CHAPTER 7
Code Word: Smile
“Go ahead,” I told Tara. “Ask me what happened.”
She arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me. “What happened?”
There was something in the tone of her voice, some trick to the words that made me narrow my eyes. “You already know.”
She smiled slightly and merged onto the highway. I’d finally made it out of the gym, and now the two of us were on our way to the Marymount Hotel, where our mark, Jacob Kann, had checked in earlier that week. We’d picked up bugs and tracking chips from the guidepost, our loading center, and then—thankfully—the two of us had hightailed it out of there before any of the others had a chance to ask a single question about my interaction with Jack.
About that time, I realized how strange it was that none of the others had managed to get a question in. These were girls who were trained to get information out of people. Plus they single-handedly ran our school’s rumor mill. So why hadn’t they asked about Jack?
The answer was simple. “The others already know, too, don’t they?”
How was that even possible? The gym had been crowded and noisy, and even Tara had been too far away to hear our exchange. Jack and I had kept our voices low. And yet…
“There’s a slight chance that I read lips,” Tara admitted.
Well, that answered that question.
“And the others?” Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Tara ratting me out.
Tara sighed. “I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say there’s a very good chance it has something to do with your body language and Zee’s ability to read people.”
And there you had it. Between a linguistics expert and a profiler who could read people like one of those See Spot Run books, I had no hope for keeping any aspect of my personal life private.
“I don’t like him,” I told Tara.
She remained silent, but allowed the edges of her lips to twitch slightly.
“You suck.” I wasn’t feeling very forgiving of twitchy lips and half smiles.
“It’s not that bad, Toby,” she said. “If it wasn’t Jack, it would be somebody else. You knew coming into this what it would entail. When you become one of those girls, those guys start asking you out, and to stay one of those girls, you have to say yes.”
The idea of saying yes to Chip or any of his followers (who I liked to think of as Chiplings) made me want to swallow my tongue in a fit of loathing. In comparison, going to homecoming with Jack was significantly less nauseating.
“And for all we know,” Tara said, continuing her logical assessment of my situation, “Peyton might not have anything to do with the TCI influx, in which case, your date with Jack can be just that: a date.”
I had to marvel at the fact that Tara was more or less lifting my objections to the homecoming situation right out of my head. It was scary how well she knew me—and my thought process. Being on the Squad was a lot like going to summer camp—after a few weeks, you start to feel like you’ve known the other campers for years. The ten of us spent so much time together—mornings before school, lunch, practice (of both the cheerleading and operative varieties) after school. The Squad wasn’t just an activity. It was a way of life.
“Toby?” In response to Tara’s prodding, I shrugged. A large part of me still wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that I’d gone from being a loner to spending most of my waking hours around nine other girls. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about how I felt about it, because I probably should have hated it more than I did.
“You want the hotel room or the car?” I asked Tara, changing the subject. Our plan of action was pretty simple. We needed to break into Jacob’s hotel room to plant a series of bugs so that we could monitor his phone and in-room conversations, and we needed to plant a tracking device on his car so that we could track his location, and, if necessary, tail him tomorrow.
“I’ll take point on the room,” Tara said. “You can come with, though.”
I knew instinctively that coming from Tara, “you can come with” translated directly to “I’ll show you general procedure for breaking into hotel rooms.” If she’d been any of the other girls, she probably would have come out and said it, but Tara was nothing if not subtle.
“And I’ll take point on the car?” I was relatively new to the spy gig, but planting a microtracker on the bottom of a Bentley with license plate number Z1X459 seemed pretty straightforward, and I was a big fan of learning by doing. I’d spent enough time in the past couple of weeks training. I was ready for some real action.
“You’ll take point on the car,” Tara confirmed as she pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot across the street from the hotel. She was careful to park the car so that it was obscured from the view of anyone inside the restaurant by a conveniently placed drive-through menu, and without pausing, the two of us slipped out of the car. Right before I closed the door, I remembered to pick up the tracking device. I moved to put it in my pocket before I remembered that my cheerleading uniform didn’t have pockets, and then, only mildly mortified, I slipped it into my bra.
“Someone’s been practicing.” Tara’s eyes danced with barely restrained mirth.
“Shut up.”
Sticking things inside my bra made me feel like a stripper, but after a couple of tutorials from Bubbles, I could finally manage a pseudostealth bra tuck without looking like I was groping myself. All things considered, that was a definite plus, even if I didn’t actually feel less conspicuous.
As we crossed the street and headed for the hotel, something occurred to me. “Should we have changed out of our uniforms?” I asked. “If we get caught, the ginormous BHS on our chests will make it pretty easy for someone to track us down.”
“We won’t get caught,” Tara said, “and all anyone will remember was that we were cheerleaders.”
That was the thing about the uniforms—people never looked past them. Anyone who saw us would just remember seeing two cheerleaders. They’d probably think we were hot, but our faces and our identifying features wouldn’t be nearly as salient in their minds as the length of our skirts, and even if they did remember seeing two cheerleaders, no one in their right minds would see us as any kind of threat.
“Besides,” Tara added, “we won’t be wearing the uniforms for long.”