Crisis Zero by Chris Rylander

else about her seemed even remotely suspicious. In fact, everything else about her made her the least likely person, on or off the list, to be an enemy spy. She always followed all the rules, and she was always making a spectacle of herself, which aren’t exactly the best traits for a secret evil spy. She would tattle on other kids for just about anything; she once tried to tell on a kid for dropping a green bean on the floor in the cafeteria at lunch and not picking it up. She almost cried once when she accidentally sneezed in class during a test, because she was so upset she broke the silence rule. The teacher had to reassure her four or five times that it was okay. But, even considering all of that, we simply couldn’t ignore her bloodline connection to Medlock.
    4.   Mrs. Food : gym teacher. She made the list because of her alleged past connections and experiences. I’ll explain more about that in a bit, but first I shouldclarify that her name really isn’t Mrs. Food, it’s Mrs. Canterbury. Mrs. Food is just what people call her, going way back to when my dad went to school there. That’s how long Mrs. Food has been teaching. Apparently there was this old TV host called Mr. Food, and she looks a lot like him. The funny thing is, Mr. Food is most famous for his big gray beard. Mrs. Food doesn’t have a beard, but somehow the resemblance is there. It’s hard to explain. But that’s beside the point. She didn’t make the list for being a seventy-year-old woman with a passing resemblance to a famous TV chef. Mrs. Food made the list because she claimed to be a former special ops double agent. She said her assignment was so top secret that even Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon didn’t know she existed. She supposedly served as a KGB double agent in Russia and across Eastern Europe. Mrs. Food always had all these crazy spy stories that she told while making kids do army crawls and insane military training stuff instead of normal calisthenics. For instance, she once claimed that she had been given the green light to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev, who was apparently a Russian president or something. She said she had slipped poison into his drink and thenhad to run back across the room and slap the glass from his hand at the last second when the hit was suddenly called off. Anyway, I was pretty sure she was just a weird, harmless old lady who loved telling stories to kids, since everyone knows that real double agents can never give up their identity, even after retirement. But just the same, we’d have been stupid to overlook her as a possible target, given her alleged past.
    5.   Peter Nilsson, aka Junior : seventh-grade student. He made the list for hating Mr. Gomez even more than I did, and thus likely to agree to a plan in which Gomez would be framed and extracted from the school in such an embarrassing and extreme manner. Other than that, I didn’t think he was really capable of being a spy. In fact, I didn’t think he should make the list at all; it was only at Danielle’s insistence that I added him. For one thing, Junior was not the smartest cookie in the jar, or whatever. He was mostly known for being the school’s biggest class clown, a goof-off of epic proportions. Whereas I had a reputation for carrying out elaborate, precise, well-planned pranks, Junior was known more as the kid making fart noises in class, usually by actually farting for real as loudly as hecould. Or for picking his nose and wiping the boogers on the kids around him. He also invited kids to dare him to drink entire bottles of glue, which he always did even when they insisted that he shouldn’t. Other stunts of his included sticking pushpins into his ears, sucking the ink out of those multiflavored scented markers, making suicide school lunches (where you mix together everything on your lunch tray into one massive blob of food and eat it), and doing cartwheels down the school