Perfect Cover
Page 42

And then I went to CNN’s website and searched for any articles about shots exchanged in Al Jawf, Libya, earlier that day.
Nothing.
I was in the process of using the mother of all search engines to do the same thing when I sensed a presence in my room. I turned, half expecting it to be Bubbles with some kind of cream for my hair or gel for my eyes, but instead, it was Noah. He was wearing a collared shirt. The collar was popped.
“Are you wearing cologne?” I sniffed the air suspiciously and minimized the search window on my computer. “Scratch that. Are you wearing an absurd amount of cologne?”
“Why? You like?” Noah leaned against my bedroom wall.
“No. I don’t like.” I paused. “Do I even want to know why you’re wearing cologne?”
Noah smiled then, and I knew I was in trouble. It was one of his crazy, charming, happy-puppy grins.
“Noah…”
Grin still in place, he inclined his head slightly toward me. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready right about now?”
The word that ran through my head at that moment was a combination of about five words that I probably shouldn’t repeat, but believe me, it involved an impressive number of interjections.
“Who told you about the party?” I asked Noah humorlessly.
“Toby, Toby, Toby…” Noah placed a hand on my shoulder. “Who didn’t tell me about the party?”
I rolled my eyes. “Who invited you to the party?”
This time, the smile was less crazy, more hopeful. “You did.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Come on, Tobe. I’ll be good. I promise. You won’t have to save me even once. There’ll be so many girls there that at least one of them will be dying for a piece of The Noah. I won’t have to resort to working my magic on the so-called unavailable ones.”
“The Noah?” He had to be kidding me. Between the title and the popped collar, I was starting to think I’d spent too much time growing up defending Noah, and not nearly enough beating sense into him.
“Just let me come with you. Please? Pretty please?”
I should have said no. I was going to the party for one reason and one reason alone, and that was the fact that if Brooke and Zee could put themselves in the line of fire for this mission, I could show up at a party and flirt with Bayport’s Most Eligible Bachelor. I could convince him to take me to his dad’s office. I could plant a new listening device (which Chloe had given me), and while I was at it, I could download information from at least one of the computers. I hadn’t exactly been authorized to do the latter, but meh. Authorization, shmauthorization.
“Toby?”
“Fine.”
Noah beamed at me.
“But let’s get two things straight. One—I’m not bailing you out of anything. If you come home with a black eye or somehow dismembered, don’t come crying to me.”
“Deal.”
Noah was eager to accept my terms, but he hadn’t heard them all yet. “Two—you say nothing about whatever I end up doing tonight. You don’t mention it to Mom and Dad. You don’t tell your friends—who, by the way, aren’t coming—and you don’t even mention it to me. Capisce?”
“Your wish is my command.”
I wished that I’d told him no, but of all the girls on the planet, I was the only one who was a sucker for Noah’s hopeful face.
“Get lost,” I told him. “If we’re going to this thing, I need to get dressed.”
I was less than surprised a few minutes later when I abandoned my laptop and opened my closet door to find that at some point during the day, my outfit had been selected for me. Sometimes it seemed like there were four of the twins instead of two. Except for the time I’d spent in class and working on Operation Playboy, I’d been with them for most of the day, and yet somehow at least one of them had made it back here at some point to play personal stylist.
For the first time since I’d joined the Squad, the selected outfit wasn’t a skirt and a glitzy top—it was a pair of white jeans that looked dangerously low cut and uncomfortably tight. And a glitzy top. There was a note on the jeans (“wear thick blue belt with rhinestone buckle”), a note on the top (“wear with gel bra”), and a pair of high-heeled blue designer cowboy boots, with (shocker of shockers) a note attached. I read the last note and crumpled it. Apparently, the twins had decided that boots were my “trademark item” and they’d put out a fashion APB on new boot styles. They were expecting deliveries more or less daily.
Though I shuddered at a future filled with fashion boots, I couldn’t help but think that it could be worse. I mean, they could have decided that a Chihuahua was my trademark item, and then I’d be stuck carrying a rat-dog around all the time.
Pushing the thought out of my mind, I carried my clothes into the bathroom and stripped. I showered quickly, dried my hair with a supersonic blow dryer that had magically appeared in my bathroom, and tried to apply my foundation. After the tutorial I had been given, I couldn’t help but feel that one wrong move with one of these face sponge thingies, and I was going to somehow destroy the free world.
I skipped the mascara and eye gunk, but applied a small amount of lip gloss to minimize the chances of a drive-by glossing. Eyeing the white pants distrustfully, I began to put on the outfit: the glitzy turquoise thong I’d bought at Victoria’s Secret, the bewildering gel bra, the glitzy blue top, and finally, the white pants. They were made of a really thick denim that must have had at least some spandex in it, based on the way they stretched to grip my butt like a glove.
I checked my back half out in the mirror, just to make sure that the underwear wasn’t showing through, and not at all because I was interested in what my butt would look like in the aforementioned stretchy pants.
Moving made me realize that something was off, and when I wedged my hand into the right front pocket of the pants, I pulled out a small piece of paper and a white choker with a blue gem on the end. The piece of paper was completely blank, but when I dampened it with the edge of my towel, bubble letters appeared on the page.
Choker = video/audio feed.
Whichever twin had written that message had signed it simply with a heart. My eyes scanned to the bottom of the page, and I saw the postscript.
PS: Don’t worry—your underwear won’t show through. Special-issue fabric.
And below that:
PPS: Wear the sparkly thong anyway. We’ll know if you don’t.
And that was that. The paper dried, the words disappeared, and I tore it into pieces before tossing it into the trash.
I put the choker around my neck, parted my hair down the center, and forced my feet into the boots du jour.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Noah was waiting for me. His collar had, without a doubt, been repopped within the last five minutes.
“You ready?” he asked, playing it cool.
I weighed the situation. I hadn’t managed to find out any information on Brooke and Zee, and I hadn’t heard a word from the rest of the Squad. I mentally prepared myself to push those thoughts down and concentrate on the task at hand. To that end, I glanced down at my body. A full two inches of my stomach was showing, my newly gel-enhanced boobs were actually noticeable, and the sparkle from the belt was so intense that I thought it was going to give me an aneurysm.
I turned back to Noah. “Ready.”
“You driving?” Noah asked.
At that exact moment, the doorbell rang, and I realized that when I’d made Noah the happiest goofy little freshman in the whole wide world, I’d forgotten one key detail about tonight’s party.
I wasn’t driving. Jack Peyton was.
CHAPTER 30
Code Word: Attraction
“You normally bring your little brother on dates with you?”
“Bite me. And watch the road.”
From the backseat, Noah watched the interplay between Jack and me, fascinated. How could I have forgotten that I’d sort of agreed to let John Peyton IV pick me up at seven? What kind of idiot was I?
“Whatever you say, Ev,” Jack said.
There it was again: the nickname, accompanied, as always, by the smirk.