Ginger's Spy School Oneshots

the shirt

Author's Note: Here's some funky nonsense based on some drawings my friend Molly did of various Spy School characters wearing funny t-shirts and my need to explain why Murray was wearing a math one

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When Ben initially packed his clothes for spy school, it was mostly math t-shirts. This wasn't some well calculated move on his part to convince everyone that his thing was math and only math, as Zoe had seemed convinced that it was.

"No one has that many shirts with just one topic on them!" she'd told him when he asked her about that portion of it at lunch about a couple weeks after he'd arrived, "It's just way too on the nose!"

"That's a good one, though," said Murray, gesturing at his current shirt with a spoon covered in chocolate pudding. Ben looked down at his shirt for that day. It said "I see you're using graph paper. You must be plotting something." It was one of his favorites, but it seemed a little weird that Murray liked it considering that he was absolutely not a math guy. He brushed it off, though, and the conversation went on normally from that point on. Well, as normally as conversations at spy school tended to go, but nothing to be suspicious of.

Later that week, Ben stuck that shirt in his hamper, and between that lunch and the day everything went down, he didn't get a chance to do his laundry. And since he wasn't in the habit of digging through his hamper on a regular basis to make sure that no one had taken his shirts, he didn't realize that it was missing.

And if Ben didn't notice that that was the shirt that Murray was wearing when the day everything went down, that was a completely understandable thing to miss, considering that fact that everything was going down. Noticing the fact that his friend was evil suddenly and that he was getting and evil job offer and that there was a bomb that was about to go off and he was the only one could stop it kind of sort of trumped that fact that Murray was wearing his shirt.

It wasn't until a couple days later when he was doing his laundry that he realized the shirt was missing. Thankfully, his brain provided the helpful detail that Murray had been wearing it when he got captured and was probably still wearing it when he got taken to jail. Unfortunately, it didn't provide this information until after he'd torn apart his room trying to find it (which, given the size of his room, didn't take too long) and was staring at the dryer, wondering vaguely if maybe it was sentient and had eaten the shirt.

It wouldn't be the strangest things that had happened that month.

He heard someone say, "Move, I need the dryer," and he whipped his head around and saw Erica standing behind him. He hadn't heard her coming up behind him, but at this point he'd come to expect that. He scurried out of the way as Erica shoved her clothes in the dryer.

"What's up with you staring at the dryer like it betrayed you personally," Erica asked as she punched the buttons on the dryer.

Ben wanted to come up with some sort of answer that made him seem cool, but couldn't think of a lie that made him sound cooler. In fact, they were all significantly more embarrassing. "Murray stole my favorite shirt," he admitted instead.

"Huh," Erica said, seeming to consider the topic for a moment before saying, "yeah, you're not getting that one back."

Ben wasn't expecting anything to come out of that interaction besides shame and embarrassment. And on a surface level, nothing did.

He went back to his room, opened the package, and took out the contents. It was a new t-shirt with a math pun on it, but this one said
PLAN
(P+L) (A+N)
PA+PN+LA+LN
YOUR PLAN HAS BEEN FOILED
And Ben decided he liked this one a lot more than the one Murray had stolen from him.

And Ben never knew who gave him the shirt for sure. But the first day he wore it, he thought he saw Erica glance at it and there was something on her face that maybe resembled a smile.

And he wondered.