Perfect Cover (The Squad 1)

To my credit (and possibly because of my little psycho-session with Zee), there wasn’t a single obscenity in the message I left in response. “Hey, this is Toby. You’re probably screening my call, and you probably won’t call me back.”

As this was an exercise in complete futility, I hung up the phone. I opened my mouth to curse Chloe, but then I thought of the whole hopeless dork/light saber thing, and couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Darn Zee.

CHAPTER 19

Code Word: Bubbles

Checking your email every fifteen seconds isn’t a healthy habit. I know this, and usually the only reason I check my email is to activate new user accounts through which I can mask my own internet activity, but Chloe had said she’d send the files my way, and as much as she wasn’t exactly the Honest Abe of the cheerleading world, I didn’t think she cared enough about what I thought to lie to my face. At least not about this.

I refreshed my inbox.

“Wow. You get like totally no email.”

I physically jumped in my seat, and Bubbles tilted her head to the side.

“Bubbles,” I said slowly.

“Uh-huh?”

“What are you doing in my room?”

“Watching you check your email.” She tilted her head in the other direction. “You don’t have any.”

I was tempted to thank her for the clarification, but became incredibly distracted when, without any warning, she hooked her hand around one of her ankles and lifted her leg straight up until it nearly hit her ear. To top it off, she just stood there, looking at me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like she hadn’t just contorted herself into a position that was painful to even look at.

“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.