Killer Spirit (10 page)

“Okay, guys. You heard the man. We’ll meet back here for seventh period and head out from there.” Brooke looked down at her watch. “We still have an hour before class starts. Who’s up for tumbling?”

At that point, I realized something. The most surreal part of this entire morning had nothing to do with ringtones or homecoming and everything to do with the fact that I had enough energy and potential frustration built up inside of me that the physical release of tumbling actually sounded good.

CHAPTER 14

Code Word: Luscious

Word to the wise. Never let a high school junior try to teach you how to do something called a layout, because either you won’t be able to do it, in which case you’ll feel like the cheertard everyone else thinks you are, or you will be able to do it, in which case, the aforementioned junior might take it upon herself to teach you something harder.

On a related note, I really, really do not recommend trying to do anything with your body that includes the phrase “full twist.”

After forty-five minutes of tumbling, every muscle in my body was rebelling, and I’d added several bruises to the arsenal I’d started the day before. Unfortunately, the twins didn’t see any of this as a reason to go easy on me on the personal appearance front. The second we got back to the locker room, they insisted on signing off on my outfit and did so only after supplying me with yet another pair of boots to supplement my growing collection.

I got all of ten minutes of peace while everyone was getting dressed and primped for the day before the twins returned to gaily consider my newly conditioned hair, anxious to see the results up close and personal.

And I mean personal. Tiffany actually stuck her nose into my hair and took a big whiff. After some whispering behind their hands, the twins informed me that my Bounce Index had improved considerably, and I was clear to go for a day at Bayport High.

Call me crazy, but I found it difficult to care about whether or not I qualified as “sufficiently luscious” when we were mere hours away from a mission so large that all five Squad teams would be deployed: two to each of the TCIs, and one to Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray.

I mean, yes, this was just an observational mission, and yes, we had been explicitly forbidden from making contact of any kind, but the thought of getting out there again and doing what the ten of us were born to do was enough to make me submit to the twins’ high-speed primping and fluffing without issuing so much as a single death threat.

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.