8 In or Out

Chapter 8 In or Out As soon as they were safely away from the burning school, Bones pulled the twins out of sight, into the woods behind the playground. He tugged at his big bushy beard, and it came off in his hand. He pulled off his mustache. Then he reached under his shirt and tore away a thick piece of foam that had been wrapped around his stomach to make him look like an extremely fat man. Bones was actually skinny! "Guess I won't be needing this stuff anymore," he said, tossing his disguise aside. Underneath it all, Bones looked pretty much like a regular guy. It was an amazing transformation.

"You mean to say you've been wearing a fat suit and pretending to be a mute the whole school year?" Pep asked him. "Why?" "Because I knew this day would finally come," Bones said. "It's a long story." The fire department did its best to get the blaze under control, but it was hopeless. By the time the fire was completely extinguished, there wasn't much left to save. It didn't look like there was going to be school come September. Not at West Marin Middle School, anyway. The police were relieved to find that there were no bodies in the rubble. No students or teachers had been in the building when the fire started. At least that's what they told the news media. The detectives had no idea that the McDonald twins had been trapped inside the whole time. Mrs. Higgins, the health teacher, was long gone. Coke and Pep McDonald had a lot of questions for Bones, the first one pretty obvious: "Why would our health teacher try to kill us?"

Bones was evasive. He told the twins he had been keeping an eye on Mrs. Higgins ever since they'd both been hired back in September. He suspected that she was up to something, but he didn't know what she was going to do or when she was going to do it. "Are you going to arrest her?" Pep asked. "She's probably just a paid assassin," replied Bones. "I want to find out who's doing the paying. And besides, I'm not a cop. I can't arrest anybody." "Then who are you?" Coke demanded. "What's going on? Why is all of this happening to us? We have the right to know. We didn't do anything wrong." "Yeah," agreed Pep. "That's the second time somebody tried to kill us in two days. And it wasn't Mrs. Higgins the first time. The first time it was some dudes wearing black suits and bowler hats." "Come with me," Bones told the twins. "I'll tell you as much as I'm allowed."

They walked around the corner to Bones's car, an old Ford with a nice variety of dents on the front and back fenders. The guy was either a lousy driver or... no, he was just a lousy driver. With some reluctance, Coke and Pep got into the backseat. Individually, neither one of them would have set foot inside that car. Together, they felt safer. If Bones tried anything funny, at least they had him outnumbered. Bones drove about a mile to a strip mall the twins had been to many times because their favorite Chinese restaurant was there. He pulled the car around to the back where there were some Dumpsters and wooden pallets leaning against the wall. Bones stopped at an unmarked garage door and got out of the car. "What is this, your supersecret spy headquarters?" Coke asked. "You might say that," he replied. Pep took Coke's hand so they couldn't be separated. Bones wasn't a complete stranger, but all the same she felt uneasy following him

around. For all she knew, maybe it was Bones who was actually trying to kill them. Maybe this was all an elaborate trap, and they were walking right into it. Coke had no such concerns. "Do you have cool doors that slide open and go whoosh, like in spy movies?" he asked. "Not exactly," Bones replied. He reached down and yanked on the old garage door until it opened with a wrenching squeak. "You oughta oil that thing," Coke said as he walked inside the garage and looked around. "Hurry!" Bones urged Pep. "Whoever is trying to kill you may be following us. They may try to burn down the place, just like they burned down the school." "All right," Pep demanded. "What's going on? We want some answers." "Okay. Do the letters T G F mean anything to you?" Bones asked after Pep had stepped inside. He pulled down the door behind her.

"No clue." "T G F!" Coke exclaimed. "Yeah! That was the last thing that lady Mya said to us before we jumped off the cliff!" "That's right!" Pep said. "And then she got hit by a dart and collapsed." "T G F stands for The Genius Files," Bones began. "It's a top secret government program. I work for TGF. Mya is one of us. Or was, I should say, before they got to her. Mrs. Higgins used to be with TGF too. Now, it appears, she has a different agenda. She must be working for somebody else." Bones told the McDonald twins all about Dr. Herman Warsaw and what had happened to him on 9/11. How he'd stepped outside for a cigarette; and as the plane crashed into the Pentagon, he'd come up with the idea of enlisting the smartest kids in the country to solve the world's problems. But somewhere along the way, that genius plan seemed to have gone off the tracks.