Perfect Cover
Page 26

“Stop doing that,” I told her.
“Doing what?”
The sad thing was, she was serious.
I gestured to her foot with my head, and when she turned and saw her ankle an inch away from her face, she blinked several times, surprise etched thoroughly into her baby-faced features.
I stared at her, refusing to say another word as she lowered her leg.
“Sometimes I do that without realizing I’m doing it,” she clarified needlessly.
“Bubbles.”
“Uh-huh?”
“What are you doing in my room?”
I could practically see déjà vu replacing the surprise on her face. I swore to myself that if she said a single word about my email, I was going to toss her out of my second-story window.
“I was on my way back from the stakeout thingy,” Bubbles said. “Chloe called, so I went to her house, and she said to give you this.” She thrust out a pink square box.
What was with these girls and pink?
It took me about a second to realize that pink or not, this box in all likelihood held the information I’d asked for. Chloe just hadn’t sent it via email. She’d sent it Ditz Delivery instead.
I opened the box, and inside there was an old-school Britney Spears CD.
“If this doesn’t have phone tones on it,” I told Bubbles, “Chloe is a dead girl.”
Bubbles tilted her head to the side.
I popped the CD into my computer, and prepared myself to immediately turn it off if “Baby One More Time” blared from the speakers. Instead, a password protection window popped up on the screen. Chloe hadn’t included the password in the package.
I smiled. My fingers flew across the keys, trying different combinations. I did some hard-core googling, and within minutes, I’d tried every combination of Chloe’s address, her cell phone number, her birthday, and the words to our halftime cheer.
Bubbles watched, fascinated, until the urge to do a back bend overcame her, and then she bent over backward and out of my peripheral vision.
After about five minutes, I hit on the right password, and logged in.
“Wow,” Bubbles said, standing up straight again.
I shook my head. As much as I would have liked to revel in my own hacking prowess, I had to admit that Chloe was tech-savvy enough that she never would have picked a guessable password unless she’d meant for me to guess it.
“No big deal,” I told Bubbles.
“Uh-huh,” Bubbles said. “But I usually just use my phone.”
“Your phone?”
She pulled a hot pink phone identical to mine out of a purple suede purse and gestured. “You just plug this thing into that thing, and then it does its thing.”
Nobody had told me our cells were equipped with decoding technology. As brightly colored as it was, I had a feeling that my fashiony flip phone was going to be my new best friend. Forget shoes or flowers or chocolate. The way to a girl’s heart was through code-breaking technology, and if my phone had that kind of program, I was officially in love.
“Anything else about this phone I should know?” I asked.
Bubbles thought for a moment. “If you want,” she said seriously, “you can get American Idol ringtones.”
I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to respond. I turned back to the computer screen, found the audio files, and plugged in a set of headphones. I didn’t want to chance someone overhearing the audio, and after years of living in the same house with Noah “Su-Underwear-Drawer-Es-Mi-Casa” Klein, I had accepted the fact that privacy was a fictional concept that didn’t exist in real life.
Reluctantly, I held off on opening the files and played hostess to Bubbles. “Anything else?” I grunted. I’d never been a particularly good hostess.
“Chloe also said to give you these,” Bubbles said, and she pulled two more items out of her purple purse. The first appeared to be an iPod of some type (not pink, for once), and the second was a small, unmarked bottle. She handed me the iPod.
“You’re supposed to listen to the playlist tonight while you sleep,” she said.
As I tried to process that information, I turned my attention to the bottle. “What’s that?” I asked. The truth serum I’d been promised, but never gotten? Some form of mild explosive from Lucy? A magnetic-based lotion that would scramble any hard drive it came in contact with?
“It’s an aloe-based avocado mask,” Bubbles said. “Chloe said to tell you it’s good for your pores.”
Touché, Chloe, I thought. Touché.
“Thanks, Bubbles.”
If Bubbles caught the dry note in my voice, her face didn’t give it away. I tried to remind myself that based on the test scores Zee had shown me, there had to be more to Bubbles than surface appearances. After all, if the biggest partier in the senior class had a PhD in forensic psychology, anything was possible. Besides, looking at Bubbles, I almost couldn’t believe that anyone could be that clueless.
“What’s your real name?” I asked her curiously.
“Bubbles,” she said immediately. “Why?”
“Is it a…uhhhh…family name?”
“No,” Bubbles said, mystified as to why I considered her name even the least bit odd. “It’s Bubbles. You know, like bubbles?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Zee might have technically been Dr. Zee, Tara might not have been one-hundred-percent foreign sophisticate, and Chloe might have secretly been more tech than chic, but Bubbles, the contortionist, was just…Bubbles. You know, like bubbles.
Thinking of Tara made me want to quit wasting time and give in to the seductive lure of the numbers in my mind. The faux Britney CD held the rest of a code, and even though Tara had only begged me to do the Jack thing, everything Squad-related, including seducing Jack Peyton and breaking this code, had gotten tied up in one giant neural ball labeled cheerspionage in my mind.
As all of this passed through my mind, Bubbles passed through my room and was halfway out my window before I realized she’d moved at all. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was fast. And stealthy. No wonder I hadn’t heard her come in.
“Hey, Bubbles?” I stopped her before she’d disappeared entirely.
“Yeah-huh?” Only the top half of her body was still visible, but she turned back to look at me.
I asked one of the questions I’d stopped dwelling on once I’d started concentrating on the numbers. “Why does Tara care so much about this case?”
I don’t know if I asked the question because I was thinking about Tara, or because I had a feeling that Bubbles would answer me more honestly than anyone else on the Squad.
“I dunno,” Bubbles said thoughtfully. “I mean, there are what? About a bazillion foreign agents? And her parents are only like two of them.” Bubbles shrugged. “Maybe she’s homesick.”
I sat there, frozen to my seat. Tara was British, and yet somehow, she’d ended up at an American high school. She spoke nine languages fluently, and her cover act was so perfect that even after having seen her this afternoon, I still bought it. When Lucy had explained Tara’s transfer status to me, she’d mentioned that Tara’s parents were “really into the Squad thing,” and Tara had started freaking out the moment she’d realized that the information leaks had involved the aliases and locations of individual foreign operatives, to the point that Brooke had taken her off the case altogether.
I’d barely gotten over the fact that people’s lives were in our hands, and now I had to deal with the fact that the people in question might be Tara’s parents. And I’d bitched and moaned about having to hit on Jack Peyton. Tara’s parents could already be dead, and I’d felt sorry for myself because my butt said CHEER and my hair was picture perfect.
“Toby?” Bubbles brought me out of my guiltfest. “Can I go now?”
Since she had the answer to one of my remaining shower questions, I decided to ask the other. “You know the guy who gave us our orders today?”
“Yeah-huh.”
“Who is he?”
Bubbles looked at me like I was very simple. “He’s the guy who sometimes gives us our orders,” she said sagely.