okay but how do you think a Jake honeypot date would go down because I have never read anything more amazing in my life
@natcat5 whose brilliant idea this is.
Marco volunteers for the date immediately, as the only one on the team who is single and desperate. (Although, he admits, not desperate enough to sleep with a controller under any circumstances.) The thing is, though, that Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One has a type: every guy Ax and Tobias have seen her flirting with in the two weeks they’ve been following her around has been tall, dark, and handsome.
Everyone on the team (especially Jake) somewhat doubts Jake’s ability to act well enough to play the part, but the only idea worse than sending Jake would be sending Ax to do it, so he reluctantly volunteers for the mission.
The setup goes more or less according to plan: Jake arranges to bump into the sub-visser coming out of a Sharing meeting, and to their enormous luck she becomes the one to ask him for a phone number. Jake suggests the time and the place, though, and doesn’t have to fake enthusiastic relief when she agrees.
The day of, Rachel spends nearly two hours dressing Jake in various combinations of the seven pairs of pants, eighteen shirts, and five and a half jackets that she bought for the occasion, before Jake throws up his hands and announces that he’s going naked if this nonsense doesn’t end soon.
Marco immediately declares that that would be a brilliant way to get Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One dancing to their tune.
Cassie shyly volunteers the opinion that Jake looks nice no matter what he’s wearing.
Rachel tells them both to shut up, on the grounds that Jake getting arrested for public indecency would be just as bad for their plan as him showing up in the ill-fitting basketball shirt and ripped jeans he wore when he left the house this morning.
After Rachel’s initial attempt to teach Jake to flirt with her crashes and burns (“You’re the closest thing I have to a sister! I can’t just flirt with you!”) she substitutes Cassie into her own role. To her surprise, that manages to go even worse.
“Cassie,” Jake says, blushing so much he looks ready to pass out. “I like many things about you. You’re the sweetest person I know, and you’re brilliant at not just morphing, but, like, understanding the morphing. Oh, and you’re really smart at other stuff besides. You get people so fast, and there are all these things in science class that go way over my head that you pick up right away. And even though I was mad about it at the time, I thought it was cool that you saved those baby skunks—”
“You told me to compliment her,” Jake says indignantly. Cassie is currently examining the toes of her shoes with intense fascination, and appears to be fighting a fit of the giggles.
Rachel sighs loudly. “Not her personality. Think more physical.”
Jake takes a huge breath and draws himself up again. “You are, like, super strong for a girl,” he tells Cassie. “For anyone, really. That time when you pried that fox’s jaws open to make it vomit up the wolf poison—”
“CUT! Cassie, Marco, switch places!”
All three of them stare at Rachel in surprise for a second. Marco becomes the first to react, sidling up and sliding his arm through Jake’s. “So,” he coos. “Why’d a big strong man like you want to go out with little old me, anyway?”
“Because…” Jake glances at Rachel, who makes go on gestures. “Because of your hair. It’s very, uh, nicely done.”
Marco flips a few strands away from his face. “You really think it turned out okay? I only had time to run a brush through it a few times on the way over.”
“Yes,” Jake says firmly. “It is nice hair. And… you are… Notlikeothergirls!”
Marco bats his eyelashes, grinning now. “You really mean that?”
Jake attempts to smile as well. “I have never in my life met anyone like you, Marco. Seriously.”
“Now you’re getting it,” Rachel announces. She and Marco high-five at their own brilliance. Unseen, Jake and Cassie exchange a mutually baffled look and a shrug of bemusement.
Jake sets off for the date trailed fifty feet up by a red-tailed hawk and a northern harrier. He’s not sure why he’s wearing three shirts right now, or why the collars on all three are sticking straight up in the air (“Trust me,” Rachel insisted, “this is gonna be all over the country five years from now.”) like he’s a pastel version of Dracula. He’s also hoping he can take the weird flat sunglasses off soon—Rachel instructed him to hang them from the v-neck of his topmost shirt when he does—because the weather’s overcast and he feels ridiculous.
“What do we know so far?” he asks Tobias.
“Stacy?” Jake asks, as loud as he dares.
“Stacy,” Jake mutters to himself, rather than admitting he forgot. “Stacy. Stacy, Stacy, Stacy, Stacy, Stacy.”
real good first impression.>
At Tobias’s urging, Jake stops at a stand outside a greengrocer’s and buys a dozen daffodils for her. He’s not sure if he’s allowed to take off the sunglasses when he’s standing under the shade of the awning, even though they make it very difficult to count out bills and change. He does know that he is not under any circumstances to push them back into his hair, because then all the gel will make a weird crunching noise and Rachel will boil him in oil when she finds his spikes deformed. He could probably fit the entire bouquet into one of the ridiculously large pockets on the pants that he’s certain are three sizes too large, but he tucks it under his arm instead. “I hate this,” he mutters.
Jake gives them both a sickly smile of gratitude.
The initial meet’n’greet outside the restaurant goes reasonably well: Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One exclaims over the daffodils, Jake remembers to call her “Stacy,” and with effort he ignores the skin-crawly sensation of Cassie (now a housefly) landing in his hair. By the time they make it into the restaurant, Tobias and Rachel are already posed at a different table with baseball caps in place, while Marco shuffles around in a white apron busing tables and Ax (despite eight or nine promises that this time he’ll be cool around food) remains safely out of sight and out of morph on the roof. If anything goes catastrophically wrong, the plan is for Cassie to alert Marco, who will create a diversion by overturning a dish cart while Rachel and Tobias hastily duck under the tablecloth of their own table—Rachel to morph, Tobias to demorph—as Ax provides everyone cover. Jake’s pretty sure that if his date wants to shoot him in the head there’ll be nothing the others can do in time to stop her, but at least he knows he probably won’t end up forcibly made into a controller by the end of the evening.
Rachel, blatantly eavesdropping even as she holds Tobias’s hand across the table and they stare into each other’s eyes (if anyone starts looking at them too closely they start loudly sucking face) has to admit that Jake does better than she would have expected. He asks “Stacy” where she got her shoes, laughs in a way that’s only slightly moronic when she compliments his sunglasses, and (after Tobias calls out a suggestion in thought-speak) even remembers to pull her chair out for her before she sits down.
As instructed, Jake waits until after they’ve already ordered their food to turn the conversation to the reason they went to all this trouble in the first place. He’s pretty pleased with how things are going so far, although then again he might just be light-headed from the smell of the instatan Rachel sprayed on him earlier.
“So,” he says. “You’re part of the Sharing, right? How’d you get into that in the first place?”
Ireiss 132 tosses a lock of Stacy’s hair over her shoulder. “My older sister got me into it, actually. She kept begging me and begging me to join, and then one time I just—Hey, you okay?”
Jake forces a laugh, doing his best not to think of Stacy, to think of Tom, to think but for the grace of God... “Sure. Just, uh, zoned for a second. So, the Sharing does a lot of recruitment events, right?”
“Yeah, we’ve got volleyball days, cookouts on the beach, whole weekends upstate…” She leans forward a little across the table. “You interested in joining?”
Cassie suggests, at almost exactly the same time Tobias says, Marco, standing across the room, makes eye contact with Jake long enough to shake his head emphatically, just as Tobias adds,
Jake closes his eyes for a second to find the patience not to swat at the back of his head and then throw a full plate of food at the next table over. “I don’t know, really,” he says diplomatically. “What do you guys do, anyway, besides sit around and eat hamburgers?”
“It’s all about community outreach,” Ireiss 132 says, apparently not noticing Jake’s hesitation. “We do days where we clean up litter at the park, we raise money to fund cancer research—”
Jake, having missed the end of that sentence, has to make an educated guess. “Sounds pretty cool. Don’t you have, like, celebrity endorsements?”
“Oh, sure. There’s Jeremy Jason McCole, William Roger Tennant…” Ireiss ticks the names off on Stacy’s left hand. “That blond lady with the cooking show, Senator Malesin, Senator Argo, Angelina Jolie—”
<Angelina Jolie?> Tobias says.
Ireiss blinks at him a few times.
Jake clears his throat. “I just mean…” He changes his inflection. “Shut up! As in, you’re kidding me! You think maybe I could meet her sometime?”
“Join the Sharing,” Ireiss says. “We could make it happen. Once you get initiated as a full member your whole life opens up before you—you can’t imagine what it’s like.”
Jake forces another smile. He picks up his fork. This helps him to avoid giving into the urge to clamp both hands over his ears, slide under the table, and scream something about how they can never have his body. He can imagine the experience a little too well, and it’s not something he’s ever letting happen again.
Nonetheless, Jake manages to keep lightly deflecting Ireiss’s recruitment attempts while also digging for information, clear through until Marco—with a flourish—brings them a plate of mini cannoli for dessert. After he ducks away from their table he sweeps over to begin polishing the corner of Rachel and Tobias’s.
Tobias says a minute later.
Jake, who has just been distracted in the middle of Ireiss’s description of how they draw in community members to Sharing meetings, makes a mental note to define the term radio silence for the entire team when they get home. Then he picks up the last cannoli, very pointedly licks it, and puts it back on the plate uneaten.
“You were saying?” Jake says loudly.
Ireiss clears Stacy’s throat. “Oh, just that we really feel reaching out to vulnerable kids—as through the youth shelter I mentioned, and the after-school program—is the best way to offer them the Sharing as an alternative to gang membership.”
Jake dearly hopes that someone is taking notes on all of this, because if he suffered through the application of that much instatan for nothing he’s going to strangle someone. “That’s really cool. So is there, like, a place where you keep track of all the Sharing’s full members? Some kind of database or something?”
“…nothing that formal,” Ireiss is saying. “Hoping for more celebrities?”
“You know what?” Jake stands up. “It’s been real. But I’ve got a thing, so…”
Tobias is right: he emphatically doesn’t want a second date. Waving at Stacy, Jake pivots and walks out the door without another word.
They assemble in Cassie’s barn later that evening, Jake attempting to get one of Cassie’s horse-brushes through the horrible gel-stiff mess of his hair as everyone else trickles in. “Okay,” he says wearily, when they’re all present, “What did we learn today?”
“For starters,” Marco says, “That Tobias is apparently romantic as hell. Were I not healthily terrified of your beautiful and homicidal cousin, I would already be trying to hit that like a—”
“Besides that.” Jake rubs a hand over his face, smearing the makeup that Rachel insisted isn’t makeup across his skin. “What else?”
“I learned that, on second thought, lime green is not your color.” Rachel frowns. “I’m not sure the look works at all. You can take the boy out of the WalMart jeans, but you can’t take the WalMart jeans out of the boy, I guess.”
“Can we please stay on topic?” Jake asks.
“Angelina Jolie’s a controller.” Cassie smiles sympathetically at Jake. “So are two of California’s state senators, and a handful of B-list actors. The Sharing is recruiting at the youth shelter, which is just all kinds of gross and awful, and they’re making a push to move into more schools across the county.”
They rehash everything Ireiss 132 said, hinted at, or confirmed in response to Jake’s questions for nearly two more hours. By the end of it they’ve got a decent plan in place for how to ensure the Sharing can’t spread any more feelers into any more parts of the community, and the beginnings of an idea for how to discredit the whole organization. By then it’s getting late, so Jake and Marco and Rachel all split off to head home.
There’s a note pinned on the fridge when Jake walks in. Midget— Some chick keeps calling the house wanting to know when she’ll see you again. Call her back or get rid of her, but stop clogging up the line with your dumb teenage nonsense.
Jake stares at it in incredulity for several seconds. “Goddamn yeerks,” he says at last, and balls it up to throw in the trash.
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