Ginger's Spy School Oneshots

the other shirt

Author's Note: So I actually had this idea before I wrote The Shirt, but then after talking with Molly (@dragonfruits02 on tumblr) about it and her subsequently drawing fantastic pictures for that (which I obviously had to write about), this one got shoved to the back burner, but it is shoved no longer! Enjoy!

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Erica had always assumed that getting into a relationship would present new and unexpected and stupidly frustrating challenges. She was extremely correct in this, because even amongst all the unexpected new things, the most unexpected of all was that it was hard to shop for birthday presents.

Through her amazing spy skills, Erica had been able to deduce that Ben enjoyed wearing t-shirts with incomprehensible math puns. Her process mostly involved "looking at his wardrobe and realizing that was what made up most of it".

One might assume, if one were an idiot, that the solution had presented itself quite clearly. All she would have to do would be to get him a shirt that included a joke about math. Said idiot would not be taking into account that math jokes were either incomprehensible or seemed like they hated math. That would not do, as Ben liked math.

However, the larger problem was proving to be that it was also going to have to be a shirt with a joke that he didn't already have on a t-shirt. And given how many shirts he was in possession of, this was proving to be nearly impossible.

Which was how she found herself sitting at the family kitchen table with so many tabs open that her laptop was threatening to shut down while Trixie was baking cookies. Because even though it was currently the plan that she'd begin attending the Academy of Espionage at the beginning of the next school year, and they'd be seeing a whole heck of a lot more of each other, Trixie still insisted that Erica come out of her room and spend time with her.

Erica would not yet have used the word "frantic" to describe her state of mind, but given the way that she was staring at her, it seemed like that was the word Trixie would have used.

"He would probably be happy with just some cookies. You can make cookies. I know you're capable of it," said Trixie.

"Counterpoint," Erica said, having exhausted the possibilities on one website and pulling up the next tab on her browser, "Cookies are generic and boring. Anyone could do it."

"Counter-counterpoint," said Trixie, "Cookies are delicious and everyone likes them and you actually have to try to make them and see if I share with you if that's the attitude you have about them."

Erica ignored her sister, put her head in her hands, and screamed quietly.

"Why are you getting so worked up about it?" asked Trixie, as she put the first two pans of cookies in the oven and started scooping out the third.

"Because I don't want to track down Murray and rip out his other front tooth, even though that would be the easiest way to top last year's present," Erica said, picking her head up from her hands, turning back to the laptop, and beginning to inspect a new website worth of t-shirts.

"Murray's other tooth?" Trixie responded after a long moment of stunned silence.

"Yeah, I got him the other one for his birthday last year," said Erica, continuing to examine the website. She clicked on a shirt, saw it wasn't going to be in stock until August, and clicked back to the main options.

Trixie looked like she wanted to say something but was physically incapable of the feat. After a couple squeaks that seemed like false starts, she said, "I can't believe that less than two months ago I thought you were a boring nerd."