Spy School: Zoe or Erica?

The Plot

They had done it again.

SPYDER had managed to dupe me into doing an extremely stupid act, set an unneeded trap, make it look like I was the bad guy, and also basically hand over a blackmail token to them.

But I still had something to back me up. Some evidence that I didn't realize earlier.

You see, whenever I go to sleep, I leave my phone on 'record'. This is because if I ever get kidnapped or someone breaks into my room, I'll have evidence of the situation. If nothing happens during the night, then I'll delete the footage and re-record the next evening.

It comes in handy in certain situations, such as this one. 

Well, it just happened that my phone was in my pocket that night, and I had talked to the fake 'Trixie' with it recording in my pocket. So all I had to do was show the recording to her, and our friendship was healed.

Not that I had considered her as a friend in the first place. I was happy just sticking around with my bro Benny.

After I realized this, I was much more elated. I didn't even care that SPYDER planned to take us to their headquarters in a car.

And, well, the first thing that the SPYDER Agents did when they caught me in my 'act'? They stuck me into the cage with Trixie. According to them, they didn't want me 'messing up their plans' by sitting in the backseat without supervision. 

How did Trixie feel about this action? Well, I felt like she wanted to cause bodily harm to me, but she held it back. It was more of a really awkward stuck-in-a-small-space-with-a-girl than a I hate you and an I will make you suffer moment.

It took a while for me to actually get Trixie's attention to show her the recording. Thankfully, I had headphones, so I could easily make sure the recording wasn't playing out loud.

The first time I tried to get Trixie to turn around, she slapped my hand away before I could even get a foot within her personal space.

"There's no point of apologizing now," she said abruptly. "You've done what you've done, and I've been captured."

I sighed. From her current state, this was probably going to take a while. And since I had no other choice, I decided to just tell her the secret I had been keeping from her for the past week.

"Trixie," I said gently. "I'm gay."

Her head suddenly perked up a millimeter, probably thinking Did he just insult himself, or is he for real?

"What?!" she exclaimed, turning back towards me after a moment of deciding that I wasn't kidding.

I stumbled back against the bars of the cage, since a Hale screaming "wwhhaAAT' in your face is kind of scary, especially considering the fact that the Hale could easily kill you within a minute.

"That's why you weren't responding to my advances," she said, completely out of character. "You should've told me earlier!"

I grinned. "I thought you were going through the 'omg Jayden betrayed me' phase just earlier. Why are you all friendly to me again?"

Trixie seemed to realize this, then pouted and crossed her arms, turning around again. Though this time, I could see a bit of relaxation in her eye. Apparently, being friendly with her helped our trust. After all, since I was gay, then she was basically just a bro to me. Just another friend that I would never love on.

"I have evidence that I'm not a SPYDER Agent," I said, quickly snapping the earbuds into her ears before she could react. "Listen."

Trixie was about to pull them off, but when she heard her own voice, her grip on the cord softened.

"What?" she said, astonished. "I never said this stuff! This isn't me, but... it is me!"

"Exactly!" I exclaimed. "I was duped! I told you!"

With this, I explained the whole entire SPYDER plot to her, step by step. With each word, her eyes got wider and her anger softened bit by bit.

Of course, after the whole explanation, it ended up with her hugging me, arms around my back, and her eyes crying out into my chest. I could care less by now, since she knew I was gay, and this was merely just a friendly action. 

"I'm sorry, Jay!" she cried, making my shirt stained with her salty tears.

Jeez, this girl was a waterfall of emotions compared to the one and only Ice Queen. She probably got Catherine's genes, while Erica stuck with the old Ice Grandpa Cyrus's hormones. I'd bet if Erica was the one here, realizing all of this, she would just roll her eyes and mutter "I was expecting this."

Meanwhile, Joshua and Jonas were in the front seat, completely oblivious of our conversation. This was because I had identified a hidden feature for this cage that we were stuck in: there was a button that could activate a bulletproof, see-through, and sound-cancelling wall of glass. I'd immediately guessed this was because either their captives would whine or scream for help a lot, so they needed something to shut them up, or the company just wanted their product to look more high-tech. Either way, it was useful.

After about thirty minutes, Trixie whimpered her last apology and gathered herself from her heap of flowing tears. 

"Calm down," she muttered to herself, breathing deeply. "Calm down."

"We need a plan," I said.

"Of course we do!" she snapped, making me retract a bit from her sudden feistiness. "SPYDER is going to be ripped apart piece by piece from my bare hands."

"Uh.... sure?" I said uneasily, glancing at Trixie's death glare. "Let's just gather ourselves and formulate a plan before SPYDER kills us."

"Gotcha," Trixie snapped her fingers, pointing at my phone. "Got any Wi-Fi?"

"Nope," I said. "SPYDER disabled my data with a parental controls password earlier."

"I'll attempt guessing the password," Trixie said. "I have a time-saving algorithm when it comes to guessing four-digit parental control passwords."

"Is that because you had a phone, and your mother set a parental controls password on it?" I said.

"Yep," Trixie admitted. "It took me a few weeks to develop it, but eventually I managed to make an algorithm that saved loads of time. Also, it helped me make sure that my Clash of Clans base was up to date every day."

"You play Clash?" I said, genuinely surprised. "What Town Hall?"

"Thirteen, maxed," Trixie waved off my question. "We don't have time to talk about this now, though. Give me your phone."

"Don't look at my messages, please," I said when I handed it over to her. "Oh wait- you probably already read all of them. I forgot, you hacked my Wi-Fi back when I was in the underground hideout."

"I didn't read your text messages," Trixie said back. "Though you are giving me some ideas for what I should invade next in your phone."

"Please don't," I begged. 

Trixie, who was relentlessly tapping what I assumed to be a perfectly planned out mix of numbers into the keypad, was too focused on the screen than to listen to me. So I decided to think about what exactly SPYDER was doing.

If they kidnapped us, then the rest of our gang were probably suspicious that we weren't showing up to lunch or breakfast in the mess hall, so... it was the most logical decision for them to kidnap the rest of the gang to make sure that no agents got word of the fact that we were under SPYDER's control. For all the Academy knew, we were still in London, staying in our bunker and doing absolutely nothing except gaining leads on SPYDER.

But the thing was- they didn't know about Kylie. So if, potentially, SPYDER came to kidnap the residents of Underground bunker number 13-AD (that was the original name, if you guys didn't know yet), and Kylie managed to get to the secret room in time, then she would be the only one left that knew of the situation.

And that's exactly what we needed.