Perfect Cover by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“It’s necessary,” Tara continued, her voice even and low, “to keep up appearances. Our anonymity in the real world is based on our complete domination of the high school one. It sounds harsh, but if we look like those girls no one will ever see us as anything else.”
I was slightly mollified by the fact that she knew of the existence of those girls. I stuffed my hands into my teeny-tiny skirt pockets and glanced down at my shoes. “What’s next?” I asked glumly.
“Training,” she replied. “Espionage. World domination.”
The corners of her mouth twitched, and I could see that she was trying not to smile.
“Seriously,” I said. “I don’t think I can take any more surprises right now. No more teal hands, no more secret shower passageways.” I narrowed my eyes. “No more Brittany and Tiffany’s beauty shop of horror and doom.”
That got a full-fledged smile out of her.
“As a matter of fact,” Tara said, “you’ve just been assigned your first mission.”
I briefly forgot the fact that I looked like the female lead of a one-hour teen drama and pictured myself as the butt-kicking girl-in-power type. “A mission,” I said slowly.
Tara nodded. Her silence made me somewhat suspicious.
“Tara,” I said. “What’s my first mission?”
Tara stared straight ahead as she answered. “We’re going to the mall.”
CHAPTER 11
Code Word: Abercrombie
“Explain to me again why I’m in Abercrombie and Fitch.”
Personally, I firmly believed that there could be no suitable explanation for such an atrocity.
“You have to tag one of the salesguys.” Tara’s directive didn’t sound any more reasonable the third time she said it than it had the first.
“Why?”
The cheerleading sophisticate sighed. I eyed her warily, because if she told me that information was classified one more time, I was going to have to reevaluate my position toward her as borderline tolerable. “Practice,” she said. “It’s protocol. Before we can move on to our actual mission, we’re required to assess your skills and transmit the results for approval.”
Once upon a time, the Squad had existed as a training program. Now, the closest I came to “training” before my first mission involved a salesguy at Abercrombie. It was official: the Big Guys Upstairs were severely unhinged.
“Come on, Toby. It’s not that bad.”
Tara had already given me a lightning-quick explanation of tagging, and somehow, I totally didn’t think the phrase not that bad applied. As Tara explained it, tagging someone involved identifying them as your target, and (a) putting some sort of homing device on him or his vehicle, (b) planting something on his person crucial to your mission, or(c) interacting with him in a way that alerted the rest of the group to his presence. For those unfamiliar with the whole notion of cheerleaders as spies, I’ll give you three guesses on what the acceptable form of interaction is.
Flirting. When you identify a target, if you’re going for a C tag, you flirt with him until your partner or whoever picks up on special flirt vibes and secret flirt code and begins an intricate, multiagent course of action against the tagged person.
Luckily, this wasn’t a C tag. This was a B tag. I had a stick of bubble gum. It had to go into his back pocket. Don’t ask me why. That information was classified. If this was the Big Guys’ idea of training, no wonder the other Squad training programs had been shut down.
“How am I supposed to do this without him noticing?” I hissed in Tara’s ear.
“You’re a cheerleader,” Tara said. “You figure it out.”
“Flirt?” I asked uncertainly. That seemed to be their answer for everything.
Tara slung her arm around my shoulder. “Toby,” she said with a wry grin, “it’s called misdirection.”
“It’s Tara, isn’t it?” A woman my mother’s age with a too-tight face, wearing too-tight pants and an obviously fake smile, approached us.
Tara whispered something in my ear and giggled. I forced a giggle, too, and pretended that she’d said something about a boy instead of telling me to proceed with the tag as planned.
Ever obedient (I can’t even say that with a straight face), I turned to leave the awkward “my daughter goes to your school” interaction that was already under way, but the woman’s voice stopped me.
“And who is your little friend?”
Little friend? I bristled at the term.
“This is Toby,” Tara said with all the poise in the world.
“She’s a sophomore.”
I nodded, trying to appear as if this whole conversation wasn’t nauseating. I have deep and abiding suspicions that my attempt was a failure.
“A sophomore at Bayport High,” the mother said, as if that was some kind of phenomenal accomplishment. “Are you on the squad, too, Toby?”
And the conversation went from nauseating to shocking, just like that. The Squad? She knew about the Squad?
“What squad?” I asked, trying to put a vacant look in my eyes. Come on, I told myself silently, if Bubbles the contortionist can play clueless, you can, too. Though of course, in Bubbles’s case, it wasn’t exactly a brilliant facade.
Tara rolled her eyes. “The cheerleading squad,” she told me in what I can only describe as a faux indulgent voice. “Toby just still can’t believe it.”
“Just can’t believe it,” I echoed, trying to suck a little less at not blowing our entire operation.
The woman patted me on the shoulder and then moved to squeeze me into a full-on hug. “These years are so precious,” she said.
Personal space, I thought, I’d like you to meet Nauseatingly Reminiscent Mom. NRM, this is my personal space. Please stop violating it.
“Well, you girls have fun.” With one final squeeze, she was off and shopping. “And do let me know when you have another one of those bake sales.”
I so didn’t sign on for bake sales and touchy-feely, Botox-ed über-moms.
“Happens all the time,” Tara said calmly as soon as the woman was out of hearing range. “It’s like every football parent or every mother of a freshman girl who wants to be a cheerleader acts like they know and love each and every one of us.”
“I feel violated,” I said darkly.
Tara half grinned. “You’ll get over it.” She prodded me gently in the side and I got the message. I had a stick of gum and it had to go in the hot salesboy’s back pocket. Such is the glorious life of a sixteen-year-old secret agent.
The way I saw it, I had a couple of options. I could do as Tara had suggested and flirt with him. I could try a drive-by approach in which I ran by, rammed the gum into his pocket, and left in a blur of honeysuckle highlights, but somehow, I thought that forcibly ramming gum into said mark’s pocket was not what the Squad had in mind. I could somehow get him to remove his pants….
“I’m going to have to flirt with him, aren’t I?” I said, less than overjoyed at the prospect.
“It’s not you flirting,” Tara told me. “It’s the cheerleader.”
Right. My cover. Malibu Toby, varsity cheerleader.
I knew then that I had exactly two choices: barf all over Tara in a fit of self-loathing, or suck it up and take one for the team. I gracefully opted for option B and wondered how exactly one went about flirting. I knew it involved teasing and giggling and a lot of hair tossing, but beyond that, the only picture that jumped into my head was one of Hayley Hoffman pulling her evil girl mojo on some unsuspecting senior jock.
I briefly considered the barfing option one more time, but that would have been like accepting that Hayley Hoffman should have made the Squad instead of me. I am Toby, I thought. Fear my wrath.
I wasn’t going down without a fight, and even though I was completely lost in the alternate dimension that was Abercrombie & Fitch, I decided to play to my strengths. Flirting might not have been one of them (understatement), but I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that mocking the flirtations of t
he Hayley Hoffmans of the world was more than one of my strong points. It was a calling.
So that’s what I did. I sashayed up to the salesguy and thrust out my chest in an Oscar-worthy parody of the flirt styles of the bitch and famous. “Do you have this in blue?” I asked, holding up a microscopic miniskirt. I pressed it against my body and posed. “Black is soooooo depressing.”
I batted my eyelashes at him at a ridiculously high velocity. And he fell for it. It was completely and utterly disgusting, and yet…strangely empowering.
“I…uhhh…uhhh…”
Two seconds, and I had reduced him to a bumbling fool. Was it wrong that I liked this? All this time I’d been knocking guys out, when I could have just made them grovel at my girly feet. Who knew?
“Blue?” He finally managed a coherent word. I almost felt sorry for him, but I was in superspy femme fatale mode. Take no prisoners!
I reached my hand toward his jeans. “Blue,” I repeated, and even though the Toby inside was wishing we’d opted for tossing our cookies before stooping so low, I forced myself to let my hand graze over his belt loops. “Like maybe the color of your jeans.”
“You mean a jean skirt?” the guy asked, coming back to his senses. “Sure, we have those.”
And just like that, my spell was broken. Was the inner Toby showing in my face? Were my eyelash bats too slow? Were my boobs too small? That was it, wasn’t it? My boobs were too small. I knew there was a reason I pummeled guys instead of flirting with them.
As the guy turned to show me the jean skirts, I lost my patience. Okay, okay, maybe I never had my patience. Long story short, I slipped the gum in his pocket, and when he turned around to look at me, I slapped him on the butt. There you have it. I’m not proud of it, but hey, it worked.
He turned a bright shade of pink, and I could feel my face turning much the same color.
“Sorry,” I said, completely straight-faced. “There was a fly.”
And then I did what any self-respecting pseudogirl would have done. I turned on my heels and walked as fast as I could out of the store. For Tara’s benefit, I even put a little shake in my hips.
She caught up with me halfway to the food court.
“I cannot believe you just did that,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was fighting down anger or hysterical laughter. “What was that?” she asked.
“That,” I said simply, “was misdirection.”
CHAPTER 12
Code Word: Gel Bra
“So…where to now?”
Tara hadn’t said a word about whether or not my butt-slapping performance, which she’d somehow “transmitted” to our superiors, had passed Squad scrutiny. This was my not-so-subtle attempt to see if we were ready for our real mission, or if I was about to be fired for sexual harassment.
Tara stirred her iced mocha (with caramel swirl) with one hand and looked down at her watch. “It’s time,” she said. She stood up, neatly tucked a wayward strand of dark hair behind her left ear, and picked up the mocha to leave.
“Time for what?” I kept my voice low. This was the mall, and who knew what kind of bizarre and twisted enemy forces were lurking around every corner.
Yeah, right.
Tara took another sip of her mocha and then threw it into the trash can, still half-full. I crumpled my empty cup into a ball and tossed it in after hers. She gave me a look, and I got the impression that cup crumpling wasn’t a preap-proved cheer girl course of action.
“Come on,” Tara said. I followed her.
“Time for what?” I asked again.
Tara’s eyes flitted to the side, and I got the distinct feeling that she was checking our surroundings.
“Time to get to work,” she said, like that wasn’t vague.
“Work,” I repeated. By this time, we’d left the food court, and she was a girl on a mission. Literally.
When she stopped in front of a lingerie store, I gave her a look of my own.
“Victoria’s Secret?” I asked dryly. “Really?”
Tara smiled, and her eyes told me not to argue. “Shop for underwear now,” she told me. “Ask questions later.”
“Blink once if there’s a purpose to all of this.”
I was expecting another look, but instead, I got a smile and a slow, deliberate blink.
“Okay then,” I said. “Underwear shopping. Lucky me.”
Five minutes later, I couldn’t even manage a sarcastic yay. There are certain things that should never be stuck onto underclothes. The list (and believe me, it’s extensive) includes, but is not limited to: bows, chains, rhinestones, ribbons, ruffles, feathers, and anything that spells out the words kiss me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my underpants plain and simple. And sometimes I like to call them underpants, but that’s beside the point.
My arms full of offending articles, I trudged toward the dressing room. As soon as we got back to the Quad, I was going to kill Tara.
“Cheer up, Tobe,” the traitor in question said. The double meaning behind her words wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to put a little more pep in my step.
I’d no sooner shut myself into one of the dressing rooms and unloaded my booty (no pun intended) when someone knocked on the door. “Is everything all right in there?”
I know the salesgirl was just trying to be helpful, but what did she think could have possibly gone wrong in the past five seconds?
“Everything’s fitting? You don’t need any other sizes? A consultation?”
Consultation? I thought. It was underwear, not rocket science.
Or was it? A little alarm bell went off in the back of my brain. What if “consultation” was code for “information transfer” or something?
“Actually…I could use a consultation. Hold on just a second, let me…”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence before the salesgirl flung open the door and barged into the room. Before I could manage a single word, she’d whipped out a tape measure and was halfway to wrapping it around my chest.
I’d like to clarify for a moment that I do not have personal space issues. I interact with others normally on a day-to-day basis, and I’m not one of those people who gets huffy when someone stands a little too close, but she was actually touching my boobs, and call me crazy, but that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
“Thirty-two inches.” She surveyed my breasts through my shirt. “And an A by the looks of it.” She gave me a sympathetic look. It was like someone had died.
“Is that…bad?” I asked, thinking of my failed flirtation with Abercrombie boy.
“No, no, of course not.” She was somewhat less than convincing.
“So, is the consultation over?” I asked. For a split second, I’d thought that maybe this was part of the mission, that the girl measuring my breasts was a fellow operative, out to do whatever secret agents did (I was still a little vague on that point), but clearly, my sixth sense, the spy sense, was completely deficient.
“Let me just grab you a few things real quick,” the girl said brightly, as if I hadn’t asked her a question at all.
“Thirty-two A…”
I couldn’t tell whether that last part was a musing or whether she was actually addressing me by my cup size. I didn’t have any time to ponder the question, though, because she was back in record time with a half-dozen bras. For one horrifying moment, I thought she was going to demand to stay in the dressing room with me while I tried things on, but she demurely stepped back, allowing me to close the door.
“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door.
“Dead girl,” I called back, matching my tone to hers.
“You’re a dead girl.”
I eschewed the underwear Tara had forced into my hands in favor of the bras the salesgirl had given me. I slipped off my own sports bra and reached blindly for a test subject. My hands closed around a flesh-colored bra, and I put it on
, fastened it, and turned to the mirror. I moved back and forth, and the bra wiggled and jumped as I did.
“Tara,” I said flatly. “It’s moving.” I poked it. “What is this thing?”
“I’m not certain, but I think you’re probably wearing a gel bra.”
I poked it again. Weird, and yet, as much as I hated to admit it, comfortable. Feeling a little less daunted by the task at hand, I threw the gel bra aside and picked up the next one. I slipped into it, but the moment I did, something poked into my skin. I eased back out of the bra. It looked perfectly normal, but when I ran my hand along the inside of the cup, my fingertips caught on a tiny, uneven bump. I prodded the bump with my fingers, and as if by magic, the fabric parted, and out came a tiny, round disk, no bigger than a nickel.
“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door once more.
I stared at the disk. “Yeah,” I called back. “I think I did.”
“Gel bra?” Tara continued conversationally, like we weren’t shouting over dressing room doors.
Still somewhat enchanted by the tiny disk, I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Gel bra. Whatever.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was standing at the checkout, lingerie in hand, the minidisk hidden securely in my own sports bra. Tara surveyed my purchases: the befuddling gel bra, five pairs of multicolored, cotton bikini-style bottoms, and at her insistence, a turquoise thong with teeny-tiny sequins on it.
I didn’t even care about the underwear. Thongs? Sure! Sequins? What could be wrong with a little sparkle? I’d found the disk. I was on top of the world.
“Next.”
At the cashier’s call, Tara stepped forward. She sat her selections on the counter and held up a lime-green bra. “Do you have this in pink?”
The cashier looked at the bra, glanced at Tara, and then took the green monstrosity with her into the back room. She emerged a moment later with an identical pink bra, and handed it to Tara. “Is that all?” she asked.
Tara nodded.
When her total appeared on the cash register, I came off my minidisk high. How could something composed of so little fabric be so expensive? Not wanting to blow things at this stage in the game, I slipped my wallet out of the purse the twins had forced me to carry, wondering if I had enough cash to cover an expenditure of this magnitude. I so didn’t want to have to explain the appearance of a Victoria’s Secret purchase on my emergency-only credit card.
I was slightly mollified by the fact that she knew of the existence of those girls. I stuffed my hands into my teeny-tiny skirt pockets and glanced down at my shoes. “What’s next?” I asked glumly.
“Training,” she replied. “Espionage. World domination.”
The corners of her mouth twitched, and I could see that she was trying not to smile.
“Seriously,” I said. “I don’t think I can take any more surprises right now. No more teal hands, no more secret shower passageways.” I narrowed my eyes. “No more Brittany and Tiffany’s beauty shop of horror and doom.”
That got a full-fledged smile out of her.
“As a matter of fact,” Tara said, “you’ve just been assigned your first mission.”
I briefly forgot the fact that I looked like the female lead of a one-hour teen drama and pictured myself as the butt-kicking girl-in-power type. “A mission,” I said slowly.
Tara nodded. Her silence made me somewhat suspicious.
“Tara,” I said. “What’s my first mission?”
Tara stared straight ahead as she answered. “We’re going to the mall.”
CHAPTER 11
Code Word: Abercrombie
“Explain to me again why I’m in Abercrombie and Fitch.”
Personally, I firmly believed that there could be no suitable explanation for such an atrocity.
“You have to tag one of the salesguys.” Tara’s directive didn’t sound any more reasonable the third time she said it than it had the first.
“Why?”
The cheerleading sophisticate sighed. I eyed her warily, because if she told me that information was classified one more time, I was going to have to reevaluate my position toward her as borderline tolerable. “Practice,” she said. “It’s protocol. Before we can move on to our actual mission, we’re required to assess your skills and transmit the results for approval.”
Once upon a time, the Squad had existed as a training program. Now, the closest I came to “training” before my first mission involved a salesguy at Abercrombie. It was official: the Big Guys Upstairs were severely unhinged.
“Come on, Toby. It’s not that bad.”
Tara had already given me a lightning-quick explanation of tagging, and somehow, I totally didn’t think the phrase not that bad applied. As Tara explained it, tagging someone involved identifying them as your target, and (a) putting some sort of homing device on him or his vehicle, (b) planting something on his person crucial to your mission, or(c) interacting with him in a way that alerted the rest of the group to his presence. For those unfamiliar with the whole notion of cheerleaders as spies, I’ll give you three guesses on what the acceptable form of interaction is.
Flirting. When you identify a target, if you’re going for a C tag, you flirt with him until your partner or whoever picks up on special flirt vibes and secret flirt code and begins an intricate, multiagent course of action against the tagged person.
Luckily, this wasn’t a C tag. This was a B tag. I had a stick of bubble gum. It had to go into his back pocket. Don’t ask me why. That information was classified. If this was the Big Guys’ idea of training, no wonder the other Squad training programs had been shut down.
“How am I supposed to do this without him noticing?” I hissed in Tara’s ear.
“You’re a cheerleader,” Tara said. “You figure it out.”
“Flirt?” I asked uncertainly. That seemed to be their answer for everything.
Tara slung her arm around my shoulder. “Toby,” she said with a wry grin, “it’s called misdirection.”
“It’s Tara, isn’t it?” A woman my mother’s age with a too-tight face, wearing too-tight pants and an obviously fake smile, approached us.
Tara whispered something in my ear and giggled. I forced a giggle, too, and pretended that she’d said something about a boy instead of telling me to proceed with the tag as planned.
Ever obedient (I can’t even say that with a straight face), I turned to leave the awkward “my daughter goes to your school” interaction that was already under way, but the woman’s voice stopped me.
“And who is your little friend?”
Little friend? I bristled at the term.
“This is Toby,” Tara said with all the poise in the world.
“She’s a sophomore.”
I nodded, trying to appear as if this whole conversation wasn’t nauseating. I have deep and abiding suspicions that my attempt was a failure.
“A sophomore at Bayport High,” the mother said, as if that was some kind of phenomenal accomplishment. “Are you on the squad, too, Toby?”
And the conversation went from nauseating to shocking, just like that. The Squad? She knew about the Squad?
“What squad?” I asked, trying to put a vacant look in my eyes. Come on, I told myself silently, if Bubbles the contortionist can play clueless, you can, too. Though of course, in Bubbles’s case, it wasn’t exactly a brilliant facade.
Tara rolled her eyes. “The cheerleading squad,” she told me in what I can only describe as a faux indulgent voice. “Toby just still can’t believe it.”
“Just can’t believe it,” I echoed, trying to suck a little less at not blowing our entire operation.
The woman patted me on the shoulder and then moved to squeeze me into a full-on hug. “These years are so precious,” she said.
Personal space, I thought, I’d like you to meet Nauseatingly Reminiscent Mom. NRM, this is my personal space. Please stop violating it.
“Well, you girls have fun.” With one final squeeze, she was off and shopping. “And do let me know when you have another one of those bake sales.”
I so didn’t sign on for bake sales and touchy-feely, Botox-ed über-moms.
“Happens all the time,” Tara said calmly as soon as the woman was out of hearing range. “It’s like every football parent or every mother of a freshman girl who wants to be a cheerleader acts like they know and love each and every one of us.”
“I feel violated,” I said darkly.
Tara half grinned. “You’ll get over it.” She prodded me gently in the side and I got the message. I had a stick of gum and it had to go in the hot salesboy’s back pocket. Such is the glorious life of a sixteen-year-old secret agent.
The way I saw it, I had a couple of options. I could do as Tara had suggested and flirt with him. I could try a drive-by approach in which I ran by, rammed the gum into his pocket, and left in a blur of honeysuckle highlights, but somehow, I thought that forcibly ramming gum into said mark’s pocket was not what the Squad had in mind. I could somehow get him to remove his pants….
“I’m going to have to flirt with him, aren’t I?” I said, less than overjoyed at the prospect.
“It’s not you flirting,” Tara told me. “It’s the cheerleader.”
Right. My cover. Malibu Toby, varsity cheerleader.
I knew then that I had exactly two choices: barf all over Tara in a fit of self-loathing, or suck it up and take one for the team. I gracefully opted for option B and wondered how exactly one went about flirting. I knew it involved teasing and giggling and a lot of hair tossing, but beyond that, the only picture that jumped into my head was one of Hayley Hoffman pulling her evil girl mojo on some unsuspecting senior jock.
I briefly considered the barfing option one more time, but that would have been like accepting that Hayley Hoffman should have made the Squad instead of me. I am Toby, I thought. Fear my wrath.
I wasn’t going down without a fight, and even though I was completely lost in the alternate dimension that was Abercrombie & Fitch, I decided to play to my strengths. Flirting might not have been one of them (understatement), but I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that mocking the flirtations of t
So that’s what I did. I sashayed up to the salesguy and thrust out my chest in an Oscar-worthy parody of the flirt styles of the bitch and famous. “Do you have this in blue?” I asked, holding up a microscopic miniskirt. I pressed it against my body and posed. “Black is soooooo depressing.”
I batted my eyelashes at him at a ridiculously high velocity. And he fell for it. It was completely and utterly disgusting, and yet…strangely empowering.
“I…uhhh…uhhh…”
Two seconds, and I had reduced him to a bumbling fool. Was it wrong that I liked this? All this time I’d been knocking guys out, when I could have just made them grovel at my girly feet. Who knew?
“Blue?” He finally managed a coherent word. I almost felt sorry for him, but I was in superspy femme fatale mode. Take no prisoners!
I reached my hand toward his jeans. “Blue,” I repeated, and even though the Toby inside was wishing we’d opted for tossing our cookies before stooping so low, I forced myself to let my hand graze over his belt loops. “Like maybe the color of your jeans.”
“You mean a jean skirt?” the guy asked, coming back to his senses. “Sure, we have those.”
And just like that, my spell was broken. Was the inner Toby showing in my face? Were my eyelash bats too slow? Were my boobs too small? That was it, wasn’t it? My boobs were too small. I knew there was a reason I pummeled guys instead of flirting with them.
As the guy turned to show me the jean skirts, I lost my patience. Okay, okay, maybe I never had my patience. Long story short, I slipped the gum in his pocket, and when he turned around to look at me, I slapped him on the butt. There you have it. I’m not proud of it, but hey, it worked.
He turned a bright shade of pink, and I could feel my face turning much the same color.
“Sorry,” I said, completely straight-faced. “There was a fly.”
And then I did what any self-respecting pseudogirl would have done. I turned on my heels and walked as fast as I could out of the store. For Tara’s benefit, I even put a little shake in my hips.
She caught up with me halfway to the food court.
“I cannot believe you just did that,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was fighting down anger or hysterical laughter. “What was that?” she asked.
“That,” I said simply, “was misdirection.”
CHAPTER 12
Code Word: Gel Bra
“So…where to now?”
Tara hadn’t said a word about whether or not my butt-slapping performance, which she’d somehow “transmitted” to our superiors, had passed Squad scrutiny. This was my not-so-subtle attempt to see if we were ready for our real mission, or if I was about to be fired for sexual harassment.
Tara stirred her iced mocha (with caramel swirl) with one hand and looked down at her watch. “It’s time,” she said. She stood up, neatly tucked a wayward strand of dark hair behind her left ear, and picked up the mocha to leave.
“Time for what?” I kept my voice low. This was the mall, and who knew what kind of bizarre and twisted enemy forces were lurking around every corner.
Yeah, right.
Tara took another sip of her mocha and then threw it into the trash can, still half-full. I crumpled my empty cup into a ball and tossed it in after hers. She gave me a look, and I got the impression that cup crumpling wasn’t a preap-proved cheer girl course of action.
“Come on,” Tara said. I followed her.
“Time for what?” I asked again.
Tara’s eyes flitted to the side, and I got the distinct feeling that she was checking our surroundings.
“Time to get to work,” she said, like that wasn’t vague.
“Work,” I repeated. By this time, we’d left the food court, and she was a girl on a mission. Literally.
When she stopped in front of a lingerie store, I gave her a look of my own.
“Victoria’s Secret?” I asked dryly. “Really?”
Tara smiled, and her eyes told me not to argue. “Shop for underwear now,” she told me. “Ask questions later.”
“Blink once if there’s a purpose to all of this.”
I was expecting another look, but instead, I got a smile and a slow, deliberate blink.
“Okay then,” I said. “Underwear shopping. Lucky me.”
Five minutes later, I couldn’t even manage a sarcastic yay. There are certain things that should never be stuck onto underclothes. The list (and believe me, it’s extensive) includes, but is not limited to: bows, chains, rhinestones, ribbons, ruffles, feathers, and anything that spells out the words kiss me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my underpants plain and simple. And sometimes I like to call them underpants, but that’s beside the point.
My arms full of offending articles, I trudged toward the dressing room. As soon as we got back to the Quad, I was going to kill Tara.
“Cheer up, Tobe,” the traitor in question said. The double meaning behind her words wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to put a little more pep in my step.
I’d no sooner shut myself into one of the dressing rooms and unloaded my booty (no pun intended) when someone knocked on the door. “Is everything all right in there?”
I know the salesgirl was just trying to be helpful, but what did she think could have possibly gone wrong in the past five seconds?
“Everything’s fitting? You don’t need any other sizes? A consultation?”
Consultation? I thought. It was underwear, not rocket science.
Or was it? A little alarm bell went off in the back of my brain. What if “consultation” was code for “information transfer” or something?
“Actually…I could use a consultation. Hold on just a second, let me…”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence before the salesgirl flung open the door and barged into the room. Before I could manage a single word, she’d whipped out a tape measure and was halfway to wrapping it around my chest.
I’d like to clarify for a moment that I do not have personal space issues. I interact with others normally on a day-to-day basis, and I’m not one of those people who gets huffy when someone stands a little too close, but she was actually touching my boobs, and call me crazy, but that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
“Thirty-two inches.” She surveyed my breasts through my shirt. “And an A by the looks of it.” She gave me a sympathetic look. It was like someone had died.
“Is that…bad?” I asked, thinking of my failed flirtation with Abercrombie boy.
“No, no, of course not.” She was somewhat less than convincing.
“So, is the consultation over?” I asked. For a split second, I’d thought that maybe this was part of the mission, that the girl measuring my breasts was a fellow operative, out to do whatever secret agents did (I was still a little vague on that point), but clearly, my sixth sense, the spy sense, was completely deficient.
“Let me just grab you a few things real quick,” the girl said brightly, as if I hadn’t asked her a question at all.
“Thirty-two A…”
I couldn’t tell whether that last part was a musing or whether she was actually addressing me by my cup size. I didn’t have any time to ponder the question, though, because she was back in record time with a half-dozen bras. For one horrifying moment, I thought she was going to demand to stay in the dressing room with me while I tried things on, but she demurely stepped back, allowing me to close the door.
“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door.
“Dead girl,” I called back, matching my tone to hers.
“You’re a dead girl.”
I eschewed the underwear Tara had forced into my hands in favor of the bras the salesgirl had given me. I slipped off my own sports bra and reached blindly for a test subject. My hands closed around a flesh-colored bra, and I put it on
“Tara,” I said flatly. “It’s moving.” I poked it. “What is this thing?”
“I’m not certain, but I think you’re probably wearing a gel bra.”
I poked it again. Weird, and yet, as much as I hated to admit it, comfortable. Feeling a little less daunted by the task at hand, I threw the gel bra aside and picked up the next one. I slipped into it, but the moment I did, something poked into my skin. I eased back out of the bra. It looked perfectly normal, but when I ran my hand along the inside of the cup, my fingertips caught on a tiny, uneven bump. I prodded the bump with my fingers, and as if by magic, the fabric parted, and out came a tiny, round disk, no bigger than a nickel.
“Found anything yet?” Tara called over the door once more.
I stared at the disk. “Yeah,” I called back. “I think I did.”
“Gel bra?” Tara continued conversationally, like we weren’t shouting over dressing room doors.
Still somewhat enchanted by the tiny disk, I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Gel bra. Whatever.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was standing at the checkout, lingerie in hand, the minidisk hidden securely in my own sports bra. Tara surveyed my purchases: the befuddling gel bra, five pairs of multicolored, cotton bikini-style bottoms, and at her insistence, a turquoise thong with teeny-tiny sequins on it.
I didn’t even care about the underwear. Thongs? Sure! Sequins? What could be wrong with a little sparkle? I’d found the disk. I was on top of the world.
“Next.”
At the cashier’s call, Tara stepped forward. She sat her selections on the counter and held up a lime-green bra. “Do you have this in pink?”
The cashier looked at the bra, glanced at Tara, and then took the green monstrosity with her into the back room. She emerged a moment later with an identical pink bra, and handed it to Tara. “Is that all?” she asked.
Tara nodded.
When her total appeared on the cash register, I came off my minidisk high. How could something composed of so little fabric be so expensive? Not wanting to blow things at this stage in the game, I slipped my wallet out of the purse the twins had forced me to carry, wondering if I had enough cash to cover an expenditure of this magnitude. I so didn’t want to have to explain the appearance of a Victoria’s Secret purchase on my emergency-only credit card.