As I tried to process that information, I turned my attention to the bottle. “What’s that?” I asked. The truth serum I’d been promised, but never gotten? Some form of mild explosive from Lucy? A magnetic-based lotion that would scramble any hard drive it came in contact with?
“It’s an aloe-based avocado mask,” Bubbles said. “Chloe said to tell you it’s good for your pores.”
Touché, Chloe, I thought. Touché.
“Thanks, Bubbles.”
If Bubbles caught the dry note in my voice, her face didn’t give it away. I tried to remind myself that based on the test scores Zee had shown me, there had to be more to Bubbles than surface appearances. After all, if the biggest partier in the senior class had a PhD in forensic psychology, anything was possible. Besides, looking at Bubbles, I almost couldn’t believe that anyone could be that clueless.
“What’s your real name?” I asked her curiously.
“Bubbles,” she said immediately. “Why?”
“Is it a … uhhhh … family name?”
“No,” Bubbles said, mystified as to why I considered her name even the least bit odd. “It’s Bubbles. You know, like bubbles?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Zee might have technically been Dr. Zee, Tara might not have been one-hundred-percent foreign sophisticate, and Chloe might have secretly been more tech than chic, but Bubbles, the contortionist, was just … Bubbles. You know, like bubbles.
Thinking of Tara made me want to quit wasting time and give in to the seductive lure of the numbers in my mind. Thefaux Britney CD held the rest of a code, and even though Tara had only begged me to do the Jack thing, everything Squad-related, including seducing Jack Peyton and breaking this code, had gotten tied up in one giant neural ball labeledcheerspionagein my mind.
As all of this passed through my mind, Bubbles passed through my room and was halfway out my window before I realized she’d moved at all. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was fast. And stealthy. No wonder I hadn’t heard her come in.
“Hey, Bubbles?” I stopped her before she’d disappeared entirely.
“Yeah-huh?” Only the top half of her body was still visible, but she turned back to look at me.
I asked one of the questions I’d stopped dwelling on once I’d started concentrating on the numbers. “Why does Tara care so much about this case?”
I don’t know if I asked the question because I was thinking about Tara, or because I had a feeling that Bubbles would answer me more honestly than anyone else on the Squad.
“I dunno,” Bubbles said thoughtfully. “I mean, there are what? About a bazillion foreign agents? And her parents are only like two of them.” Bubbles shrugged. “Maybe she’s homesick.”
I sat there, frozen to my seat. Tara was British, and yet somehow, she’d ended up at an American high school. She spoke nine languages fluently, and her cover act was so perfect that even after having seen her this afternoon, I still bought it. When Lucy had explained Tara’s transfer status to me, she’d mentioned that Tara’s parents were “really into theSquad thing,” and Tara had started freaking out the moment she’d realized that the information leaks had involved the aliases and locations of individual foreign operatives, to the point that Brooke had taken her off the case altogether.
I’d barely gotten over the fact that people’s lives were in our hands, and now I had to deal with the fact that the people in question might be Tara’s parents. And I’d bitched and moaned about having to hit on Jack Peyton. Tara’s parents could already be dead, and I’d felt sorry for myself because my butt saidCHEERand my hair was picture perfect.
“Toby?” Bubbles brought me out of my guiltfest. “Can I go now?”
Since she had the answer to one of my remaining shower questions, I decided to ask the other. “You know the guy who gave us our orders today?”
“Yeah-huh.”
“Who is he?”
Bubbles looked at me like I was very simple. “He’s the guy who sometimes gives us our orders,” she said sagely.
“Yeah, I get that, but who is he?”
Bubbles was one-hundred-percent solemnity when she answered. “Nobody knows.” I almost expected eerie mood music to start playing in the background as she continued, but her next sentence entirely ruined the effect. “I call him Bob.”
“Bob?”
“Yup.” If Bubbles found it at all ridiculous that she called the mysterious voice, the head of our operations, Bob, she didn’t show any signs of it. Instead, she shifted her weight and tilted her head to one side. “Hey, Toby? Can I go now?”
I nodded, and just as she was about to descend from my window, the door to my bedroom flew open.
“I knew I heard girls in here,” Noah said triumphantly.
