On The Ball by Susannah McFarlane Page A

Contact. The ball flew through the air. It went high, much too high, over the goals and out of bounds.
    Ms Tenga blew the whistle.
    â€˜Bad luck, Emma. Good try,’ cried Ms Tenga. ‘Great game everyone! That’s it for today. Now quickly into the changing rooms.’
    Everyone rushed off, except Emma was a bit slower than the others. She was angry with herself for missing both those headers. She felt she had let the team down. Hannah must have noticed her friend looking sad and came up and put an arm around her.
    â€˜Cheer up,’ she said.
    Then Isi bounded up to them. Isi was, as always, excited.
    â€˜How fun was that!’ she exclaimed. ‘And we nearly won. Those boys were so sure that they would beat us by heaps and it was a draw. Yay us!’
    â€˜Yay you, maybe,’ said Emma. ‘I can’t believe I missed two headers. Maybe I shouldn’t try out for the school team.’
    â€˜No, you have to,’ cried Isi. ‘How cool will it be if we all play together? And this year, the team is going to have proper shirts with our names on them! You have to be in the team Em, you just have to be!’
    â€˜I have to get into the team first,’ said Emma glumly.
    â€˜Why would anyone want to be in the soccer team?’ said Nema, who had walked up alongside them. ‘It’s a boys’ sport.’
    Ms Tenga was coming up behind the girls. She must have heard their conversation.
    â€˜Don’t be silly, Nema, soccer is one of the largest girls’ sports in the world. And don’t be so hard on yourself, Emma. You played really well today.Headers take a lot of practice. Keep trying, stay on the ball and you could really shine.’
    Emma blushed. On the ball. Gee whizz, lemonfizz, I should be good at that, she thought.
    And she should. After all when she wasn’t Emma Jacks, schoolgirl and not very confident soccer player, she was Special Agent EJ12, code-cracker for the under-twelve division of the secret agency SHINE. And a secret agent always had to stay on the ball.

    Emma Jacks was pretty much your normal, everyday schoolgirl. She went to school (her favourite subjects were maths and art), she liked sport (particularly gymnastics), she loved spending time with her friends (sometimes too much email time, according to her mum) and she loved animals and chocolate, animals more than chocolate. She thought she might be a vet when she grew up, although her brother Bob didn’t think she would ever grow up,which gives you an idea of how irritating Bob was.
    Emma worried about things sometimes, normal things. Sometimes she worried about friends (and mean girls not being friends), sometimes she worried about school and quite often she worried about whether she would be able to do something properly. Like soccer. So, Emma Jacks was pretty normal, very normal in fact—except for the spy thing. Except for being one of SHINE’ s best secret agents.
    SHINE was a worldwide secret organisation that stopped evil plans, particularly those of the SHADOW organisation. SHADOW was as bad as SHINE was good and they seemed to be always launching new evil schemes. SHADOW used secret messages to send instructions to their agents and they were always inventing new ways to make sure those messages couldn’t be intercepted or decoded.
    Luckily, SHINE’ s agents were very good at cracking new codes and foiling SHADOW plans. Agents like EJ12. She enjoyed looking at the codeand picking the clue within it, finding the thing that would let her decode it. This was a problem she enjoyed—and she was good at it. She had a good head for secret messages and codes. She was pretty good at the mission too and was awarded lots of points in the SHINE Shining Stars, the Spy of the Year competition.
    She just wished she had a good head for soccer as well.



That afternoon at home Emma was practising her headers with her older brother, Bob. Strangely, Bob was being nice to her.