Jack took my silence as an admission of guilt, and he grinned again. “You know, Ev,” he said, “a little sparkle never hurt a girl.”

“Bite me, Peyton.”

“Love to,” he said. “Does that mean we’re on for tonight?”

The other girls gawked at me. I’d done more or less nothing but insult him, and he’d asked me out. I was a little suspicious that my new look might have had something to do with it—I’d been insulting (not to mention physically assaulting) guys my entire life, and none of them had ever asked me out, with the not-so-notable exception of Noah’s friend Chuck.

I was too busy pondering this turn of events to answer Jack, and someone (my money was on one of the twins, who’d arrived just in time to put in an appearance and pick up on the fact that I’d defaced my shirt) kicked me sharply under the table.

“Ow!” I shrieked.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Jack said. “Pick you up at seven.”

With that, he stood up and ambled away from our table. As soon as he was gone, four other guys leaned in my direction, and one of them moved his hand toward me. Given the look on his face and the current trajectory of the aforementioned hand, I inferred that for some incomprehensible reason, he was moving to rest his hand on my thigh.

Calmly, I reached for a fork someone must have left on the table the day before and held it, poised for action, as I met Thigh Guy’s eyes. “Word of advice,” I told him. “Don’t go there.”

He must have read the intention to draw blood in my eyes, because he quickly pulled his hand back.

“Everybody-Knows-Toby,” Thigh Guy said, giving me an awed look without ever completely removing his gaze from the deadly fork in my hand. “No wonder.”

And that was the exact moment when threatening bodily harm became acceptable flirting practice at Bayport High. Overnight, I had become one of those girls, and the rest of the girls at our school had begun taking their cues from me.

“Chip, if you try to look down my shirt one more time, I’m going to have to hurt you.”

Chip, student body president and generic hottie, grinned. “Would you please?” he asked. The rest of the guys grinned lecherously at Chip’s wit.

What was a girl to do? I kicked him in the shin, and not one of the other cheerleaders glared at me. They were too busy trying to figure out how I’d managed to get a date with Jack “Unattainable” Peyton in under two minutes.

Chip grabbed his smarting shin, the rest of the guys started laughing, and I grinned. As much as I hated to admit it, a girl could get used to this.

CHAPTER 23

Code Word: Footsie

Less than an hour after I’d actually agreed to go on a date with our school’s most eligible and broody bachelor, I was in Chloe’s car, along with Bubbles, the twins, Chloe, and Lucy. Tara and April had agreed to stay behind to prepare for our mission that afternoon, and equally importantly, for our party that night.

“So when you kick them, do you like kick them hard, or do you just sort of play footsie with their shins?”

Brittany and Tiffany were very interested in what they had termed my FT (flirting technique). I got the distinct feeling that it wasn’t so much that they had trouble garnering male attention on their own as it was that they considered themselves to be connoisseurs of the art of flirtation. That there was any FT in existence that they had yet to master was a matter of grave concern.

“Toby.” Brittany said my name again. “Hello, focus! Footsie?”

“Do I look like I play footsie to you?”

Tiffany nibbled on her bottom lip in concentration.

“Well, you didn’t before the Stage Six, but…”

I considered introducing Tiff to the concept of the rhetorical question, but ultimately decided that there were better uses for my time. The twins and I were sitting in the backseat of Chloe’s car, a chic little red number that totally wasn’t big enough for six people. Luckily, Bubbles and Lucy were so tiny that they only counted as two-thirds of a person each, and neither of them seemed to be the least bit put out that they were sharing the shotgun seat. Bubbles was equally unbothered by the freakishly bizarre angle at which her upper body was twisted and the fact that her positioning relative to the stick shift had to have been giving her a horrible wedgie.

“Do you kick them like this?” Brittany asked, and the toe of her foot made contact with my shin.

“No,” I said. “More like this.”

“Ow!”

In the front seat, Lucy started laughing, and Bubbles, always up for a good giggle, joined in. In a momentous lack of twin solidarity, Tiffany commenced giggling, and even Chloe Thrill-Driver Larson let out a short laugh. Was it possible? Was this a bona fide bonding moment? As I was pondering that question, Chloe took a sharp right, and my head banged against the window. As the resounding thunk filled the car, Lucy broke into another bout of high-pitched tee-hees.

I was about to tell Chloe in somewhat unpleasant terms to slow down when she whipped the car into a parking space and twisted around. “You ready?” she asked the twins.

Brittany and Tiffany immediately turned to each other. Britt smoothed her sister’s hair, and in return, Tiffany touched up her twin’s lip gloss.

“Ready,” they said, speaking in unison. It was strangely unnerving—I’d never seen them dressed identically before, and postsmooth/postgloss, they were more than identical. They were like the same person, which was, all things considered, more or less the point.

“You memorized the maps?” Chloe prodded. “You know your way to the executive wing? You’ve got a cover for each stage of security?”

The twins nodded.

Chloe took a deep breath. It was enough to make me wonder if she was actually nervous. Just how much did Chloe feel like she had to prove here?

“Here’s the magnifier,” Chloe said, handing them a small, wood-colored square. “Don’t lose it.”

As Chloe continued to rattle off directives, Tiffany slipped the magnifier into her bra like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was like a kangaroo with a freaking pouch.

“Activate your minicams, and you’re good to go.”

The twins, still moving in synchrony, fiddled expertly with their identical necklaces. Chloe adjusted one of the car’s cup holders, pulled out a keyboard, and typed some form of command in. Instantly, a large screen came down from the ceiling, and with some more nimble finger aerobics on Chloe’s part, the feed from the twins’ necklaces showed up on the screen.

“Audio.” I was unsure at first whether Chloe was giving an audio command to the car, or issuing an order to the twins.

“It should be on,” Britt said, ever the spokesperson for her twin. “We’ll do a quick check on our way to the building.”

Since we’d parked a good two blocks away, that seemed safe.

Chloe nodded. “Proceed as planned,” she said. “If any alterations need to be made in this initiative, I’ll make them from here.”

Alterations in the initiative…It wasn’t that I’d expected gadget guru Chloe to have a ditz-sized vocabulary, but still, it was an incredible jump from “Beat the Bobcats!”

“Ready?” Chloe asked.

“Ready,” the twins answered.

“Ready,” Bubbles and Lucy chorused from the front seat, where Bubbles, for some unfathomable reason, had placed her feet behind her head.

Chloe cleared her throat and turned around to give me a pointed look.

“Oh,” I said, my brain still dedicated to wondering how a person would go about contorting themselves into a pretzel shape and why exactly they might feel compelled to do so.

“Ready.”

“Ready,” all of the others said again, and I recognized the cheer-tone in their voices. “Okay!”

Unfortunately, my mind took that as a cue to launch into a mental rendition of our halftime routine as Tiffany and Brittany slipped out of the car and Bubbles (feet now a safe distance from her head) wiggled her way into the backseat.

A few minutes later, the twins’ audio clicked on. “Bangs.”

“Out.”