Dirk Daring, Secret Agent

by Helaine Becker

  I could hear Opal release her breath in a long, shuddery gasp. Funny, I hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. “It’s better that you know though. I mean—”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “’Cause here he is, going behind your back, laughing at you, showing people your secret book—”

  I must have gone white as a marshmallow, because Opal bit her lip and touched my sleeve. “You okay?”

  No, I wasn’t okay. Opal’s revelation had hit me like a swift jab to the intestinal fortitude.

  I felt naked. Exposed. Hot and cold, all at once.

  Was it really true? In addition to selling tests, had Travis been showing people my journal?

  Dear Brother Waldo’s words echoed in my head.

  BEYOND LOW (low low low looooo…).

  “Who?” I asked tonelessly.

  “Aw jeez, Darren! I’m sorry! You said you—”

  “WHO?”

  “Not a lot of people. Just some of the guys. Henry. Vero. Louie.”

  My gut twisted. One pretzel knot for each name.

  How could I ever face those guys again? How, if they knew my secret alter ego’s identity? If they knew the real me?

  I stumbled away, ducking behind the tree. Let myself sink to the hard, dry dirt there. Let my head fall to my knees.

  I began considering all the ways I knew of committing hara-kiri.

  The knife to the belly.

  The cyanide pill, crushed between the teeth.

  The swan dive off a train trestle.

  None were adequate—mostly because I couldn’t perform any of them right this instant. All I could do was sit there, with my back against the old oak’s trunk, and let the horror wash over me.

  Endless, endless waves of misery.

  Opal came around to my side of the tree. Her eyes were huge, her voice high and shaky.

  “Darren! You said you knew!”

  No, she hadn’t sandbagged me. I had sandbagged her.

  Another wave of horror struck me.

  If Opal knew about my journal, she knew what was in it too.

  Opal, only the prettiest girl in Preston Middle School. The girl I—

  Oh God.

  And here she was, right now, staring right into my face.

  The shame! The mortification!

  If I could have shriveled up and died, I would have. Right there on the spot. But Opal wouldn’t let me. She had hunkered down in front of me, and her bright baby blues were fixed on me like surgical lasers. That hard blue gaze wouldn’t let me go. It wouldn’t let me hide.

  I mumbled something, anything, to get her to go. But she wouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry.” Her face and tone were completely sympathetic. It was an even worse form of torture than if she’d flat-out laughed. “So so so so soooooo sorry. But you said you knew…of course I didn’t think there could be anything else besides…but I guess there is.”

  Her lips tightened into a firm, white line. “So what did you know, Darren? If you didn’t know about the book? Tell me. Now.”

  I could not avoid her probing gaze. Could not resist her insistent questioning.

  “He was selling tests. To Waldo,” I mumbled.

  She sank down in the dirt beside me. Ran her hands through her gossamer hair.

  “Whoa. That’s serious.” She snaked her arm around my shoulder. I knew I should have shaken it off, but I was incapable of action. I felt gutted, empty. Done.

  Even so, words tumbled from my lips, like someone else was speaking them. They came pouring out of me in great, gasping gulps.

  “Something’s happened to him. The Travis I know wouldn’t do those things. Either of them!”

  Opal squeezed my shoulder. I knew I should make her stop, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  Her face grew thoughtful. “Yeah. I hear you. He was always kind of a jerk. But he was never evil. And he’s turned evil now, hasn’t he?”

  I couldn’t answer her. My throat had gone tight. Thick. I quickly wiped my eyes with the back of my hand—it wouldn’t do to let Opal see me cry.

  It wouldn’t do at all.

  I could feel Opal thinking, hard, beside me.

  “The question is, why? What happened to Travis that would make him do what he’s been doing? ’Cause you’re right—it’s not like him. Not at all.”

  Her face brightened. She punched me lightly in the arm. “So this is good news!”

  “Sure. Right.”

  She punched me in the arm again, harder this time.

  “Don’t be such a poophead. Look at the upside! There are mysteries to solve! Secrets to de-secret! In fact, this sounds like the perfect mission for a guy I know. Dirk Daring. Ever heard of him?”

  I have agreed to work with a new, untried partner on this most dangerous, most critical of missions. To do so is not the normal practice of secret agents at my level of accomplishment and responsibility. Especially once our cover has been blown. But flexibility is the hallmark of the master spy. When Opportunity knocks, one opens the door and grabs her by the hand. And there is none more flexible, or grabalacious, than Dirk Daring, Secret Agent.

  I cannot risk entering the Dragon’s Den. So at Mission Go! Hour 0:00:00, I lurked in the shadows that shrouded the water fountain. Looking left, right. Making sure no one saw Agent Jewel and me together. Our success depended upon our discretion.

  All clear. I gave the go signal to Agent Jewel. On my mark, she disappeared into the cafeteria. The Dragon’s Den.

  There, on the Inside, she would be my eyes. There, on the Inside, she would be my ears. She would stalk the dragon in his lair and learn his secrets.

  I waited.

  Left, right. Left, right. Nothing.

  Patiently, I waited.

  One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes.

  Could I trust her spycraft? Her talent for observing unobserved? I confess, I was completely outside my comfort zone. For even Dirk Daring, Secret Agent, has vulnerabilities. Even he can be undone.

  Suddenly, she was at my side.

  “Dang! How do you do that?” I said, trying to still my rapid-fire heart.

  She smirked, just a tad. “Do what?”

  “Forget it. Report, Agent Jewel.”

  “Yes sir, captain sir!” She snapped her heels together and gave me a mock salute.

  I glared at her.

  “Oh for crying out loud, Darren. Lighten up.”

  “Report.”

  “All right, all right. It’s just like you said would happen. With you sidelined, Lu has got Travis cornered. Practically has him in a headlock. If I wasn’t hating him so much, I’d feel sorry for him.”

  “There is no place for emotion in the shadow world,” I reminded her.

  Was that laughter rippling across her lips? No—for Agent Jewel was a professional. She would not laugh in the face of duty. Only in the face of danger.

  “Right. I’ll do another pass in”—she checked her gadgety, oversized watch—“35 seconds.”

  We stood side by side, waiting while her praiseworthy timepiece ticked away the seconds.

  “This is fun,” Agent Jewel said. “Being on a mission.”

  Dare I admit that her radiant smile struck me down, leaving me defenseless?

  I swallowed hard. Shook the feeling off. It was dangerous to allow myself to be unmanned so. The shadow world, after all, is no place for emotion.

  I pointed at the cafeteria doors. “3…2…1…go.”

  She gave me another mock salute and slipped away.

  I waited.

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  Three minutes.

  A burst of sound—laughter, the clatter of trays—as Opal came flying through the doors. Face flushed.

  Breathing hard.

  “We got a problem, D.”

  I held my finger to my lips. Motioned her to accompany me to the library. Where we could talk privately.

  Quickly, quietly, we made our way through the empty corridors. When we were fi
nally ensconced in a study carrel, we bent our heads together. Colleagues. Conspirators. Collaborators.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Lucinda—she’s O.P.”

  “O.P.?”

  “Out of the picture. She wasn’t sitting with Travis anymore. I couldn’t find her at first. Finally, I spotted her. She was sulking over a grilled cheese sandwich. At the loner table by the window.”

  “So he gave her the heave-ho. As predicted.” I gave myself a mental check mark in the “correct” column.

  “And T-Bone? What was he doing?”

  Opal bit her lip. “He was up to no good. We’re in big trouble, dude.”

  My blood froze in my veins as I pictured Travis flaunting my spy journal, showing it off to everyone he could. Pointing out the “good parts.” The most embarrassing parts. I could practically hear the mocking laughter ringing in my ears.

  How could I have been so stupid? Handing him the very keys to my humiliation?

  Easy—I’d thought he was my friend.

  “Go ahead. I can take it. Tell me.” My voice sounded flat even to my own ears.

  “He was with Amber! They were, like, together30 Heads practically touching! Laughing and giggling. They were whispering together like…like…” She stared into my eyes. “Well, like us!”

  “Colluding with the enemy,” I said, staring right back. Man, her eyes were blue.

  “Consorting,” she replied breathlessly.

  “This can’t be good,” I said.

  “No. It can’t,” she said.

  The next time we met, it was in the War Room.

  Opal surveyed the space with critical detachment.

  “Nice digs, D.” She pointed at the poster over the bed. “Didn’t take you for a Star Wars fan though.”

  “Yeah, well. We put that up when I was, like, 6. Never got around to taking it down.”

  She spread her arms wide. “Well, maybe you should call this the Wars Room, then. Hey—don’t get mad! I’m joking. Joking!! Your room’s nice. Really.”

  She glanced around again, her head nodding appreciatively. Her fingers hopscotched through the jumble on my dresser. “You sure have a lot of computer stuff in here.”

  “Hey! Don’t touch that! It’s delicate.”

  “What is it?”

  “A motion detector.” I took it out of her hands. “It sounds an alarm whenever anyone unauthorized comes into my room. It doesn’t work though—the batteries are dead.”

  “Hnph. That’s too bad. I coulda used one of those to keep Amber out. Except we shared a room, ha ha. What’s this?”

  “Come on! Leave my stuff alone!”

  “What is it?” she said again, fingering the LEDS and levers on the console.

  “It’s a lie-detector set. Put it down, okay?”

  “Okay! Okay!” She replaced the kit exactly as she had found it, lining it up just so, letting her hand linger a tad longer than necessary on its shiny black cover. “I sure wish I had one of these…”

  Her index finger trailed across it one more time. Then Opal crossed her arms and squared her shoulders. “So. What’s the plan here?”

  I got down on my hands and knees and pulled a stack of plywood sheets out from under my desk. I lifted off the top sheet and selected the uppermost map—one I’d drawn up earlier in the week.

  I cleared a space on my desk and laid the map—it was more of a chart, actually—out flat.

  “Wow,” Opal said, “that’s pretty cool too. Great job on the lettering. Love how you did that 3D thing.”

  “Thanks.” I gave her a curt nod. “Now, let me explain what’s what. Here are the battle lines. As of last week.”

  “Is that me?” Opal pointed to the sparkly diamond I’d penciled in under Green Team.

  I cleared my throat and decided to sidestep her seriously embarrassing question. I dove into my desk drawer, searching for my extremely-hard-to-find cupcake eraser.

  When I judged it was safe to surface, I began vigorously cupcaking names and lines off the map.

  “Right. So this is the original survey map. There’ve been some major changes, though, since I made it.”

  I grabbed some colored pencils and quickly roughed in all the current alliances and positions.

  “You’ll notice this new version is missing a few key combatants. That’s because they’re loose cannons right now—unallied forces we can’t be sure of.”

  I picked an old plastic Smurf guy out of the jumble on my desk. He was holding a champagne bottle that read Happy Smurfday. “This one’s Waldo.”

  Then I grabbed a pad of Post-its and quickly drew a goony face on it. “This one’s Lucinda.”

  I placed the Smurf and the Post-it pad on the board in No Man’s Land/Unallied Territory.

  “Yeah. I see why you don’t want to draw them in yet,” Opal said. “You can’t be sure where they stand.”

  “Exactly. Take Lucinda, for instance.” I tapped on the Post-it pad. “She was definitely Team Travis, and therefore on my team, when I drew up the first battle plan—100 percent all the way.” I pushed the pad into the Travis-controlled zone. “But now that we’re splits, and Amber’s moved in on Travis territory…”

  Opal nudged the Post-it pad right off the map. “She’s out.”

  “You sure?”

  “Oh yeah. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ And Lucinda is definitely a woman scorned. You shoulda seen her face Friday in the lunchroom…” Opal nodded decisively. “Trust me on this—Lucinda can be turned. Give me five minutes with her and she’ll be working for us.”

  She picked up the Post-it pad and dropped it into our zone. Plunk. “Meet Agent Fury. Team Us.”

  A queasy feeling turned in my gut. “I dunno. Remember, she threw me under a bus…”

  Opal waved away my objection.

  “Forget it. She wasn’t thinking about you. She would have thrown her own mother under if she thought it would get her with Travis. Don’t know what she sees in him, actually, but hey, no accounting for taste, is there?” She smiled, just a tiny bit, then flicked her blond hair behind her shoulder. “Agent Fury—yeah, I really like the sound of that. She’d have to be Junior Agent Fury, of course. Following my orders.”

  She picked up the Smurf and twirled it in her fingers. “But what about him? Where does Waldo fit now that you know about the book and the tests and everything?”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” came a voice through the wall.

  “ARE YOU EAVESDROPPING ON US, YOU… YOU…SNEAK?” I shouted.

  Waldo appeared in the doorway. “Dude, haven’t you noticed? The walls in this house are like rice paper. I can hear you fart in your sleep. So no, I wasn’t ‘spying’ on you. God forbid, ’cause spying is wrong, eh?” He chuckled to himself. “But I did hear someone call ‘my name.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. “Wallllll-do. Hey—maybe that’s why I can hear through walls. Walls are my”—more air quotes—“‘secret power.’ Wall-do. Get it?”

  Opal tightened her arms over her chest. “So. Whose side are you on in this? Other than your own, of course.”

  Waldo shook his head mournfully. “So young, so jaded.” He flung himself onto my bed. Acting all Lord and Master-y. “Look, I’m not really into your silly spy games. But I already told you, I think Travis is a douche. I didn’t like him from the first day I slapped an eyeball on him.”

  “More like since the first day you realized he’d got you by the short hairs,” I said.

  “Knowing about how you’re a cheater and all,” Opal said.

  Waldo shook his head. “Naaah—he can’t do a thing.

  If he outs me, he outs himself too, right? But here’s what I want to know.”

  He stretched himself out on my bed, resting his head in his clasped hands. I cringed, knowing where those hands might have been recently.

  “We got that boy a month in detention, right?”

  Opal and I both nodded.

  “My idea was he’d repo
rt back to you on what was going on up there, right? Find out what those guys were talking about. Maybe get some dirt on who was organizing the whole school bus-lunch money-shakedown gig.”

  “He was only up there because you tricked me into—”

  Waldo held up one hand. “Focus, little bro, focus. He was there, okay? Who cares why. He was on the inside track to get the goods. But what did he report? Nothin’.”

  I crossed my arms. “He said nobody talked. Because Miss Robinette was practically Der Führer.”

  Waldo abruptly leaned toward us. His dark eyes intense. Bullets.

  “That’s pure, unadulterated bs.”

  “Which, of course, you’d know all about,” said Opal.

  Waldo gave her a sharp look and replied in a sing-songy voice, “No, it’s not something I know all about, Miss Priss. But Miss Robinette is my English teacher. And she’s no dragon. She’s hot.”

  “Ugh,” Opal said.

  “Yeah, well, ugh you, okay? She’s super nice too. So no, she doesn’t make those detention goons keep quiet. They’re keeping mum for some other reason.”

  “Or Travis lied. About what they were talking about,” I said.

  “Exactamundo. Because he didn’t want to clue you in. Now as school president, it is my business to know what’s going on at Preston. Everything, including what those naughty detention boys are up to. That’s why I wanted you to get Travis into detention in the first place, right?”

  “You killed two birds with one stone…” I said, getting it at last.

  “You hear that?” He cupped his ear with his hand. “That’s the other shoe dropping. Mazel tov. So here’s the deal, little bro. I’m on your side on this one. Because I want you to find out what Travis is up to with those detention losers. And the best way to do that is for you to get yourself into detention too.”

  “No way!”

  “He’s right,” Opal said.

  “Oh great, now you’re on his side too?”

  “I’m on the side of making life at school bearable. And if finding out why Travis is acting like such a colossal you-know-what is the way to do that, then finding out what he knows about the Detention Gang might be part of the solution. Not to mention, D, you’ve got to figure out how to get your book back.”

  Waldo shook his head and laughed. “That stupid book, man. Mind-Blowing Missions. How freaking lame is that?”