CHAPTER 15 Code Word Hottie
Code Word: Hottie
“Help me out here,” I said to the room at large. “We need to place surveillance on an evil law firm that probably has so much security that we couldn’t sneeze in front of their building without someone handcuffing us to a large metal object, and we’re throwing a party because why?”
Brittany leaned forward, her lips spreading into the smile of a girl who was about to spread a particularly juicy bit of gossip. “Jack.”
“Jack?”
“Oooohhhhh! Jack!” Lucy clapped her hands in front of her face.
“Jack Peyton,” April said, and again, I felt like the dumb stepcousin or something. April turned to Chloe. “Are you telling me that Jack Peyton, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Good-Looking himself, is somehow tied up in this?”
“His name’s actually John Peyton,” Brooke said. “John Peyton the Fourth. His great-grandfather was John, his grandfather was Johnny, his father is John-John, and he’s Jack.”
“Let me guess,” I said, doing the mental math. “John, Johnny, and John-John, they’re the Peyton in Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray?”
“John was the founder, Johnny was his first partner, and now that they’re gone, John-John is the senior partner.”
So Jack Peyton (whoever that was) was the son of the Big Kahuna of the evil law firm.
“And we’re throwing a party because why?” This time, I asked the question louder, like that would get me an answer. Codes and numbers made sense to me. The Squad way of life did not.
“The easiest way to Peyton is through Jack,” Brooke said. “Trust me.”
Little warning bells went off in the back of my head at the tone of Brooke’s voice. The bells sounded suspiciously like they were saying “stay away from Brooke’s ex-boyfriend; go near Jack Peyton and die!”
“Jack never misses a party,” Chloe said. “If one of us is going to use him to get into Peyton, we’ll just have to throw one.” She gave me another special Chloe look before turning to smile at April, her perfect little protégée. “Can we move Saturday’s party up to tomorrow night?”
April nodded. “Daddy’s out of town, the pool house is always open, and besides, I have it on very good authority that Thursday is the new Friday.”
“Great,” Chloe said, and she turned back to Brooke. “You think you can get Jack to take you to Peyton?” It sounded more like a challenge than a question.
Brooke returned Chloe’s smile. “Do you think you can?” she asked sweetly.
Whoa. I might not have been cheerliterate, but I could read between the lines.
Somewhere along the way, this Jack guy had dated both Brooke and Chloe.
What a player. And, for that matter, what an idiot.
You couldn’t pay me enough money to spend time alone with either one of them, and some guy had actually voluntarily dated them both?
Clearly, this Jack character had emotional, if not mental, problems.
“Guys, this is serious.” Tara’s voice was louder this time, and sharp enough to cut the silence between Chloe and Brooke. “We don’t have time for some infantile spitting contest.”
Wow. Chalk another one up for the British girl.
In one motion, Brooke and Chloe turned to glare at Tara.
“You know as well as I do that Jack doesn’t like cheerleaders,” Tara said, her voice nice and calm again, despite the fact that I could still actually see the tension in her neck. “He won’t take either of you to Peyton.”
“Classic operant conditioning,” Zee piped up. “He associates cheerleaders with pain and heartache and physical discomfort. He views us as an ontological kind and extends properties freely from one exemplar to another.”
Hmmm. Maybe Jack wasn’t as dumb as I’d thought. We seemed to have the same kinds of beliefs about cheerleaders as a species.
“In short, he hates all of us equally.” Zee defused the tension between Chloe and Brooke with a single flip of her hair. “I don’t think he can even tell most of us apart.”
I couldn’t help but wonder exactly why Zee kept glancing at me as she spoke.
“If he hates us so much, why does he hang out with us?” Bubbles asked, knotting up her pretty little forehead in what appeared to be genuine and profound confusion.
“Status quo,” Zee said. “Jack was born to rule. It’s been ingrained in him since childhood, and at Bayport, we, my friends, are the ruling class.”
“So he’ll hang out with us, but he won’t date us?” one of the twins asked. “That is like so totally wrong.”
“He has textbook Conditioned Cheerleader Aversion,” Zee said.
He and I both.
And that’s when I got why Zee kept looking at me. Feeling paranoid, I glanced around the room. Brooke and Chloe were looking at Zee looking at me. Tara had her eyes fixed on mine. One by one, the rest of the girls followed suit.
“He likes you,” Zee said frankly. “He thinks you’re different.”
“Yeah,” Brittany said, “if by different you mean bizarre and freakish.”
“Zee’s right.” Brooke spoke slowly. “Jack’s been so anti lately, but today at lunch, he actually talked to Toby.”
Today at lunch? I played the whole ordeal over in my head: Noah’s celebration, Hayley’s threats, Lucy saving me, Brooke instructing me to flirt with Chip, me resolving to get some blackmail material on the arrogant guy with dark hair …
It occurred to me then that April had referred to Jack Peyton as Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Good-Looking. As much as I hated to admit it, Smirky Boy had been tall. He’d had dark hair. He’d known that he was good-looking.
“That’s Jack Peyton?” I asked. I’d fully intended to cut smarmy smirk boy down to size and wipe the cocky expression off his perfectly symmetrical face.
And now a bunch of cheerleaders were telling me I was supposed to suck up to the guy?
Make him like me? Have him take me back to Daddy Dearest’s office so I could plant some kind of cheer bug there?
“No way,” I said. “I hate that guy.”
“That’s why you’re perfect,” Zee said, highly satisfied with her analysis of the situation. “Everyone else thinks he’s good-looking; you couldn’t care less. Everyone else would like their lips plastered to his; you’d just as soon kick him in the crotch.”
I had to admit it—Miss PhD Zee was right on target, about the crotch-kicking, at least.
“You are exactly what Jack is looking for. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
I tried to imagine myself seducing Jack, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I was genuinely concerned that the very thought might make me throw up in my own mouth.
“Toby.” It was Tara, her eyes still on mine. “Please.”
I’d wondered earlier in the day what the real Tara was like, who she was when the cheerleading cover went away and her guard came down. Now she was looking at me, and for the first time, she didn’t seem poised. She didn’t seem sophisticated.
She seemed lost, and I had no idea why.
“Okay,” I said. Tara was my partner. And yeah, she’d only been my partner for like a day, but that was enough. Black belt and “attitude problems” aside, I was turning into a verifiable softy.
“If Jack’s going to be your mark,” Tiffany mused, “you’re probably going to need some new shoes.”
That’s where I drew the line. If I was going to be putting the moves on one of those guys (you know, the guys who date those girls), I was damn well going to do it in combat boots.
“Did you get her a gel bra today?” Brittany asked Tara, eyeing my boobs. I folded my arms over my chest and glared at her. Silently, Tara nodded.
“Can we discuss something other than my chest?” I asked, my voice dangerously pleasant. “Like the other two parts of the Mission?”
“Chloe, you’ll take lead on the Infotech hack,” Brooke said, and I wondered how much of that decision was based on the fact that Chloe was Brooke’s second-in-command and the most capable of running a large tech-based operation, and how much of it was basic cheer politics.
“I’ll handle the Heath Shannon end of things.
Chlo, you’ve got Toby. Let me know who else you need. ”
Wait a second. Had Brooke just given me to Chloe? Had she seriously just loaned me out like a tube of flavored lip gloss? And what about Tara? The two of us were supposed to be partners.
Just as these thoughts were flying through my head, Lucy piped up with a suggestion of her own.
“Let’s talk about who’s going to go through the files on the disk,” she said brightly. “Not it!”
Not it? What was she, five?
“Not it!” Seven other voices said in unison.
Damn.
April and I stared at each other, and then April spoke up. “Toby and I can’t do it alone,” she said. “We don’t know what to look for.”
“I’ll do it.” Chloe’s offer surprised me. “We should start working on a game plan for hacking Infotech’s system anyway. We can listen to the audio files and strategize at the same time.”
Who was this mysterious we she was speaking of?
“I’ll stay, too,” Tara said.
“No.” Brooke didn’t provide a reason, but her voice was strong and final.
Tara opened her mouth and then closed it again. Then, after a moment’s deliberation, she spoke calmly and clearly. “Toby’s my partner. If she’s going to be here with Chloe making plans for the Infotech hack, I should be here.”
“Tara,” Brooke said evenly. “Go home. Zee and I will tail Heath Shannon tonight, and by tomorrow, we’ll have a plan of attack on that front.
Chloe and Toby can handle the Infotech strategizing on their own.
And just for good measure, Bubbles and Lucy will case Infotech tonight, on the off chance that the Big Guys are wrong and Heath Shannon interacts directly with the source, rather than using Peyton as a middleman. ”
“I’ll go with you and Zee, or Bubbles and Lucy,” Tara said. “I can’t just do nothing.”
“Yes,” Brooke said, “you can. And you will.”
The only thing about that discussion that wasn’t slipping straight over my head was the fact that Brooke was even bossier than I’d previously thought, and that somehow, I’d been drafted not only to pick up Jack Peyton at April’s party the following night, but also to coordinate with Chloe on breaking into Infotech’s system while scanning the rest of the digi-disk for files that might shed some more light on our current situation.
The way the Squad worked was becoming clearer to me by the moment.
Apparently, the Big Guys Upstairs issued orders to Brooke, Brooke issued orders to the rest of us, Brittany and Tiffany did makeovers, all of the girls did halftime routines, some of them went on low-key stakeouts, and I did everything else.
I glanced at my watch. It was five-thirty at night.
I’d been a member of the Squad for exactly twelve hours, and in that time, I’d slapped a guy’s ass, bought a gel bra, successfully obtained a disk that contained classified information, learned that the lives of nameless foreign operatives were in the hands of fewer than a dozen high school cheerleaders, and quite possibly torn every muscle in my entire body doing bouncy little jumps with names like toe touch and spread eagle. And now …
“You might want to call your parents, To-bee,” Chloe advised me, condescension dripping from her tone. “You’re not going to be home for dinner.”