Perfect Cover by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“Okay,” I said. “Let me get this straight. Once upon a time, the government—God knows why—started recruiting high school cheerleaders and training them to be spies, and somewhere along the way, it actually occurred to them that this wasn’t the best use of the taxpayers’ dollars, so they stopped with the cheer-spies thing, except here in Bayport, where the Squad went from being a cover-up for some sort of spy school to being an actual operative agency?”
Lucy nodded. “That about covers it.”
“And these people that we’re supposed to ‘keep an eye’ on?”
Lucy shrugged. “They’re the bad guys.”
How very illuminating.
I was going to ask more questions, but Lucy changed the subject with all the subterfuge her cheerleading mystique could muster. “What do you think—blow darts—in or out?”
I pictured myself blow-darting an evil football player. “In.”
I had so many more questions about the Squad—what exactly did we do? How much training did we receive? How was this whole thing even legal? Despite Lucy’s dumb act (and, overcaffeination aside, I was starting to suspect that it was an act), I had a feeling that she knew more than she was letting on. At the same time, though, she was holding a knife, and I didn’t want to press her.
“So,” I said, eyeing the knife nervously. “Have you always been into weapons?”
“Me?” Lucy asked, and then she laughed loudly. Given the insanely broad smile on her face and the extra-large knife in her hand, it was borderline freaky. “Gosh, no. A couple of years ago, I’d never even seen a slingshot. I just wanted to make the varsity squad, you know? I’d been cheerleading for like ever, and making varsity seemed to be like this huge challenge and stuff. It was just something I did, and I wanted to do it well, you know? Cheerleading and student council and school and riding classes and…well, you get the drift. Anyway, when they brought me onto the Squad, I had like no specialty whatsoever. I wasn’t a transfer like you. I was just a regular old recruit, like April, but I wanted to be good at something, and their weapons person had just graduated…”
“Hold on there, Skippy…errr…Lucy, what do you mean ‘a transfer’ like me?”
Lucy shrugged. “Some of us are Bayport natives,” she said. “We grew up here, and when we were old enough, we started cheerleading. It’s just what people do here, you know?”
I didn’t interrupt her, but did concentrate on using my nonexistent mind-control powers to compel her to get to the point.
“When I was in fifth grade, everyone wanted to be a cheerleader. I mean, I think every single girl in our class tried out. They picked forty of us that year, and then the next year, it was thirty-five, and they kept getting rid of people. Tryouts kept getting more and more competitive. By the time I made JV, there were only twelve of us.”
Lucy’s voice took on a new tone as she talked about the lengths she’d gone to in her pursuit of making varsity.
“Lucy,” I told her. “Transfer.”
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said. “Well, the way it works is like this. The Bayport Cheerleading Association runs the tryouts for JV and under, and they’re like, a bunch of overinvolved parents and all of the coaches. And I guess maybe some of the coaches are government people or something, because by the time we reach JV, they have all kinds of reports on us. And every year, the Squad captain gets profiles on all the current members of JV, and any other ‘people of interest’ in the sophomore class, and the members do a little digging around. We read through the files we’ve been given, and we do a bunch of prescreening and whoever the current Zee is runs all her psycho-whatsits on them, and then if there are any open spots, we make our recommendations to the Boss Guys.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“No idea who the Boss Guys are,” Lucy said. “That’s why I just call them the Boss Guys. Or maybe you were wondering about the whole ‘current Zee’ thing? Because obviously, there’s only one Zee, but I meant, you know, whoever has Zee’s job. Because picking the new Squad is part of the current Squad’s duty, and the current Squad is always changing and stuff, so…”
“Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“Transfer.” I tell you, keeping the Queen of Babbling on task was a full-time job.
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said. “Well, you know how I said we fill in any extra spots with girls from JV?”
I nodded.
“Well, sometimes we don’t have that many extra spots, because ever since the Squad went from being a training thingy to an action thingy, the Boss Guys have been bringing people in from outside the system.”
“The system?”
Lucy nodded. “As in the school system,” she said. “If they find someone they want on the Squad, they fix it so that they’re transferred to Bayport. That’s how we got you. They transferred your dad, and you moved here.”
I tried to digest this information. I’d hacked into the Pentagon, and a month later, my dad had been transferred to Bayport. I’d never made the connection before, but now, it was undeniable. “Are you telling me that I moved to Bayport because somebody wanted me to eventually be Squad Girl?”
Lucy gave me a very meek smile. “Would that be a bad thing?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like the idea of the government playing puppet-master with my life, but it made me realize, maybe for the first time, that the Squad was very real, and that the Big Guys Upstairs, whoever they were, were very, very powerful.
“How many other transfers are there?” I asked.
Lucy, sensing that I wasn’t going to maim the messenger, smiled broadly. “Most of the time, the Squad’s about fifty-fifty. Half of us have been cheerleaders forever, and just happen to have an aptitude for the spy thing, and half of us are special skills peeps who are transferred in.”
“Which half is which?” I asked.
“You, Chloe, Tara, and Zee were transfers,” Lucy said happily. “Did you know that Zee has a PhD?”
“She has a what?”
“A PhD. In forensic psychology and stuff. She might have another one or something, but I’m not really sure.”
“Lucy,” I said patiently. “Zee’s a senior in high school. And her claim to fame is the fact that she can tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. Unless PhD stands for Pretty Hot Diva, I don’t think—”
“She was a transfer,” Lucy said stubbornly, like that explained it.
“So she got a PhD, and then a bunch of government guys said, ‘Hey, want to become a high school cheerleader?’ And she just said yes?”
Lucy nodded. “Pretty much,” she said. “I guess the first time around, she graduated high school when she was like eight or nine, so it was pretty much no fun at all.”
My mind was spinning. The government had transferred my parents to Bayport so that I would become a Bayport High varsity cheerleader, aka Double-0-Toby. These same government guys plucked Zee straight out of grad school and convinced her that high school would be more fun the second time around.
“And Tara and Chloe?” I asked.
“Tara’s an exchange student,” Lucy said. “You’ve probably noticed the British accent. It’s real. She grew up in England, mostly, but traveled a lot. Her parents were really gung ho on the Squad thing. And Chloe got some patent thingy when she was like ten, and they got her here the next year.”
“And the rest of you guys?” I asked. “One day, you were just cheerleaders, and the next—boom—you’re secret agents?”
I could almost understand the idea behind using a cheerleading squad as a cover-up—after all, if you stick a girl in a cheerleading skirt, no one takes her seriously—but the idea that half of us had been handpicked by the government for our “special skills” and that the other half had been chosen from the current supply of cheerleaders was still a little mind-boggling.
“Cheerleaders and secret agents have more in common than you might think, Toby,” Lucy said.
I think the word incredulous would probably be something
Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh, Toby,” she said, like we’d been friends for a million years and she just couldn’t get over how very silly I was in the most endearing of ways. “Here,” she said, picking a notebook up off the counter. “Read this. It’s this Squad history thing that Brooke got somewhere. It’s got all of the stuff I told you in it, but it probably explains it better.”
I seriously doubted there was anything in that book that could make me believe that high school cheerleaders were somehow predisposed to being brilliant government operatives, but it would have taken someone with a far harder heart than my own to tell that to Lucy Wheeler.
“So,” she said brightly. “We still have like twenty minutes before you have to report to the salon. Wanna blow stuff up?”
All things considered, that was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.
CHAPTER 10
Code Word: Makeover
Unfortunately, happy explosives time couldn’t last forever, and sooner than later, I’d bid goodbye to Lucy’s lab and said hello to the twins’.
“Copper frost for the skin?”
Brittany pursed her lips at her twin’s question. “Only if we go dirrrrrrty blond on top.”
That’s the way she said it, too. Like it was from some idiotic Christina Aguilera song that was cool when we were younger.
“If we go blond, we may need to change the eyes, too.”
“Crystal clear?”
“Here’s an idea,” I said from my seat between them.
“How ’bout we leave my hair, skin tone, and eyes the same?”
“Brown, taupe, and brown? Puh-lease.”
“My skin’s not taupe.”
Brittany and Tiffany remained suspiciously quiet.
“Hyperdye for the hair,” Brittany said suddenly. “It’s totally brill. Like who’s gonna believe that she became Hollywood blond overnight? Nobody. But if we hyperdye her, and she changes her hair color like all the time…”
“People will think she’s just releasing her inner cool,” Tiffany completed her twin’s thought. “People are so dumb.”
“Hyperdye?” I asked, trying not to let them push me past the breaking point.
“It’s this totally cool stuff Chloe made for us,” Tiff said.
“It like changes colors when you do this thing to it with another one of Chloe’s gadgetmathingies.”
I groaned inwardly, because obviously that incomprehensible (not to mention ungrammatical) sentence cleared everything up. Like, totally.
“So my hair could be blue one day and red the next?” If I was going to have to dye my hair anyway, a punk look was the most I could hope for.
“Blue?”
“Red?”
The twins spoke with identical, horrified tones.
“Toby, you’re a cheerleader. Cheerleaders do not have blue hair.”
“You hyperdye it. I’ll pick the colors.” I wasn’t entirely sure how hyperdye worked, but it seemed like a good compromise to me.
“Maybe hyperdye isn’t such a great idea,” Brittany said slowly, still twitching in horror at the idea of a varsity cheerleader sporting bright blue hair. “Chloe gets kind of mad when we use it recreationally.”
A six-syllable word. Impressive from a twin.
“Can’t we just leave my hair brown?” I asked. “It’s either that or bright red. Your choice.”
For a moment, the twins stared at me, homicide in their little cheerleader eyes, but then, the twin on the left perked up a bit.
“Chocolate brown?” she suggested.
“Or maybe mahogany?”
“Honeysuckle!”
“Ohhh…or we could do mahogany with honeysuckle highlights.”
“Perfect,” they both said at once.
I tried to follow their conversation. “So we’re going with brown, then?”
The two of them stared at me like I was the stupid one. “Were you not listening at all, Toby? We’re going to go with a mahogany base and then add some honeysuckle highlights around your face to bring out those nonexistent cheekbones.”
Tiffany softened her sister’s words a little. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting me on the head like I was a small child. “We’ll hyperdye you before a mission sometime. That way, if you get caught and have to run or something, you can change your hair color like that.” Tiff snapped her fingers, and the sound, sharp as her manicured nails, echoed in my ears.
I glanced around the room nervously. Four walls, no visible door, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t “EXIT, OKAY!” under pressure. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—just me, trapped alone in what looked like the world’s most high-tech salon, with twin fashionistas who had been authorized to administer a Stage Six makeover.
At least I still had my combat boots.
Britt reached up and pushed me into a chair. Immediately, restraints locked down my arms and legs.
“Wha…?”
Without a word, the twins spun the chair around and forced my head into a sink.
“Don’t move,” Brittany advised. “Most of our stuff is kind of…you know…”
“Killer strong? Illegal?” Tiffany suggested.
“Yeah,” Brittany said. “That. Oh, and you should probably wear these sunglasses, too. Are you allergic to avocado?” Without waiting for a response, she slipped the glasses onto my face. I won’t go into the ugly details of what happened next: the dye so potent that the Squad bought it on the black market, the electron wave accelerator that the twins had co-opted to properly blend the highlights with the rest of my hair, the tanning spray that totally got up my nose, and the superstraightening serum that was, and I quote, “completely supposed to be used in some bomb thingy.” They plucked me. They waxed me. They exfoliated the crap out of me.
They put makeup on my face.
Worse, they tried to teach me how to do it and acted like I was completely intellectually delayed when I couldn’t explain the difference between lip liner, lipstick, and lip gloss. When they sat me back up and turned my chair to face a wall-length mirror, I prepared myself for the worst. What I got was absolutely shocking.
I looked just like them. All of them. Perfect tan. Perfect nails. Silky soft skin, gloriously shiny and thick hair, brushed to perfection. Big, pouty lips, and huge doe-like eyes, which they’d actually left my original chocolatey brown. I still looked like me. Sort of. It was just like me, cheerlead-o-fied.
You know those movies I was talking about earlier, the ones where the popular crowd makes over the dorky, shy girl, and even though she’s quirky and zany and a real individual, she can’t help but become enamored with her new look, because deep down, she’s always wanted to be pretty?
This is not one of those movies.
“What the hell did you do to me?” I asked, horrified. “Do you know what I look like?”
Brittany smiled. “A cheerleader?”
“I look like Barbie’s brown-haired friend! I look like something out of a commercial for capri pants, and I don’t even know what capri pants are.” I raged on, but even raging, the mirror let me know that I looked what most of the school would have termed fabulous. “I look,” I spat out, “like the brunette love child of Mandy Moore and Marcia Brady. If they made a TV movie of my life right now, do you know who they’d cast to play me? Do you?” I couldn’t say the name out loud. I despised tween queen actresses with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns, and now, one of them was going to be starring in Toby: The Untold Story.
Until this moment, it hadn’t been entirely real. Sure, people were talking about me, and yeah, I’d worn pink sparkles for the first time in my life, but I’d still felt like me. Now, staring at my face covered in their makeup, I had no choice but to be honest with myself: I was becoming the thing I hated most in the world, one of those girls. You know them. Every school has them. They’re the girls you love to hate, but it’s okay to hate them, becau
And I was one of them. Minus the heels, thank God.
“You look fabulous,” Brittany told me, interrupting my inner rant.
Tiffany smiled and hooked her arm through Brittany’s. “We’re brilliant,” she said, beaming first at her twin and then at me.
I glowered back at them, but with my shiny lips and mascara-ed eyes, the effect just wasn’t the same. Either that, or the two of them had the combined emotional intelligence of a walnut, and couldn’t read the obvious distress in my now clearly heart-shaped face.
“Access granted.” The computerized voice spoke, a previously invisible door slid open, and Tara walked in. She seemed serious. Poised. Dignified. For one of those girls, she wore the look well.
“Nice job,” she told the twins, who were too busy congratulating themselves and giving me an impromptu lecture on cuticle management to hear her. Tara shrugged slightly, her dark hair falling behind her shoulder. “You’ll get used to it,” she told me softly. “We all did.”
That made me think of my one-on-one time with Lucy, and everything she’d told me. The über-salon existed for a reason. I wasn’t the only transfer, which meant that I probably wasn’t the only person who’d had to be cheerlead-o-fied. I’d always pictured the God Squad as the kind of girls who were born in a tanning booth wearing a bikini and getting exfoliated. It was like being born royal: the Divine Right of Popularity. And maybe that was true for girls like Lucy and the twins. But what about the other transfers? I couldn’t help but wonder—what had Zee looked like back when she was a child prodigy PhD? What about Chloe? And…
Tara took my elbow and gently led me out of the room. “You will get used to it, Toby,” she said. “You’ll find a way to make it work for you, and after a while, you won’t notice so much anymore.”
The day I didn’t notice I looked like this was the day I lost the majority of my senses. I looked different. I felt different. I even smelled different.