Work Text:
“Lisa, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, of course,” I lied. “Disappointed, do better, think of others… I think that was all the highlights.”
Thomas sighed, closing his eyes and turning up his head while letting his shoulders droop. The image was impressively despairing. “Lisa…” he returned his gaze to mine, his expression serious. “You’re a brilliant young woman, but-” and then he said some other things that couldn’t have been nearly as important or true, ending with “-will attend Winslow High along with Taylor.”
Wait… “what?”
Thomas reached into his desk and pulled out a piece of paper which he slid across to me. A transfer form. I stared at it, at my name on it, and a small part of me was actively trying to burn the paper with my mind, or transform it into something else.
“You must understand the consequences that your actions have for others. If the only way to do that is for you to feel the consequences yourself, so be it. And besides,” he added with a small smile, “spending more time around people your age will be good for you.”
“Consequences?” I said. “I was doing Taylor a favor, helping her dig her name out of the dirt it’s been dragged through.”
“And I’m sure that’s why you haven’t told her who it is exactly who’s been spreading rumors about her having a-” he picked up a sheet of paper, reading off of it- “girlfriend from Canada who’s a model, athlete, and star student.”
I shrugged. “She didn’t ask. Besides, in high school, you are who you date. If people think that she landed a catch, then that boosts her status. And as long as that catch isn’t someone that any of the people going there would know, you can make up whatever you want about them!”
“You seem to have missed a critical point, Lisa,” Thomas said.
That didn't sound like me. “Like what?”
“While none of the rumors could be traced back to you, neither could they be traced back to any real source. Without any evidence or anyone willing to back up your claims, it was easy for some of her classmates to create a counter-narrative. Can you guess what that would be?”
I could feel my face warm up as the realization hit me. “They’re saying that she’s the one who’s been spreading the rumors, that she’s lying for attention.” Those bitches!
“Very much so,” he said with a thin-lipped smile. “And that is why I’m sending you to clean up the mess that you’ve made.”
With that, he reached over and pressed a large red button on his desk and the floor opened up beneath me. No matter how many times I got chuted, I could never get used to that stomach-rising-into-your-throat feeling that happened when the floor beneath you was suddenly no longer beneath you, and a scream tore itself out of my mouth as I fell into darkness.
---
It took me a little while in the girls’ bathroom with the multi-use compact to get fully dolled-up, and by the time I was done, the five-minutes-to-class bell was already ringing. Did I want to pretend to be head-over-heels for a girl I considered strictly a friend? Of course not. Was I willing to do anything less than my best when faced with a challenge like this? No way in hell.
Thankfully there hadn’t been any specific details about where Taylor’s girlfriend was from in Canada, so I wouldn’t need to fake an accent or use gratuitous Canadian-French. I would need to be on my A-game though; I needed to convince the student body of Winslow High that I was a real life dream girl so I could salvage Taylor’s reputation.
I tucked away my supplies and left the bathroom, emerging into a hallway that… was surprisingly clean. I’d heard a lot about this school, its funding and delinquents, but apparently the janitors were on top of things. The floor even squeaked a bit beneath my shoes as I made my way to the first class of the day. Thomas had given me a class schedule that mostly matched Taylor’s, with one class a day that was separate. It could have been to deflect suspicion, but I figured that it might also be to give me time without Taylor around so that the other students could interrogate me on my own.
I was fashionably late for math, meaning that I wasn’t technically tardy, but since I arrived just before the final bell, everybody was already seated and settled, allowing me to capture more attention than if I’d showed up with the crowd a few minutes ago. I put on a smile; small enough to hint that I was nervous, but wide enough to showcase a bit of enthusiasm. Sometimes it was helpful and not just annoying to be both a teenager and a superspy.
Thankfully, the math teacher noticed me right away and remembered that she had a transfer student, so she took charge, introducing me as Lisa while I gave a little wave to the students and directing me to find an empty seat.
There were only a couple of places I could sit, but thanks to either a small miracle or Thomas’s machinations, the seat next to Taylor was open, so I made a show of looking her way, noticing that fact, and willing my eyes to sparkle with excitement as I half-sauntered down the aisle of desks. There were too many eyes on us, including the teacher’s, for any overt acts of affection, but I offered Taylor a familiar look and a friendly “hey Tay!” before settling down and getting out a notebook. I could feel her gaze boring into me even with my focus on the teacher and the whiteboard that was quickly being filled with formulas and the start of a wonky graph.
As it turns out, you can be a brilliant superspy, you can know enough about physics to intercept an ICBM and enough about chemistry to neutralize a neurotoxin, but if you haven’t taken the first three months of Algebra II, the numbers and letters were almost incomprehensible. I doubted that I’d be here long enough for a major test, so I just wrote down what the teacher put on the whiteboard without bothering to pay much attention to what she was saying. I could always get help from Taylor with the homework later too.
The teacher called a student to the front to solve an equation, and while the student was fumbling his way through both the math problem and the task of writing with a whiteboard marker, Taylor leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “Lisa, what are you doing here?”
I shrugged, making sure that my response was just loud enough to be heard by the students around us, “dad got some work down here in the U.S, and while we’re here, he let me attend the school that my girlfriend is going to. Sorry I didn’t mention it sooner, I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Taylor’s face made some interesting shapes as it went through confusion, understanding, affront, and a few other emotions I couldn’t quite place once she remembered to try and hide her reactions. It probably wasn’t very fair to expect her to keep a solid poker face when she was off-duty and I was kinda-sorta on a mission, but it wasn’t very befitting of a superspy to let so many of her thoughts be that easy to read.
Before she could respond, the teacher let the student slink back to his desk and the window for talking in class was closed. A few minutes later when the teacher’s back was turned to the class, Taylor leaned over and deposited a note onto my desk. I ran my fingertips over it, deciphering the message inside by the impressions that her pencil had left on the paper, and then flipped it open to ‘read’ the note in a way that let the students behind me peep if they so chose. Let’s talk after class , it read. In Private.
Ooh la la. I waited until Taylor was looking my direction and gave her a smile and a thumbs up below the desk, where the teacher couldn’t see but Taylor- and just as importantly, the other students behind them- could.
Of course, ‘Private’ with the capital ‘P’ was referring to one of the safe-rooms installed around the city in case we needed to gear up to react to an emergency and the chute system was down. There was one here in the school, but I wasn’t so sure that Taylor knew the normal implications of a known couple sneaking into the janitor’s closet between classes.
Once math class was finally over, everyone began to pack up their supplies and funnel out. I made sure to cast a fair share of fond glances over toward Taylor as I followed suit, and when she stood, silently waiting for me to follow, I slipped my hand in hers with a smile. “Ready to go?”
She actually flushed a bit at that, and muttered “stop that,” though she did lead me out through the classroom and through the hall until we were able to covertly slip into the closet. I’d noticed that we’d had a few tails that we hadn’t shaken from math class, but I couldn’t imagine that Taylor had missed them either, so I had to figure that she was fine with them knowing that we’d slipped away together.
Once we were both inside, Taylor grabbed an unlabeled switch on the wall and pulled it down. The door locked with a deadbolt hidden inside the wood, and a panel opened in what seemed to be a boiler, from floor to ceiling.
As it turned out, the safe-room wasn’t all that big, and after we both stepped inside, we only had about a foot of distance between us. It was uncomfortably intimate.
“Lisa, what the hell? Why are you… I didn’t want this!”
I shrugged. “Hey, this wasn’t my idea either. Thomas told me to play the girlfriend for-” I realized that he hadn’t actually told me how long I’d need to keep up this charade- “a bit. I’m just following orders.”
Taylor blinked, angrily. “That doesn’t make sense. I told him that I would only do this if he kept out of my personal life as much as possible, and this is definitely crossing that line. Is this part of some mission, is my identity compromised, or…”
Okay, no, I couldn’t let Taylor spiral too deep, or she’d start making rash decisions. “Okay, so it may possibly have something to do with me too. Because I was trying to help, you know? But maybe I didn’t think it through all the way, completely.”
It took her a couple of seconds to connect the dots. “It was you!” She jabbed me in the shoulder. It actually hurt a bit. “Lisa, what the hell!”
“I was helping!” I defended myself. “Even if it wouldn’t get everyone off your back, knowing that you’d gotten a girlfriend would make at least some of those rumors about you ring hollow, and if people wanted to get to know her through you, they might even be a bit friendlier.”
“And what did you think would happen when they tried to get to know her and she didn’t exist!?”
Another angle that I hadn’t entirely considered, but… “she dies in a plane crash maybe? Exit stage left, and all that.”
Taylor massaged her temples before her hands fell to her sides, limp. “You should have told me. You should have asked me. I’m trying to think of an easy way out of this, but…”
“Let’s just play this out, for today, I’ll talk to Thomas, see if I can’t get him to call this all off.”
For a few seconds, she stared into the distance, her fingers twitching as if she was trying to reach for a gadget or a weapon. “...okay,” she eventually said. “Just today.”
“Not to push the envelope, but we’re going to have to do a little bit of cover-work before we head to the next class. To sell the story.”
“It’s a simple story,” Taylor said. “You’re my ‘Canadian girlfriend’ who’s going to school here in the short term because her dad moves a lot for work.”
“That’s not what I mean, kiddo. We ducked into the janitor’s closet between classes, and we weren’t super subtle about it. Here, you do me and I’ll do you.” I reached out and ruffled her clothes a bit, then moved up and mussed her hair.
It took her a few seconds, but I could tell when Taylor caught on because her face flushed bright red. Well, it would help the look we were going for. To catch up, I started deliberately hyperventilating to get my breath uneven and my blood flowing.
While Taylor ‘fixed’ my ponytail, I pulled out my compact and applied a faint smudged lipstick mark to her neck. I could have made the mark the authentic way, but that would be going a bit too far. Taylor was a good friend, but I didn’t think of her that way, and I had to imagine that the feeling was mutual.
Just as the pre-class bell rang, we slipped out of the janitor’s closet. Our faces were flushed, our clothes just slightly off-kilter, and a couple of marks were just visible. Just two girlfriends stealing some time for a makeout session, nothing to see here.
Unfortunately, the next class didn’t have any open spaces for me to sit next to Taylor, but we were both in the back of the classroom, so there was a decent amount of note-passing. For anyone who ‘intercepted’ the messages between us, it would seem like normal flirting, but with our coded language, I was able to make a proper apology to Taylor and clarify a few details with her on my backstory and our general relationship.
The hour passed quickly, and we filtered out back into the hall, only for our path to be blocked by a group of five girls.
“I don’t know how much Taylor is paying you, but I’m sure it isn’t enough,” the lead girl said. “No amount of money is worth lowering yourself that far.”
I took a second, feigning confusion and then realization. “Oh!” I said, cocking out my hip and putting my hand on it. “You’re the bitches!” A boy off to the side laughed, and a few giggles answered him.
The lead girl- Emma, I had to assume- opened her mouth to retort, but I continued, “I really don’t appreciate you picking on my girl, you know. I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to say it to your face, but Taylor is a kick-ass girl who I wouldn’t give up for the world, and the fact that a shallow child like you can take up even a portion of her day is a tragedy.” The same boy ‘oooh’d, and I glanced in his direction for a moment. I know I offered you twenty bucks to take my side on this, but you’re laying it on a bit thick.
Still, the plant was doing his job, and the students who had stopped to watch the unfolding scene chuckled or winced, looking to Emma like this was a tennis game.
Even though I’d given a solid serve, she barely hesitated to return the ball. “I’m sorry, I thought I was talking to someone reasonable. It’s clear that whatever she’s been carrying around has gotten to your brain, too.”
I made a quick calculation, and then stretched my arms above my head, clasping my hands together and arching out my back as I feigned fatigue. The boys in the crowd were probably appreciating the show (gross), but more importantly, it showed that I wasn’t bothered, and communicated that I was getting bored with her. “You wish you had what I’ve got, girl.” I was only a little older than her, but I had the glamour of being the fantasy Canadian girlfriend and the body and confidence from being a superspy to back it up. Emma looked pretty enough- fashionable too- but she hadn’t saved the world a dozen times over, and she couldn’t take down a martial artist with nothing but a tube of lipstick and a high kick.
I took Taylor’s hand. She was frowning, but she didn’t fight me as I pulled her past the group of girls. “Come on, babe. What’s next, current events?”
The teacher who’d been coming to break up the confrontation- and who I’d noticed over the girls’ shoulders- gave me an unsure look as I wove past him, and I gave a big smile in return.
Well, maybe being Taylor’s fake girlfriend wouldn’t be so bad.