3
" switching to a different channel, where I found Jason Stern mouthing off about me. It wasn’t an official interview; instead, Jason had been posting about me on social media—probably without his family’s permission—and the news was wantonly parroting everything he said. Unsurprisingly, Jason was being awful to me—and very supportive of himself. “My father would have been dead if it wasn’t for me,” Jason had proclaimed on his blog. “I suspected Ben Ripley was a possible assassin all along. The kid was real weird. So when he came over, I was on guard. When I heard his jacket ticking, I risked my own life to rip it off him. Sucks that it blew up the Oval Office, though. And that the Secret Service let him escape. Losers.” On Twitter, he had been much more succinct: “Stopped #AssassinBenRipley from killing my father today. You’re welcome America.” Since Jason wasn’t actually giving interviews, no one could ask him why he’d invited me over for a playdate if he suspected I was an assassin all along. Somehow, none of the news commentators thought to point this out either "
― Stuart Gibbs , Spy School Secret Service (Spy School, #5)
10
" You’re not expecting us to jump to that?” I asked, worried. “I’m not expecting anything. We’re doing it.” With that, Erica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton. She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn’t have in the slightest. I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the government agent, who was digging himself out of the dinosaur toys. He had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear. The SPYDER agents appeared to have lost us, but the government agent was threatening enough. I jumped over the railing. To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Erica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly. Erica swung from the whale’s lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall. The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the Smithsonian had started hiring circus performers to spice things up. Erica looked to me expectantly. So did all the tourists. Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with. Knowing I couldn’t possibly do what Erica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle. The tourists groaned, like I had let them down. "
― Stuart Gibbs , Spy School Secret Service (Spy School, #5)
