Perfect Cover
Page 23

Zee lifted her hands up and arched an eyebrow at me. “I come in peace.”
Feeling more than a little stupid, I rose out of my position and shifted my weight to the balls of my feet. “I’m not lost,” I grumbled. “Chloe just gives really crappy directions.”
“Which brings me back to my original point,” Zee said.
“You’re pissed at Chloe. What’d she do this time?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are you asking as a PhD or as the resident Gossip Girl?”
Zee shrugged delicately. “Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.”
I was less than amused. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a stakeout?”
Zee shrugged. “Brooke decided I should stay here and work on profiling Heath Shannon. She took April with her instead.”
It just figured—I was here listening to audio clips with Chloe, and April got to go on a stakeout at the evil law firm.
Zee put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got some stuff you should probably see.”
I didn’t move.
“Seriously, Toby. I swear that it has nothing whatsoever to do with lipstick, pore-reducing cleanser, or whatever else has your panties in a twist.”
“Panties in a twist,” I said. “Is that a technical term?”
Zee rolled her eyes. “So what? Just because I have a PhD, I have to be smart all the time? A person can be more than one thing, Toby. I can be smart and a cheerleader and incredibly knowledgeable about celebrity marriages, all at the same time.”
“A girl of many talents,” I said.
Zee grinned. “Damn straight. Now, are you coming or aren’t you?”
She turned around and started walking off. Since I had exactly two options, Chloe or Zee, I chose Zee. Chloe was predictable (or, at least, predictably witchy). Zee was something of an enigma.
I followed her up a staircase, and after two security checkpoints (one that scanned our fingerprints, and one that scanned our retinas), found myself in a small room with a desk, a large filing cabinet, a computer, and a television.
“Your office?” I guessed. Zee nodded. It occurred to me that I should probably demand my own computer lab/office setup—Lucy and Chloe had labs; the twins had the salon; Zee had an office. Judging from her demeanor, I could only guess that Brooke probably ruled over a small country somewhere in the Quad. The least they could give me was an office with the world’s fastest computer.
“I’m sure it can be arranged,” Zee said, making me wonder if she was psychic. “But give it a few weeks. The rest of the girls are still adjusting to the new group dynamics.”
The way Zee switched from one mode to another, sounding like one of those girls one minute and full of psychobabble the next, freaked me out. Then again, wasn’t that what the Squad was all about?
“So what did you want to show me?”
The sooner she showed it to me, the sooner I could go home, eat, shower, and pass out. In that order.
“Have a seat.” Zee gestured, and I sat. Post–herkie torture, my body was fundamentally opposed to standing for any extended period of time.
When Zee sat down behind her desk, her eyes watched me carefully, and I frowned. “I am so not in the mood to be psychoanalyzed,” I told her.
Zee flipped her glossy black ponytail over her shoulder. “Been there,” she said. “Done that. You’re not that interesting.”
I folded my arms across my chest and waited.
“Actually, I thought you might want the rundown on everyone else.”
“Say what?”
“Let’s face it. You’re not exactly Miss Sociable. You didn’t know any of the girls this time last week, and I’m pretty sure you hated all of us anyway. Now you’re a part of the Squad, and, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve decided that Tara is tolerable, and you’re trying awfully hard not to like Lucy. You still haven’t forgiven the twins for the Stage Six, you’re mildly threatened by April, you think Bubbles has the IQ of a doorstop, you’ve already created a mental list of dictators whose personalities resemble Brooke’s, you can’t understand what Chloe’s problem is, and my PhD freaks the hell out of you.”
It was like she had me in some kind of freaky cheerleading mind meld!
With another hair flip, Zee crossed her arms over her chest, matching her posture to my own. “How’d I do?”
I didn’t answer.
“I take it that means I did well? Know you better than you know yourself, et cetera, et cetera?”
“Didn’t you have something to show me?” I asked.
“Sure,” Zee said. She pushed a folder across the desk, and I picked it up. Not sure what to expect, I opened it.
The first thing I saw was the numbers. I got numbers. They were comfort food for my brain. I read the labels, examined the axes of the graphs, and flipped through the pages.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Ideal profile for an operative,” Zee said. “Aptitude tests, IQ, EI, personality diagnostics. The works.”
Then Zee slid another folder across the desk.
I opened it, and as I digested the data in front of me, Zee explained.
“That’s the breakdown for the Squad,” she said. “I didn’t label the different individuals, but you get the drift. There’s some EI/IQ tradeoff, and the personalities vary, but they’re all good at keeping secrets, they all know how to command a situation, they’re all incredibly intuitive about the strengths and weaknesses of others, and they’re all extraordinarily loyal.”
Without a word, Zee slid another folder across the table. Unable to help myself, I opened it.
A little girl with dark hair, glasses, and a serious expression on her face stared back at me.
“That was taken the day I graduated from high school,” Zee said. “I was eight.” She shuddered. “I know, I know, the bangs are hideous, and it’s more than obvious that my mother was still picking out my clothes….”
She trailed off. “I didn’t start picking out my own clothes until grad school, you know? And I never hung out with people my own age. I think that’s why I was so into psychology. I always thought that if I could understand what it meant to be normal, I could just sort of fake it. And then one day, someone comes along and offers to pay me to do it all over again. They styled my hair, they made me over, they gave me a car, and they put me on a cheerleading squad with nine other teenage girls.”
Zee paused. “And those nine other girls? They would have died for me. A couple of times, some of them almost have.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Without a word, Zee handed me another folder. I opened it, and Lucy stared back at me.
“She’s a perfectionist,” Zee said. “She’s got this really incredible drive to be good and nice and sweet and happy, and she doesn’t do anything unless she can be the best at it. She had an older sister, but the sister died in a car wreck when she was nine. Lucy being Lucy is pretty much the only thing that kept her family together.”
Zee pushed another folder across the desk. I didn’t open it.
“That one’s Chloe,” Zee said. “You gonna open it?”
I thought about it and then shook my head. “You going to give me the Cliff’s Notes anyway?”
“But of course.” Zee twirled her hair absentmindedly as she spoke. “Chloe was, in layman’s terms, the world’s biggest dork. Kind of chubby, socially awkward, really into Star Wars.”
As Zee dished, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the Gossip Girl/profiler pairing made sense. I mean, wasn’t a profiler just someone who knew everything about everyone to the point that they could practically see inside their heads? And wasn’t a gossip queen pretty much the exact same thing?
“Star Wars?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“She’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this, but yeah. Star Wars. She spent the majority of fourth grade building a functioning light saber.”
The next time Chloe made a computer geek comment, she was so incredibly toast.
“Chloe moved to Bayport when she was eleven,” Zee continued, “and she was drafted to the program immediately.”