I need to talk to you.

For a note from one of my Squadmates, it wasn’t very high-tech. No codes. No invisible ink. But then again, the message wasn’t exactly the stuff that national security was made of. Girls across the country probably passed notes like this every day. I scanned the table, trying to figure out who’d sent it to me, and when my eyes landed on Chloe, I groaned internally.

She was staring straight at me, and her not-a-glare glare changed into something else. She held my eyes for a moment, and then spoke. “OMG. I totally forgot to pick up the banner paint, and we were going to make banners for Friday’s game at practice today. I’m going to go see if Mr. J will let us sneak out to pick some up. You want to come with, Toby?”

I really didn’t, but since Chloe had never voluntarily spent time in my presence, I got the distinct feeling that whatever she wanted to talk to me about, it was big.

“Sure!” I tried to match her peppy tone. “I’ve always wanted to pick out banner paint.”

I could see Brooke repressing an eye roll at my response, and even I had to admit that it wasn’t exactly one hundred percent believable, but if any of the guys at the table thought it was strange, they didn’t comment on it. Even Jack just looked at me, a half smile on his face, like he knew that banner paint was seriously up there on the list of things I couldn’t have cared less about, but wasn’t going to blow my cover, because he was the master of pretending to care about things that didn’t matter himself.

As Chloe and I walked away from the table, part of me had to wonder whether I fell into that category, or if I was the only thing in Jack’s charmed life that didn’t.

“Arrrrr, mateys! It be homecoming season, and we be the homecoming pirates.”

Dear God, I thought in silent prayer, when I turn around, please don’t let that be Noah.

“Arrr!” a dozen more voices chorused.

I turned around, and there was Noah, along with Chuck and the slew of freshman boys who’d been at my house that morning. All of them were dressed up like pirates, and three of them were actually standing on a table in the middle of the cafeteria. Noah brandished a makeshift sword.

“Who you be voting for, mateys?” he asked his pirate followers.

In what I can only conclude was the product of a great deal of rehearsal, the other boys chorused in unison, “The homecoming pirates be voting for Toby Klein. She be worth her weight in pirate’s gold. Arrrrrr!”

What was my brother thinking? Did he honestly think making a complete fool out of himself would encourage anyone to vote for me? That was insane. Or, at least, I hoped it was insane, because if by some miracle Noah’s pirate act actually convinced so much as a single person to write my name down on that ballot, I was going to stuff not one, but both of my poms into a part of his anatomy where the sun doesn’t shine.

“Arrrr!”

To her credit, Chloe didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder at the boys, and a large portion of the student body followed her lead. Still, I couldn’t help but notice as we left the cafeteria that a disturbing amount of freshmen and sophomores were cheering Noah on.

As Chloe and I walked toward the vice-principal’s office, the silence between us was nearly tangible, but I finally broke it.

“If there was a way to deport my brother to Antarctica, you’d tell me, right?” That was about as much of a peace offering as I could give her. If we were going to be stuck in the same room for any amount of time, I preferred to get rid of any latent hostilities first.

“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’re not 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 been ordered to 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?”