I was still smiling with anticipation a few minutes later when I left the Quad and headed up to my first hour. My mind on reconnaissance missions and tailing hostile individuals who may have posed a threat to our national security, I wasn’t watching where I was going, and as I rounded a corner on the way to my geometry class, I ran smack into a large, smirking Jack-shaped object.
I bounced off of him and stumbled backward, falling to the ground. I jumped immediately back to my feet, the way I would have in the middle of a fight. Jack caught me in his arms and grinned.
“Happy to see me?” he asked, taking in the goofy smile that was still plastered to my face and ignoring the reflexive narrowing of my eyes that hit me the moment his hands touched my arms.
“I have to say, Ev, the whole smiling thing really works for you. Not that your little scowl isn’t cute, too, but…”
I tried to glare at him, but he just touched the side of my face.
“See?” he said. “Cute scowl.”
Just then, I didn’t care who his father was, or his uncle. All I could think was that I’d show him cute.
“Vote for Toby!”
Any violent and/or furious kiss-related thoughts rising in my mind were immediately quelled when I heard a familiar voice that sounded way too self-satisfied for its owner’s good.
“Vote for Toby. Vote for Toby. Hey, baby. How you doin’?” Slight pause. “Vote for Toby.”
Jack glanced over his shoulder at the source of the voice and then turned back to me, incredulous. “Does your brother have a death wish?” he asked.
“Toby Klein—the people’s candidate. Voting for Toby is like voting for yourself, except it’s not at all narcissistic. Vote for Toby. She’ll—Well, hello there, gorgeous. Call me. We’ll do lunch.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again.
“Vote for Toby!” Whatever he was doing, Noah was getting progressively louder.
“Yes,” I said, answering Jack’s question. “He has an obvious death wish. He must also be a masochist, because this is going to hurt.”
My moment with Jack temporarily forgotten, I stalked off, rounded another corner, and came face to face with my brother.
He was wearing a sandwich board with my photo plastered to the front.
He was handing out buttons and flyers with my name on them.
And, unless I was mistaken, he’d gotten his friends to do the same.
“Vote for Toby.”
“Vote for Toby.”
“Vote for Toby.”
All up and down the hallway, the biggest goofballs in the class below me were actually encouraging their peers to throw their homecoming votes my way. From this distance, it looked like Chuck might have even been handing out candy.
I may be short, but it only took me three hugely angry steps to be standing directly behind my brother. I tapped him on the shoulder—harder than required to get his attention—and he turned around.
“Vote for To—” he started to say, but the moment he saw the look on my face, he changed his mind. “Hey there, big sis,” he said in a little-boy voice especially designed to remind me that I was his older sister, he was the baby, and my family had a strict no-maiming policy.
He needn’t have worried. I wasn’t going to maim him. I was going to end him.
“Noah,” I said through gritted teeth. He waited, and I couldn’t even go on. Instead, I gestured at his sandwich board, the buttons, and the various other freshmen watching our interaction, their hands full of VOTE TOBY posters.
“Explanation,” I barked, knowing that nothing he said would make this any better, but feeling as if I should allow him to have some final words other than “hey there, big sis.”
Noah said nothing.
“Now.” My voice started off low and dangerous, but it rose to a yell.
“I told you,” Noah said, his grin never faltering, even as he showed the beginning signs of preparing to run. “I’m your campaign manager.”
“I don’t want a campaign manager,” I said, stepping even further into his personal space. “I don’t want to win.”
“I know,” Noah said. “That’s why you’d be perfect!”
I grabbed the lapels of his shirt, even though the fact that he had three or four inches on me meant that I had to reach up a little to do it. “If you don’t make all of this disappear in the next five minutes,” I said, “you’ll be perfectly dead, and Mom and Dad will never miss you. Clear?”
“Crystal,” Noah replied. Then he raised his voice.
“Okay, guys. We have a no-go. That’s a no-go on the posters, buttons, and boards.”
I released him, and as he scurried down the hallway, I heard him yell one last thing.
“Proceed to Plan B.”
“Death wish,” Jack said, coming up beside me. “Clearly.”
About that time, I realized that due to the volume of the threats I’d issued to my brother, everyone had heard me sounding about as dangerous as I get. This type of behavior didn’t exactly qualify as flying under the radar and taking advantage of the cheerleader stereotype to convince people that I couldn’t possibly be anything more than I seemed.
The Squad would not approve.
“Uhhh…Go Lions,” I added. My audience let out a collective shrug and dissolved.
“How long until that hits the rumor mill?” I asked Jack below my breath.
“Seven-point-eight seconds,” Jack answered solemnly.
“But don’t worry, Zee’ll come up with something more interesting for people to talk about. She always does.”
He was right. That was part of Zee’s job, orchestrating gossip that served our purposes and stomping out rumors that hurt them. Sometimes, Jack was so perceptive that it truly freaked me out. The only thing I was sure about when it came to Jack’s family was that Jack didn’t know what his uncle did, or, for that matter, what I did. Whether or not he knew the full extent of what his father’s firm did was up in the air. Of all the people who could potentially discover our secret, Jack was the candidate whose discovery would devastate our operation the most, and he was the one person most likely to actually sort things out.
And he was my homecoming date.
“I don’t know if Zee will be able to do anything about it,” I said, trying not to let him see that his comment had really rocked me. “It doesn’t get much juicier than a cheerleader-issued death threat.”
“Oh, come on, CDTs happen all the time,” Jack said solemnly. “Usually it’s over stuff like two girls wearing the same outfit, or someone telling someone else that a third person said they were a slut, but still, cheerleader death threats are old news.”
He was trying to make me feel better, and there was a chance he was right, but those stupid VOTE TOBY posters were still plastered all over the walls, and it was hard for me to be optimistic about anything with my own face staring back at me, reminding me that the world hated me and wanted me to suffer.
“But you know, Ev, if you really want them talking about something else, I could probably help you out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
He took my words as a challenge, pressed me to a wall, and kissed me so long and hard that even once I knew we had an audience, I couldn’t pull away.
This was wrong. There was a conflict of interest here, and besides which, he was at the top of a hierarchy I hated. Forget that I was on top, too. I wasn’t the kind of girl to go weak at the knees just because someone was…
The most incredible kisser. Ever.
His hands moved from the side of my face down my neck and to my waist.
I hated him. I hated being a cheerleader.
I hated that I didn’t actually hate him or being a cheerleader. But most of all, I hated it when we stopped kissing.
“Miss Klein! Mr. Peyton! Perhaps the two of you should invest in a room?” Mr. Corkin pushed to the front of the crowd that had gathered around the two of us while I’d been lost in my own thoughts and Jack’s lips.
“I don’t suppose you’d know where we might get one?” Jack inquired, his face a mask of civility, his tone overly polite.
Mr. Corkin sputtered.
“No?” Jack said. “In that case,” he flicked his eyes over to mine, “maybe the two of us should go to class?”
“Jack Peyton is HOT!” someone from the audience yelled.
“Toby Klein is HOTTER,” a male voice argued, and I almost went into an epileptic fit of disgust at both the words and the tone.
“Now, now,” Jack said, raising his hands. “Don’t be ridiculous. Mr. Corkin is clearly the hottest.”
Corkin turned bright, bright red, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
Jack Peyton was everything I shouldn’t want in a guy—including, given his background, potentially evil—but I had to admire someone who could make Mr. Corkin turn a nice shade of fuchsia without ever even suggesting that a posterior-kissing might be in order.
Jack wrapped his arm around me. I forced myself to shrug it off, but as the two of us walked through the crowd, he put it back and bent down so that his mouth was right next to my ear.
“See, Ev?” he said. “By lunchtime, no one will be talking about any death threats you may have allegedly issued toward your younger brother. Everyone will be talking about what just happened between the two of us.”
He sounded vaguely like a lawyer, and I remembered all of the reasons that I didn’t want the rest of the school talking about him and me any more than I wanted them talking about the fact that my little brother could provoke even the sanest of cheerleaders to homicide.
“Let me guess,” Jack said, taking in my silence. “You don’t want them talking about us, either.”
“Give the man a prize.”
He fixed his eyes on mine, and for a moment, he looked almost sad. “They’ll always talk, Toby.”
My real name, for a rare moment of real seriousness between the two of us.
“That’s the life. People watch you, and they talk about you, and they expect you to act a certain way until no matter what you do, they see it as part of whatever it is that you’re supposed to be.”
Now he wasn’t talking like a lawyer. He was talking like someone who knew way too much about my life, way too much about the Squad and the reason it worked. Or maybe he was just talking like someone who’d lived the high life for way too long.
“It sucks,” I said.
Jack shrugged. “You get used to it,” he said. “And it’s not all bad.” His eyes lingered on mine.
At that exact moment, four scrawny guys ran by wearing nothing but ski masks, boxers, and paint on their chests. As they passed us, I tried to make out the writing on their chests and realized that each guy bore one letter.
T. O. B.
“Y.” Jack completed the sequence for me. “I have to hand it to your brother. He’s inventive. And brave.”
And, I thought, so incredibly dead.
Obviously, no combination of mystery and intrigue was going to be enough to gear me up for this day. I even had doubts that coffee would do the trick. My first class hadn’t even started yet, and I’d already publicly threatened to exact physical revenge upon the creature formerly known as my little brother, engaged in some serious PDA with someone I wasn’t supposed to have actual feelings for, and watched the aforementioned brother-creature and his friends streak by wearing nothing but boxers and my name painted on their chests. Not to mention the part of the equation where I’d gotten an operative assignment so dangerous it had been designated “Do Not Engage.”
Tomorrow, I was going for at least three cups of coffee, just to be on the safe side.
The bell rang, and without a word, Jack and I went our separate ways, and I found myself thinking disturbingly girly thoughts along the vein of “how can he like me if he doesn’t really know me?” and “does he really like me, or is it just that I’m the only girl who’s ever turned him down?”
Forget the coffee, I thought, wanting to ram my head into something quite hard to discourage my subconscious from any more probing thoughts. Tomorrow morning, I’m going with cyanide.
CHAPTER 15
Code Word: Boyfriend
“It was like the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“And then this teacher was all ‘get a room,’ and I was all ‘yeah, please do.’”
“I hear they’re going to be on Survivor: Couples’ Edition.”
“Really? I heard they’d already accepted an offer from Real World: Bayport.”
“I soooooo wish I was Toby Klein.”
By lunchtime, Jack and I were the primary topic of conversation in the cafeteria, and bits and pieces of conversations assaulted my ears as I made my way toward the central table. I was beginning to feel like I couldn’t sneeze without making front-page news: God Squad Member Toby Klein Sneezes; Allergies Are IN!
Of course, some of the whispers were less than flattering. Jack was the number-one hottie at our school, and Chloe (Jack ex number two) wasn’t the only one whose hackles were up at the thought of a Toby/Jack pairing.
“She is such a slut.”
Yup. Jack was the only guy I’d ever kissed, and we hadn’t done anything but, so clearly, I was Slut Girl. Of course, given the fact that the person who was slinging the s-word around was in fact much “friendlier” toward the opposite sex than I was, the insult didn’t carry much of a punch.
“And her technique is total crap.”
At first, I thought they were talking about my kissing technique—WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MY KISSING TECHNIQUE?—but then I realized that when junior varsity cheerleaders say “technique,” they mean one and only one thing.
“I mean, did you see that back handspring?”
Insults were one thing coming from Chloe; whether or not we were friends, we were teammates, and that meant something, but these JV girls didn’t know me, and I was getting damn tired of people picking on my handsprings.
“You know,” I said, sauntering up to their group and inserting myself into their conversation. “Maybe you’re right. The other girls on varsity think my standing back tuck is much cleaner than my back handspring, and even my back handspring back tuck has a little more oomph, so maybe I just shouldn’t bother with the easier stuff at all.” I paused and looked at each of the JV cheerleaders in turn. “This morning, Bubbles was teaching me how to do a layout. Maybe next year, we’ll start requiring more advanced tumbling skills for new recruits.”
The girls shut their mouths one by one. As jealous as they were, and as much as they hated me, I’d just reminded them that I held their futures in my hands. There were four seniors on varsity this year, which meant that we’d have four open slots on the Squad next year, and as far as these girls knew, the remaining members simply voted in new ones on whims. None of these girls had made varsity as sophomores, but they were still pretending that they stood a chance junior year, and some of them might have.
If they managed to go that long without really pissing me off.
“Go ahead and up the tumbling requirements,” Hayley Hoffman sniffed. “My back handspring back tuck is flawless.”
“But your personality,” I said, “well, let’s just say that they invented the term fatal flaw for a reason, Hayley, and as far as the varsity squad is concerned, you’re dead to us.”
Okay, so it was cheesy, but I wasn’t used to issuing popularity threats. It must have been potent enough, though, because all of the other girls gasped a little and took a step back. It was so over the top and ridiculous that I couldn’t believe it was really happening, let alone that I was an integral part of it, but these days, suspension of disbelief was my forte.
“If you’re still on the God Squad next year,” Hayley said, “I wouldn’t want to be. Being varsity used to mean something, but apparently, they’ve lowered their standards.”
She looked to the others for support, but they remained quiet.
“Kiki,” Hayley hissed, and one of the girls cleared her throat. r />
“Ummm…yeah,” she told me. “Unless…do you think if I could stick a back tuck that maybe…”
“Kiki!”
“Never mind,” the girl mumbled. Since April had joined the Squad, Hayley had surrounded herself with new minions, and it looked like at least one of them was taking orders, albeit clumsily.
“Well,” I said, “I should go eat lunch. With my boyfriend. And the rest of the God Squad. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. It’s not like anyone who matters is listening.”
I turned on my heels and walked toward the central table. And that’s when it hit me…
I was turning into one of those girls.
It wasn’t pretend. It wasn’t just a cover. I’d just threatened a bunch of girls with cheerleading annihilation. I’d referred to Jack as my boyfriend and thrown it in their faces. I’d told Hayley she was “dead to us.”
What in the name of all that was good and holy was the matter with me?
This wasn’t me. I didn’t take crap, but I didn’t play games, either. I didn’t care what other people said about me, and I certainly didn’t think the fact that I was going to homecoming with Jack gave me the right to use him as a weapon against lesser females.
Oh, no.
I’d just mentally referred to someone as a lesser female.
It was too much. This wasn’t what I signed up for. I wasn’t supposed to actually change. That was never part of the deal. I’d agreed to pretend to be a cheerleader, pretend to play the popularity game, but it was just supposed to be that: pretend. Make-believe. I was still supposed to be me. I wasn’t supposed to become the kind of girl I’d always hated.
That was the thing, though. Being around the other girls had made me realize that I didn’t hate them, not even Chloe, and I’d done a complete one-eighty on my views of cheerleading in general, so maybe that was why I’d changed. I’d learned to respect them. I even liked them for the most part, and now…
Was I doomed to become another Chloe? Two years from now, would I look at some new girl on the squad and snip at her the way Gadget Girl did at me?