strange prank that would suddenly make sense by the end of it. For the next few classes, I carried my backpack with me. Which I know sounds stupid, but I couldn’t risk leaving it alone anywhere. If it was with me at least I could control the situation. Well, that is if you can call yelling random stuff like a madman in the middle of class, or having twenty-three-second-long coughing fits every fifteen minutes controlling a situation.

  Some kids laughed, but others were giving me weird looks. The same kids who probably never found my pranks funny. And also kids who didn’t get that I was doing it on purpose, kids like Olek.

  “You need neck lozenge?” he had asked after one of my particularly obnoxious coughing fits in fourth period.

  It was hard not to laugh every time he spoke. Especially because he seemed like such a good guy, always so genuine and nice. It made his odd accent and poor English all the more hilarious for some reason. But in a good way. I wasn’t actually laughing at him. There was something about the way he said things, a look in his eyes, that made me think he was in on the joke, that he knew his English was terrible and he was purposely playing it up to make me laugh.

  “No, I’m good, Olek, thanks,” I’d said.

  “Your cough,” he said, “is very American.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “It is very loud.”

  “Well, I guess we just like to be noticed,” I said.

  “Huh” was his only reply. Then he turned away and seemed to ponder this response as if I’d just given the secret to the meaning of life. After a few moments he turned back. “Maybe this is why Jimmy Buffett is so good at music? To be heard over loud American coughs?”

  I just shrugged. I was too preoccupied at this point to laugh at anything. Because I still had no idea which Mr. Jensen I needed to deliver Betsy to.

  Like I said, there were two Mr. Jensens who taught at my school. To make things simple let’s call them Tall Jensen and Short Jensen. Tall Jensen and Short Jensen are actually close to the same height. And neither one is particularly tall or short. Actually, they look pretty similar in general. Which is what makes this so confusing. Here’s what I knew about both Mr. Jensens at my school:

  Tall Jensen is a sixth-grade social studies teacher. I never had him for sixth grade, but my best friend Dillon did last year so I know a lot about him. Well, what Dillon actually told me was a whole bunch of stuff about Mr. Jensen secretly plotting to fail him, or how he was pretty sure Mr. Jensen was a vampire, or how a few weeks later he realized that of course Mr. Jensen wasn’t a vampire, he was a vampire hunter, only to then admit that he was probably wrong about both of those things because Mr. Jensen was obviously a werewolf. He even tried to get me to sneak over to Tall Jensen’s house with him one night when it was a full moon. Later that year, Dillon had recanted all of the monster stuff entirely and instead said he was pretty sure Tall Jensen was a master thief. He had to be since he was always sneaking around. Now, some might think that could be a clue that Tall Jensen wa
s the right Jensen to deliver Betsy to, but the thing was, Dillon said something similar about almost every teacher he ever had.

  Anyway, here’s a summary of the real information that I was able to gather about Tall Jensen in between Dillon’s crazy conspiracy theories:

  • Tall Jensen had taught at our school for six years.

  • He’s around thirty years old.

  • He drives a Nissan to work every day, except on Fridays for some reason, when he rides a bike (yes, there was a time when Dillon was following him to and from school to make sure he wasn’t actually a troll who lived under the Eighth Street bridge).

  • He’s a fair but strict teacher, and his class could be pretty boring most of the time. But that’s true for most classes.

  • He’s not married and does not have kids.

  • He’s the assistant coach of the eighth-grade football team. He was definitely an athlete in high school and college, and still acts like most athletes do with the excessive manly posturing and spitting all over the place and high fives and all that.

  • He’s not a vampire or a vampire hunter or a werewolf, but he seems to be a fan of horror movies.

  Based on all that, he didn’t seem especially likely to be the Mr. Jensen that the dude in the suit had wanted me to deliver the package to. All signs pointed to him being a normal teacher.

  But the real problem was that Short Jensen seemed even less likely.

  Short Jensen was the school music teacher. I was in class with him two days a week last year and again this year. Here’s what I knew about him:

  • He teaches music, orchestra, and choir.

  • He participates in the production of our school’s annual plays and sometimes directs the musicals.