The sad thing was, she was serious.
I gestured to her foot with my head, and when she turned and saw her ankle an inch away from her face, she blinked several times, surprise etched thoroughly into her baby-faced features.
I stared at her, refusing to say another word as she lowered her leg.
“Sometimes I do that without realizing I’m doing it,” she clarified needlessly.
“Bubbles.”
“Uh-huh?”
“What are you doing in my room?”
I could practically see déjà vu replacing the surprise on her face. I swore to myself that if she said a single word about my email, I was going to toss her out of my second-story window.
“I was on my way back from the stakeout thingy,” Bubbles said. “Chloe called, so I went to her house, and she said to give you this.” She thrust out a pink square box.
What was with these girls and pink?
It took me about a second to realize that pink or not, this box in all likelihood held the information I’d asked for.Chloe just hadn’t sent it via email. She’d sent it Ditz Delivery instead.
I opened the box, and inside there was an old-school Britney Spears CD.
“If this doesn’t have phone tones on it,” I told Bubbles, “Chloe is a dead girl.”
Bubbles tilted her head to the side.
I popped the CD into my computer, and prepared myself to immediately turn it off if “Baby One More Time” blared from the speakers. Instead, a password protection window popped up on the screen. Chloe hadn’t included the password in the package.
I smiled. My fingers flew across the keys, trying different combinations. I did some hard-core googling, and within minutes, I’d tried every combination of Chloe’s address, her cell phone number, her birthday, and the words to our halftime cheer.
Bubbles watched, fascinated, until the urge to do a back bend overcame her, and then she bent over backward and out of my peripheral vision.
After about five minutes, I hit on the right password, and logged in.
“Wow,” Bubbles said, standing up straight again.
I shook my head. As much as I would have liked to revel in my own hacking prowess, I had to admit that Chloe was tech-savvy enough that she never would have picked a guessable password unless she’d meant for me to guess it. “No big deal,” I told Bubbles.
“Uh-huh,” Bubbles said. “But I usually just use my phone.”
“Your phone?”
She pulled a hot pink phone identical to mine out of a purple suede purse and gestured. “You just plug this thing into that thing, and then it does its thing.”
Nobody had told me our cells were equipped with decoding technology. As brightly colored as it was, I had a feeling that my fashiony flip phone was going to be my new best friend. Forget shoes or flowers or chocolate. The way to a girl’s heart was through code-breaking technology, and if my phone had that kind of program, I was officially in love.
“Anything else about this phone I should know?” I asked.
Bubbles thought for a moment. “If you want,” she said seriously, “you can getAmerican Idolringtones.”
I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to respond. I turned back to the computer screen, found the audio files, and plugged in a set of headphones. I didn’t want to chance someone overhearing the audio, and after years of living in the same house with Noah “Su-Underwear-Drawer-Es-Mi-Casa” Klein, I had accepted the fact that privacy was a fictional concept that didn’t exist in real life.
Reluctantly, I held off on opening the files and played hostess to Bubbles. “Anything else?” I grunted. I’d never been a particularly good hostess.
“Chloe also said to give you these,” Bubbles said, and she pulled two more items out of her purple purse. The first appeared to be an iPod of some type (not pink, for once), and the second was a small, unmarked bottle. She handed me the iPod.
“You’re supposed to listen to the playlist tonight while you sleep,” she said.
