by Meg Cabot
“I— I guess I never thought of it that way,” I said, absently stroking Cosabella’s woolly little head.
“So she lost her body,” Christopher said. “She’s still got her mind. Just because her former career was entirely based on her looks, that doesn’t mean she can’t have a new career, this time using her brains instead. Has she even considered that? It’s not like she doesn’t have good business sense. As you might have noticed, considering the fact that she scared the owner of a multinational corporation into trying to have her murdered.”
I blinked at him. It was true. Nikki had a lot more going for her than just her face.
But how was anyone going to convince her of that?
“If we could only figure out what Robert Stark was so scared of her revealing to everyone,” I said slowly. The embryo of an idea was forming in my mind. “The thing with the Quarks, I mean. The fact that she was instrumental in discovering it… if we could uncover it and make it public, that might be enough to boost her self-esteem into not wanting someone to hack into my head and scoop my brain out of it again.”
Christopher yelled at the cabdriver, “Turn right here!”
The cabdriver yelled back, “You are crazy! I’m in the wrong lane!”
“Just do it,” Christopher yelled back. “There’s an extra twenty in it for you.”
Cursing, the cabdriver made a right turn so suddenly, Cosabella and I lurched over into Christopher. He threw an arm across my shoulders as, all around us, cars and trucks honked. Cosabella scrambled to find footing on the seat, which mainly involved stabbing her paws into my thighs.
“Sorry,” I said, mortified that parts of my own body had gone flying into Christopher’s. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He was craning his neck to look behind us. “If he was back there, we lost him for sure.”
“We did?” I tried to straighten up, conscious that Christopher hadn’t moved his arm. It was horrible to be so hyperaware of these things, when I was sure he didn’t care at all. “Well, that’s good.”
“And I get what you’re saying,” he said. “About Nikki. She has good instincts. They just needed to be guided in the proper direction. She was right to do something about what she overheard regarding the Quarks. She just didn’t do the right thing. Blackmailing her boss instead of trying to stop him does nothing for the greater good…which is what you want to do.”
“Robert Stark isn’t collecting all that data for no reason, Christopher,” I said, looking into his eyes. He still had his arm around me, so it was kind of hard not to. Also not to notice his lips, which were looking highly kissable. But I tried to turn my mind to higher things, such as saving Nikki and her family. “I was paying attention to your speech about him in Public Speaking. You don’t get to be the fourth-richest man in the world by doing things for no reason. Tomorrow night I have to go to a party at his house. If there’s going to be any chance of my finding out what it is he’s doing, it’s going to be then—”
“Whoa,” Christopher said, his arm tightening. “You’re going to confront him yourself?”
“Well,” I said, “I think it’s going to be our only chance of ending this. Otherwise…well, my parents are threatening to bankrupt themselves because they think they can just waltz into Stark Corporate, pay off my contracts, and be done with this. Which is so never going to happen. Steven and his mom are going to have to live in hiding forever, for fear of what Robert Stark and his cronies are going to do to them. And Nikki’s going to get herself killed— or kill herself— trying to be who she used to be. So…yeah. I’m going to confront him myself. With your help, if you’re willing. What do you think? Are you willing?”
Christopher didn’t say anything right away. The cab rumbled along Houston Street, taking us God only knew where. I held my breath, waiting for his answer. I knew I couldn’t do any of this without his help. I needed him— and his cousin Felix— to break back into Stark’s mainframe and see what they could find out. I didn’t think I’d be able to just walk up to Robert Stark and go, “Tell me everything.” I needed to arm myself with some information first.
Information only they could get. If they looked in the right place. And it wasn’t encrypted. Which it probably would be.
Still. The least they could do was try….
“You’re crazy,” Christopher said. He seemed angry. At me. At himself. At the whole situation. For which I couldn’t exactly blame him. “This whole thing has been completely crazy.”
“I know,” I said, with a shrug. Secretly, though, I was encouraged. A You’re crazy wasn’t a no.
“That guy back there had a gun,” Christopher went on. “Brandon Stark didn’t even have a gun, and he managed to kidnap you just by threatening to do mean things to your friends. How do you think you’re going to cope with his dad, who’s a real gangster?”
“Well,” I said. Suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so encouraged. There were actual tears in my eyes. “That’s why this time I’m asking you for help. I know I can’t do it alone anymore. I need you, Christopher.”
“You’re damn right you do,” he said. “It’s about time you realized it.”
Then he pulled me roughly toward him and kissed me on the mouth.
Fourteen
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
That’s what Felix wanted to know when we showed up in his basement an hour later.
It was obvious from his tone that he didn’t mean where had we just been— escaping from Stark security goons and making out (well, a little) in the back of a cab.
He meant where had we been since he’d last seen us.
In fact, I wasn’t sure he’d moved from in front of his multiscreened computer command center since the first time I’d met him. He still seemed to have on the same clothes— baggy jeans, green velour shirt, and a lot of gold chains.
The only difference, really, was that there were a lot more empty plates piled up around him. His mom had evidently been bringing his meals down to him.
Well, it was hard being a computer hacker under house arrest…though I guess there were some perks. Like sandwiches and brownies from Mom, upstairs.
“We just outran a guy from Stark security,” Christopher informed him. “He was following Em. He had a gun.”
“Em?” Felix spun around in his overpadded computer chair to look at me with narrowed eyes. Then he nodded. “Oh, that’s right. I read the medical file. You’re just borrowing Nikki Howard’s body. Your real name’s Emerson…Watts, right?”
“Uh, I get to have the body for keeps, I’m hoping,” I said. “Getting your brain swapped into someone else’s body is no picnic, you know.”
“Especially if it’s Nikki Howard’s body,” Felix said, and he made a growling noise. “Mamacita, I’d like to get me some of that!”
Christopher walked over to his cousin and slapped him on the back of the head.
“Hey,” he said severely. “Show some manners. Just because you live in a basement doesn’t mean you don’t have to act like a gentleman around ladies.”
“Ow,” Felix said, reaching up to clutch his head. “Stop. I was only playing.”
“It’s okay,” I said to Christopher. I actually felt a little sorry for his cousin. It had to be hard to be so smart and yet not have any outlets— positive ones, anyway— for all that intelligence.
“No,” Christopher said, shaking his head at me. Felix might have been playing, but Christopher definitely wasn’t. “It’s not.”
I blushed. Christopher was being chivalrous toward me now…
…but back in the cab, after he’d pulled me so roughly toward him and kissed me, he’d pushed me just as roughly away and muttered, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
I’d stared at him in astonishment, my lips still tingling from where his mouth had bruised mine, and said, “Christopher. It’s all right.” Believe me. It was more than all right.
“No,” he’d said. “It’s not.”
So. I still wasn’t forgiven
. Not yet. It was just that he couldn’t help kissing me from time to time.
Boys are so weird.
Now he pointed at one of the computer monitors in front of Felix, which was streaming information.
“We’re still on Stark’s mainframe?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Felix said. He sounded sulky. He leaned back in his computer chair so that he could rest his gigantic feet on one of the milk crates that made up his jerry-rigged command center, near some of the empty plates. “Not that they’re doing anything interesting. I’m more bored with this hack than with all the Stargates combined.”
“They’re actually doing a lot that’s interesting,” Christopher said. “They’re storing all the data people who bought the new Quarks are uploading.”
This information startled Felix so much that he jumped, bringing his feet down from the milk crate and accidentally taking all the plates down, too, causing them to fall to the floor with a crash.
He didn’t seem to care or even notice, however. His fingers began flying over the keyboard in front of the Stark monitor.
“Holy crap,” he said, looking— for the first time— actually wide-awake and excited. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? What would they care about a bunch of data from some pissant plastic student laptops? It doesn’t make any sense. Where are they storing it? I’m not seeing it.” He took a slurp from one of the Cokes his mom had brought down to us (Aunt Jackie was super happy to see me. She’d gotten the complete Nikki Howard fragrance collection for Christmas from her husband and wanted me to sign the box with Nikki’s face smiling alluringly up from it). “Where are they putting it?”
“What do you mean, you’re not seeing it?” Christopher demanded. “Can you find the data or not?”
“Oh, it’s on here,” Felix said, slurping the Coke. “Their encryption is a joke. I’ve never seen a corporation so full of itself. It’s like they think no one can touch them. And maybe that’s because no one’s ever cared enough before to try. But, I mean, I can’t tell what they want all this crap for. They’ve got kids’ Facebook and Flickr pages, even their damned dental records. What would they want that for? And here’s a bunch of online budget travel reservations. Priceline and cruise ships and spring break school trips…”
“Maybe they want to get into the travel business?” I ventured with a shrug. “Stark doesn’t have a commercial airline.”
“Phoenix,” Felix said.
“They want to base their travel hub out of Phoenix?” Christopher asked, confused.
“No,” Felix said. His straw hit the bottom of his soda can. “That’s what they’re calling the database where they’re keeping all these files. Project Phoenix.”
Christopher looked at me blankly. “What’s in Phoenix?”
I shrugged again. “Desert?”
“Senior citizens,” Felix said, when Christopher looked at him. “Old people who drive golf carts. In pastels.”
“Look it up,” Christopher said to Felix.
Felix sighed, and typed the word phoenix into a search engine.
“Phoenix,” he read, when the definition came up. “A mythical sacred fire bird with a thousand-year life cycle, near the end of which it builds a nest of myrrh twigs, then self-ignites, then is born anew from the ashes.”
We all looked at one another blankly.
“Maybe it’s a new video game,” I suggested. “And the people whose data they’ve collected all have high scores on Journeyquest or something. And they want to send the game to them as testers.”
“Then they should have sent it to me,” Christopher said, looking (justifiably) offended.
“Yeah,” Felix said, clicking on the Facebook page of one of the new Quark owners. “And no way does this loser play Journeyquest. Look at him. Hi, I’m Curt. I like the Dave Matthews Band. I only drink organically grown coffee. I’m going hiking with my dog in Seattle at the end of the month. I suck.”
I looked at Curt’s profile. He definitely wasn’t a gamer. He listed running and biking as his hobbies. He was attractive, without an ounce of body fat on him. He liked dogs and his nephews and wanted to save the whales.
All of which were admirable qualities and it was mean of Felix to be making fun of him.
“Show me another one,” I said.
“Hi,” Felix said, clicking on another profile. “I’m Kerry. Oooooh, Kerry’s hot. She likes writing and sunsets. I like writing and sunsets, too, Kerry. Look at that, Kerry’s going to Guatemala to help teach children to read next month. That’s nice of her. What else does Stark know about Kerry? Let’s check her medical records. She had to e-mail them to the program she’s going to Guatemala with. Oh, look at that. Perfect health. Not even a cavity. Surprise. Those Quark buyers are way too healthy. Eat a cheeseburger, Kerry, swimming in grease!” Felix was yelling at his monitors.
Felix got excited way too easily. Maybe it was all the caffeine and sugar in the Cokes he drank.
“It’s weird,” I said, “that they’re all so crunchy granola.”
“Or,” Christopher said, looking at me, “someone at Stark is purposefully weeding through this data.”
“And only saving the files on the healthy, attractive ones?” I squinted at Kerry’s Facebook picture. She was standing in the sun on a hiking trail, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. She looked slim and fresh-faced and happy.
“But why?” Felix asked, reaching for the Coke I hadn’t touched (Nikki’s body couldn’t handle caffeine or high fructose corn syrup). “I hate healthy people.”
“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “But what else do they all have in common?”
“They take good care of their bodies,” I ventured.
“They’re all hot,” Felix said.
“And they’re all going places,” Christopher said, “with their lives.”
“Robert Stark is forming an army,” I said with wonder.
“Yeah,” Felix said sarcastically. “Of really boring people.”
Fifteen
“OH, THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE,” GABRIEL said, opening the door to his apartment.
I couldn’t figure out why he was so happy to see us. Not at first.
I’d offered to come over to his apartment with some takeout, having realized I was going to be no help whatsoever in solving the mystery of Project Phoenix…
…at least, not by sitting around, reading over file after file of incredibly attractive Stark Quark owners. That was something Christopher and Felix could do on their own.
So you could imagine my surprise when Christopher said he would come with me to Gabriel’s. Don’t ask me why. He hadn’t grabbed and kissed me again, or supplied an explanation for why he’d done so in the cab that afternoon. As far as I could tell, he still hated my guts and planned on continuing to do so indefinitely.
I couldn’t help wishing I could be more like Nikki. I’m sure she’d had plenty of guys play weird mind games with her. She wouldn’t put up with Christopher’s guff for more than five minutes. I’d love to have asked her how she dealt with guys like him. I would have done so, in fact…
…if I thought I could get away with it without her punching me in the mouth and demanding again that I give her back her body.
Inside the Thai restaurant where we’d gone to pick up the takeout, it had been warm and dry and had smelled insanely good. I’d ordered one of almost everything to go, then sat waiting for the food on a red vinyl padded chair with Cosy on my lap while Christopher sat beside us, texting Felix on his cell.
After a little while of trying to ignore Christopher’s presence —his highly kissable lips and big, raw-looking hands— it occurred to me: Wait a minute. I didn’t have to ask Nikki for her advice. I could just come right out and demand an explanation from Christopher himself about where we stood as a couple. I deserved that, at the very least. I mean, we’d been friends for years before we’d ever been boyfriend-girlfriend (if we were even that).
What was I so scared of, anyway? He was just a high
school boy. I was freaking Nikki Howard, supermodel.
Even if I wasn’t, really.
Why was I so scared of what he was going to say, anyway? We’d already hurt each other as much as we possibly could. What more could we possibly do to each other?
And Lulu had said we needed to communicate more. Right?
“Christopher,” I’d begun, after taking a deep breath and telling myself to be brave. After all, he’d kissed me, right? That had to mean he still liked me, at least a little. “What exactly—”
“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t even look up from his cell phone.
“Don’t what?” I asked, offended. I mean, really! The least he could have done was look at me!
“Don’t start talking about our relationship,” he said.
How had he known? How do they always know? What do they have, some kind of radar?
“Uh,” I said.
Now I wasn’t just offended. I was mad. I wasn’t one of those whiny I want to know where our relationship is going kind of girls. I’d never brought it up once, not in the whole time we were going out.
Which, okay, had only been for, like, two weeks. And for a large part of that time I’d been shacked up with Brandon Stark…against my will.
But still.
“I think I have a right to know where our relationship currently stands,” I said indignantly. “Because I’ll be honest: If you’re going to keep playing these head games, I’m just going to start seeing other people.”
Yeah! That sounded good. Like something Lauren Conrad or someone would say. Not that Lauren Conrad is this huge role model or anything.
But who else do we single girls have to guide us during these complex modern times? Seriously, everyone else is divorced.
Christopher lowered his cell phone and stared at me with an expression of utter disbelief.
“What?” he said. His voice cracked.
“I mean it,” I said.
I didn’t want to get into a huge fight in a Thai takeout place in Brooklyn.
But come on. A girl has to have standards.
“You can’t just come rescue me— twice— kiss me a bunch of times, and then act like you don’t even care about me.” I tossed some of my hair. “I don’t have time for this kind of game playing. I need to know. Either you’re into me or you’re not. If you are, great. If you’re not, quit kissing me. It’s only fair.”
