Spy Ski School Read Online Free PDF Page A

told me.
    This was a very convincing argument. I didn’t want to be dead, so I was beefing up my memory. It had turned out to be far more work than I’d expected. I had been pulled out of my regular classes and placed in an intensive memory immersion course. For hours each day, I’d memorized random strings of numbers and decks of cards. My instructor, Professor Richmond, had walked me down the city streets and then peppered me with questions about everything I’d seen: What model car was parked closest to the corner? What type of earrings had a mail carrier been wearing? How many people had failed to clean up after their dogs? It had seemedalmost impossible at first, but I was already getting better at it, picking up things I never would have noticed about my surroundings before. Like how everyone else at the zoo was dressed.
    â€œWhy are you staring at those people?” Mike asked me.
    I still needed a bit of work on not being so obvious, however.
    â€œI thought I recognized them,” I said quickly.
    Mike stopped walking near a park bench where an old woman sat (black overcoat, red earmuffs, big hairy mole on her chin) and fixed me with a hard stare. “Have you recognized a lot of people at the zoo today? Because you’ve been staring at everyone we’ve passed.”
    â€œNo, I haven’t,” I said, even though I had. It occurred to me that Mike had quite strong powers of observation himself.
    â€œYou have so. You’ve been acting weird all day. Even weirder than usual.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘weirder than usual’?”
    Mike began ticking things off on his fingers. “The last time you went to Adventureland Mini Golf, you took after some suspicious guy and ended up burning the whole place down. On the one day you were back at school with me, you beat up Trey Patterson and three of his buddies and then vanished. And the one time you told me to sneak onto St. Smithen’s to spring you for a party, I got tackled by acommando squad. They claimed it was only a training exercise, but I know that was a bunch of bull.”
    â€œI realize that all seems kind of weird,” I replied. “But there’s a good explanation for everything.”
    â€œYeah. Something strange is going on at that science school. And you’re wrapped up in it.”
    â€œEr . . . ,” I said, and then had no idea what to add. Mike had caught me completely off guard by nailing the answer.
    Mike waited for two other zoo visitors to pass us—a mother (heavy tan parka, hiking boots, librarian glasses) and son (blue Batman jacket, snow boots, a river of snot running from his nose)—and then whispered, “They’re experimenting on you, aren’t they?”
    I’d been preparing myself to be accused of being a spy, so now I was caught off guard again. “What?”
    â€œI mean, it’s a science school, but there’s all this secrecy around it,” Mike explained. “So whatever they’re up to . . . it’s not kosher, right?”
    â€œUm,” I said, not quite sure where this was going. “Maybe.”
    â€œSo what do they do to you?” Mike asked, growing intrigued. “Inject you with all sorts of weird chemicals to give you incredible martial arts skills one day and hyper-attentiveness the next?”
    I was annoyed that Mike thought I was a human guineapig, but then I remembered what was known as “Delman’s Law of Opportune Aliases”: If someone mistakenly assumes something about you, it’s much easier to simply let them believe it than to make up something else entirely.
    So I said, “Yes. I’m a human guinea pig.”
    â€œI knew it!” Mike crowed, so loudly he startled a passing zookeeper (gray hair, bushy mustache, coveralls smeared with what looked disturbingly like animal poop). Then he lowered his voice again and said, “This explains everything.