“If you win homecoming queen,” Chloe snipped, “I’ll deport him myself.”
Something about the expression on her face convinced me that she wasn’t joking, and I spent several seconds hoping that senior members of the Squad didn’t actually have a way of deporting people, because I couldn’t actually let someone ship my brother off the continent.
Chloe rolled her eyes and snorted simultaneously. “Gullible much?”
Chloe’s tone reconfirmed two things for me. First, that when it came to me, hostility was Chloe’s middle name, and second, that my first impression of this whole homecoming situation had been entirely accurate.
Things were definitely going to get ugly.
On the plus side, though, talking Mr. J into excusing us from our last two classes turned out to be a piece of cake. After all, heaven forbid we run out of banner paint!
“You do realize how twisted this is, right?” I didn’t particularly want to talk to Chloe, but once we were safely away from the office, I couldn’t keep the opinion to myself.
“Don’t look a gift vice-principal in the mouth,” Chloe said glibly. Almost belatedly, she rolled her eyes, as if she’d remembered at the last second who she was talking to and that an eye roll was the mandated response. “But, yes, for the record, I do get that this is ridiculous. We all do. We’renot stupid.” Chloe paused as the two of us entered the Quad, and when she continued, her voice was slightly less blatantly nasty and marginally more condescending. “Look at it this way—if Jacobson didn’t have a job at Bayport, he’d have a job somewhere else, and the cheerleaders at that school probably wouldn’t be skipping class to deal with terrorist threats.”
That was, in all likelihood, an understatement.
All things considered, though, it was a miracle that none of the other parents had ever complained. Then again, if any of the parents did complain—about their kids not making the varsity squad, about the blatant favoritism in the school, about the fact that there wasn’t a single noncheerleader nominated for homecoming court—the Big Guys Upstairs would probably just pull some strings and have that parent transferred out of the Bayport school district, the same way they’d somehow managed to have me transferred in.
The longer I spent on the Squad, the more I started thinking that maybe the paranoid people in the world had it right. Big Brother was totally watching.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked. “Why did you need to talk to me?”
Chloe didn’t say anything. She just kept right on walking through the Quad, up a flight of stairs, through a labyrinth of hallways, and into her lab. “Don’t touch anything.”
Like I was going to mess up her precious inventor’s lair. Then my eyes lit upon something that looked vaguely like some kind of microscanner, and Chloe’s voice broke into my techno-daydreams.
“Let me rephrase that.Don’t touch anything.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “What do you want?”
Chloe reached over to her desk and picked up a thick stack of papers. “It’s Ross’s dissertation,” she said. “Brooke doesn’t know I have it, and neither do our superiors, but I’m not letting the two of you go into this mission blind because they don’t feel like telling you what you’re up against.”
I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: the fact that Chloe was so adamant about protecting us, or that she’d had the exact same idea I had about finding a copy of Ross’s dissertation.
“It wasn’t easy,” she told me. “He originally submitted it for publication, but retracted it only a few weeks later. It was like he suddenly realized he could make a lot more money off of this thing underground than above. He wiped every trace of it off of the web, but the university still had a copy of it in their database.”
“You hacked it?” Compared to most of my jobs, this was kiddie play, but still, I was the hacker, and this was Chloe treading on my turf. And she knew it.
“Is that a problem, Toby?” she asked sweetly. “From the look on your face, you’d think somebody stole your boyfriend or something.”
Subtle she was not. Forget the fact that I’d beenorderedto date Jack in the first place, and the fact that the two of them had been over long before I’d come into the picture. Clearly, I’d stolen her boyfriend, and therefore, her stealing hacking jobs was my just reward.
“So do you want the Cliff’s Notes, or do you want to read it yourself?” Now that she’d gotten in her jab, Chloe was all business.
“I’ll read it myself.”
An hour and a half later, Chloe grinned at me. “So do you want the Cliff’s Notes version, or do you want to read it yourself?”
On the one hand, I wanted to tell her to shut up. On the other hand, I still hadn’t managed to make sense of the dissertation, and we were running out of time before seventh period.
“Fine,” I said. “Cliff’s Notes.”
To Chloe’s credit, she didn’t make me say “please.”
“Basically, Ross managed to combine his degrees in biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, and genetics to design a nanotechnological device …” Chloe paused and then made a show of dumbing down her words for me, her smile broadening. “He built a teeny, tiny computer type thingy that is capable of targeting and altering DNA in a prespecified manner. These nanobots … I mean, thesethingieshe designed basically go in and rewrite a person’s genetic code.”
“Are we talking about the dissertation or a really bad science fiction movie?” I may have been stronger in math than in science, but even I knew enough to be skeptical. I was pretty sure the type of thing Chloe was describing shouldn’t have been possible.
