“Toby, OMG, are you okay?” Lucy greeted me with a huge hug and a mouthful of high-speed babble. “We were like so worried about you! I mean, I know you were standing far enough away from the blast that the resulting heat wave shouldn’t have affected you, but flying debris can be so totally deadly and stuff!”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. “Really, Luce.”
Tara rolled her eyes, probably at the fact that I’d gone from Drama Queen mode to downplaying the whole thing. All it took was a little sympathy.
“Do you think the cut will heal before homecoming?” Lucy was wide-eyed at the prospect. I brightened slightly at her question. Would this negatively affect my chances for homecoming princess?
Please, I thought, let this negatively affect my chances for homecoming princess!
“Don’t worry, Toby. We’ve got you covered.” Brittany handed me a small gift bag, and then Tiffany handed me a slightly larger one.
“Oooohhhhh,” Bubbles said appreciatively. “Prezzies!”
I was somewhat skeptical of anything that involved the twins handing me packages. Somehow, I doubted there was chocolate inside.
“The blue one has a new liquid base in it,” Tiffany said.
“It’s totally safe to use on wounds, and it’s got this polymicrofiber thingy in it that completely camouflages even the worst bruises.”
Oh, goody! Makeup.
“What’s the pink one have in it?” I was almost afraid to ask.
Brittany reached a hand out to touch my hair. “Prototype conditioner,” she said. “Explosions wreak havoc on your hair’s moisture levels.”
I almost got blown up, and the twins were worried about the effect it would have on my hair. Why was I not surprised?
“Good. You’re back.” Brooke pushed through the others to stand directly in front of Tara and me. “You two ready to give us the full rundown on your recon?” Her gaze lingered on my bruised temple for just a moment, and I thought I saw something that might have been worry behind her eyes. Then again, it also might have been unadulterated disdain. I’m always mixing those two up.
“We’re ready,” Tara said. Then she looked at me, and the edges of her lips turned up slightly. “Let’s go.”
The look in her eyes, in combination with the tone in her voice on those last two words, had me fighting an insane urge to giggle, even though our “let’s go” joke wasn’t objectively funny at all. I blame the fact that, between the body glitter, the pep rally, and nearly being decapitated by flying debris, it had been a pretty stressful day.
Not saying a word, and somehow managing to keep my stress-induced giggle impulse to myself, I followed the others to our conference table and sat docilely while Tara began calmly and methodically walking the others through our mission.
“Your potentially hostile target almost caught you guys casing his room?” Brooke asked.
Tara inclined her head slightly, acceding the point, but the look in her eyes was pure steel. “He didn’t catch us.”
“Get in and get out,” Brooke said. “You were supposed to get in and get out.”
Personally, I thought she was blowing this a little bit out of proportion. She hadn’t been the least bit concerned about the fact that I’d almost been blown to Toby bits, but she was upset that we’d overstayed our welcome in Kann’s room?
“He didn’t catch us.” I backed Tara up, even though there was a distinct chance that she would have preferred that I keep my mouth closed.
“He could have,” Brooke countered tersely.
“He’s dead,” I told her.
Even Brooke couldn’t argue with that.
“And besides,” I added, reaching back to unclasp my necklace. “If we’d gotten in and out more quickly, I wouldn’t have been able to get this.” I slipped the charm off the chain and threw it to her. Moving on reflex, Brooke caught it.
“The contents of his hard drive.” I smiled brightly, looking every inch the cheerleader. “And his email.”
Brooke became very still, her eyes locked on mine. “Seriously?”
I nodded.
She smiled. “Sweet.” And then, without a word, she tossed the data stick to Chloe, who caught it just as easily as Brooke had a moment before.
“Think you can have the data sorted by morning?” Brooke asked her.
Chloe grinned. “Natch.”
A few seconds later, I came to the realization that Brooke had put Chloe in charge of looking for meaningful data on my disk, and I actually managed to stop gloating long enough to protest.
“I can do it.”
Brooke didn’t pause a beat. “You can go home,” she corrected. “And rest. Right after you talk to Zee and convince her that you’re not traumatized for life.” Even though Brooke clearly considered this an order, there was something almost gentle in her voice. In fact, of all the words she’d ever spoken to me, these were the only ones that didn’t sound like some variation of You are a retarded cheerleader. You are a cheertard.
While I was still processing her tone, she turned to the others. “We’ve got intel coming in on the other three TCIs. We’ll split up and sort through the audio feed and GPS data on their movements since we planted the chips. If Chloe can pull something meaningful off of Kann’s hard drive, we can backtrack and download any info the Big Guys have on phone records to cross-reference any common contacts here in Bayport. With any luck, we may be able to identify the threat before the Big Guys do, in which case, we may actually be able to keep this case a Squad operation.”
I didn’t need Zee’s PhD to read the look in Brooke’s eyes. She didn’t want to hand this case over. For that matter, neither did I. Somebody had made me bleed, and that same somebody had killed my mark. That made this personal, and Brooke seemed to regard it as the same. This was officially one of those times when Her Royal Highness, the cheerleading captain, was a person I almost liked and borderline understood.
“Go home,” Brooke repeated her earlier order to me. I didn’t like it any more this time than I had before. I’d earned the right to be here. There was data to be processed, feeds to listen to, and she expected me to go home? Forget what I said about understanding her. She was clearly wacky.
“There is no way I’m—”
“Home,” Brooke said, and the bossy, I-Rule-the-World tone was back in her voice. “We’ll debrief you tomorrow.”
I looked at Tara, hoping she’d back me up, but she rolled her eyes. “You were nearly concussed,” she said. “One night off won’t kill you, and rest would probably be a good idea.”
Traitor.
“What do you expect me to do at home? Sit around and wonder what you guys are doing here?”
“What did you do before you joined the Squad?” Tara asked in what I hated to admit was a completely reasonable manner.
“Yeah,” Tiffany piped up. “We always sort of wondered that. Because, I mean, you like didn’t really have any friends, and you didn’t really seem like you did anything, and…”
Her twin elbowed her, and Tiffany, amazingly enough, shut her mouth. I was temporarily grateful to Brittany, until she came up with a suggestion for how I should spend my newfound downtime. “Do that deep moisturizing conditioner treatment we gave you.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Besides the fact that explosions dry out your hair, we’ve totally been meaning to talk to you about volume and bounce.”
Needless to say, that was a conversation that I would willingly have right after I volunteered to dance in the Nutcracker and legally change my name to Buttercup Posy-Pants.
“If you want,” Tiffany offered brightly. “We could come over and help you.”
Translation: We can come over and torture you. And then they’d follow the hair treatment by faux flirting with Noah, and I’d end up actually concussing myself by banging my head repeatedly against the closest wall.
“You stay,” I told the twins, shooting Brooke an aggrieved look. She smiled smugly back, and I realized I was being manipulated by the master.
And her minions.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but if anything needs decoding—anything—you call me. Deal?”
Brooke inclined her head slightly, and I got the feeling that that was as much of an answer as I was going to get.
“I’ll walk you out,” Zee volunteered. Tara opened her mouth and then closed it again. She’d probably been on the verge of making the same offer, but Brooke shook her head slightly, and Tara remained silent. With one last nod at all of the others, Zee and I made our exit, and for a little while, we walked in silence.
“Chip asked Brooke to homecoming,” Zee volunteered finally. She was always the first one to know school gossip.
“And Marty Bregman asked Chloe, but she turned him down, of course.”
I didn’t even know who Marty Bregman was.
“That’s the point,” Zee said, lifting the thought from my head. “You don’t know who Marty is. If he mattered, you would, hence Chloe politely declining.”
Somehow, I seriously doubted that Chloe’s decline was anywhere near polite. She had a chip on her shoulder, and the fact that Brooke had an A-list date couldn’t have been sitting well with her.
“Who are you going with?” I wasn’t exactly an expert at girl talk, but I was pretty sure that according to Girl Law, this was the question I was supposed to ask the Gossip Queen next.
“Aaron Lykeman,” Zee said.
That name I knew—vaguely. He was a football player and one of the Chiplings.
“Any other gossip?” I asked. To me, rumor was still a four-letter word, but as long as Zee was talking about other people, I didn’t have to worry about her going all Freud on me.
“Not really,” Zee said. Apparently, there was a first time for everything. “I actually wanted to talk to you about Brooke.”
Say what?
“I know she can seem kind of intense,” Zee said, “and I know you think she’s bossy, but Brooke’s under a lot of pressure right now.”
The last time Zee had pulled me over for a heart-to-heart, it was about Chloe. This time, it was Brooke. I was starting to wonder if our resident profiler’s mission in life was to make me understand the psychological complexities of bitchiness.
“Pressure?” I tried to sort it out in my own mind before Zee could throw herself into full-on wisdom-imparting mode. “Well, there was an explosion,” I mused. “And it sounds like the Big Guys Upstairs are kind of breathing down her neck about it.”
“And,” Zee added, “homecoming’s this weekend.”
As if I needed reminding.
“As far as Brooke’s concerned, she can’t afford to lose this case, and she can’t afford to lose that crown.” Zee gave me a look, willing me to understand her.
I tried to oblige. Apparently, Brooke was stressing about whether or not she’d win a title everyone already knew was hers. And this was supposed to make me feel sorry for her how?
“As far as Brooke’s mother is concerned, losing out on queen and losing a case to the Big Guys are equally unacceptable outcomes.” Zee paused. “She’s really leaning on Brooke right now.”
Ahhhh…the infamous Mrs. Camden. All I knew about her was that she’d trained Brooke for the Squad program from the cradle. From the tone in Zee’s voice, it sounded like she was pretty hard-core about it, even now.
“Brooke’s mom can be…intense.”
At this point, I was used to Brooke being Brooke. A few weeks ago, I probably would have told her to stick her pompoms where the sun don’t shine if she’d even thought about pulling me off a case, however briefly. All things considered, my response to Brooke’s “request” was looking downright reasonable, and Zee’s info-dumping seemed less than necessary.
“Anything else to share, O Wise One?” I asked.
“Actually,” Zee said. “Now it’s your turn to share.”
I stared at her dumbly.
“You’re tough, Toby, but you also saw somebody die today.” Zee carefully measured my response. “That’s a hard pill for anyone to swallow.”
“Technically, I didn’t see him die.” I shrugged the words off, even as I said them. “I was sort of unconscious at the time.”
“Uh-huh.” Zee was less than persuaded by my response.
“It doesn’t seem real.” I tried for honesty over technicalities this time. “This whole thing—what we do, who we are—it’s all just so surreal that I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that today actually happened.”
“Believe it or not,” Zee said, “that might be a good thing.”
And here I’d thought denial was a psychological no-no.
“What we do is surreal,” Zee said. “It’s unbelievable, and there would probably be something wrong with you if you didn’t have a hard time processing this. I just need to know—are you having second thoughts?”
“Second thoughts? About the Squad?”
She nodded.
“I’m starting to think the CIA is seriously deranged for letting us do this,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do it.” I paused. “Actually, the fact that we probably shouldn’t be doing this kind of makes me want to do it more.”
Zee snorted. “Adrenaline junkie,” she accused.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Or maybe,” Zee filled in, “the fact that the danger is real is making you realize that the good we do is real, too.”
I didn’t reply. Zee was the PhD, not me, and I wasn’t all that curious as to why nearly having my head taken off by flying debris was more of a turn-on to the spy gig than a turn-off.
“You’ll call if you need to talk?” Zee asked.
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Cool.”
“That it?”
Zee grinned. “Unless you want to talk about your feelings for Jack?”
I glared at her.
“Didn’t think so.”
CHAPTER 11
Code Word: The Fam
For the first time since I’d joined the Squad, I walked through my front door before eight o’clock at night. The first couple of weeks, I kept thinking that my mother would at least ask why we were having such long practices, but apparently, unbeknownst to me, she’d caught a documentary on competitive cheerleading, and she didn’t seem to think that the hours I was keeping were all that unusual.
Then again, there was very little that did strike my mom as unusual. She was the kind of person who could walk into a room and discover that it was filled with penguins, and she would just shrug it off like it was nothing. She wasn’t at all oblivious; she noticed everything, took note, and filed it away for future reference, but nothing fazed her. Nothing. My dad was the exact opposite. Most days, he was so caught up in equations and theorems that the mere existence of nonnumeric entities in the world took him by surprise.
“You’re home for dinner,” my mom commented the second she set eyes on me. “Help me set the table.”
See? No questions as to why I was home for dinner, or, for that matter, how I’d gotten the cut on the side of my head. She definitely noticed it, and the look in her eyes told me that she wanted me to know she’d noticed it, but she didn’t spare it so much as an additional comment.
I set the table for four, and at the last minute, my mom had me add a place setting, which could only mean one of two things. The first option was that my dad had brought someone home with him from work. The second was that one of Noah’s friends had tagged along after school. I spent a single moment devoutly praying that it was the first option. I would rather listen to multiple socially awkward physicists wax poetic about string theory than suffer the company of the freshman goof squad.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Who’s the fifth setting for?”
“Noah’s friend Chuck.”
Today was just really not my day. Chuck had an unhealthy Toby obsession. He’d had the aforementioned obsession since the pre-Squad days, and needless to say, my becoming the stereotypical teen boy’s
dream overnight hadn’t done much to dissuade him.
Long story short, I wasn’t looking forward to dinner.
By the time Chuck and Noah slid into their seats at the table, I had a very simple plan. I was going to eat quickly. I was going to glare at anyone who tried to talk to me, and I was going to thoroughly pretend that there wasn’t still blue body glitter on my chest. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, but it was functional, and after the day I’d had, I wasn’t sure I could hope for much more than that.
“Hey, Tobe.” Noah greeted me cheerfully. In fact, he sounded just happy enough to sketch me out. If he was happy, he was up to something.
“Mmvvmmmesh,” Chuck mumbled. I was about ninety percent sure that he was trying to say hello, but decided to ignore his mumbling altogether. It was kinder that way. Really.
“So,” my mom said, taking her seat next to my dad, whose eyes were glossed over in that “I’m working out a new theory of black holes” kind of way. “Anything interesting happen at school today?”
I shot darts at Noah with my eyes and hoped the threat of violence was coming across clearly enough. The last thing I needed was for my brother to advertise the fact that I’d been nominated to homecoming court.
“Some of the girls who dig me got nominated for homecoming queen,” Noah said, heeding my warning and choosing to talk about the other nominees instead. “But, of course, the real competition will be which one of the lovely ladies gets to go as my date. I can only hope there will be no bloodshed and a minimum of tears.”
Now do you see why the twins really didn’t need to encourage him? Noah was basically a puppy, the kind who’s always chewing on shoes and jumping up on people and wanting them to rub his belly (metaphorically speaking, I hope). My brother was one hundred percent unabashed energy, and for reasons that continue to elude me to this day, he was confident in his appeal to the fairer sex, even though he’d never actually succeeded in convincing a girl to go out with him.
“Toe.” Chuck tried to say something, but didn’t quite succeed. To put things mildly, good old Chuck didn’t exactly have Noah’s confidence.
“Toe?” my mom prodded.
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