Perfect Cover
Page 11

He was exactly the kind of arrogant, pompous, gorgeous ass I normally tried to avoid. Heavy on the gorgeous.
“Everyone knows Toby,” Zee said, tossing her shiny black hair over her shoulder. Watching the hair toss, it was hard to believe that the psychological profiler and the school’s numero uno “exotic hottie” were one and the same person.
Then again, it was hard to believe that I was one “Go Lions” away from being the school’s most boo combat-boot-wearing, European, Hollywood offspring of Calvin Klein. I rolled with the punches.
“Everyone knows me.” I repeated Zee’s words, and then couldn’t resist pulling Mr. Gorgeous’s chain. “Who the hell are you?”
This time, I dodged the shin kick with a microsecond to spare.
“Well, Everyone-Knows-Toby,” the boy said, addressing me. “I guess you’ll just have to find out.”
Inwardly, I smiled a wicked little grin. I would find out who he was, and with the help of the state-of-the-art Quad facilities, with any luck, I’d also find some grade-A blackmail material to wipe that self-important smirk off his perfectly crafted face. All I had to do was make it to seventh period first.
“Well, I heard that she totally dated a prince.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“That is so boo!”
Unless I found a way to tune out the rumors flying at warp speed through the halls, getting to seventh was going to be harder than I had anticipated.
CHAPTER 9
Code Word: Like, You Know?
By seventh period, I was exhausted. Actively hating your newfound popularity with a fiery passion can really take a lot out of you. And seriously, I was beginning to think that everything sucks more if you’re wearing a miniskirt. As I opened the door to the practice gym, all I wanted to do was escape. And lose the miniskirt. And forget about the fact that Brooke had assigned the twins to Project Give-Toby-a-Makeover. Talk about mission impossible.
I’d like to say that I walked into the gym with my head held high, completely devoid of any fear. But a day of being “completely boo” had taken its toll on my morale, and truthfully, I would like to believe that the phrase Stage Six makeover could put fear into the heart of even the most stalwart social misfit.
“Toby! Hi!”
I didn’t know whether to be glad that Brittany and Tiffany weren’t waiting for me, or to groan at the fact that Lucy was. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t completely despise Lucy for being the perky, happy soul that she was. I’m not entirely heartless, and especially after the way she’d put Hayley in her place at lunch, I even had what might vaguely pass as a fondness for the bouncy little weapons expert. It was just a very particular kind of fondness—the kind where I didn’t want to spend any more time in her presence than was absolutely necessary.
“Toby! Hi!” Lucy tried again. I had a sinking suspicion that ignoring her wouldn’t make her any less friendly, and I wasn’t sure I could take “Toby! Hi!” on repeat indefinitely.
“Hey, Lucy.”
“So how was your day? Probably pretty long, I guess. But good? It was good, wasn’t it?”
I could only conclude that the speed with which Lucy was speaking was the result of some kind of highly classified government enhancement of her tongue muscles, because otherwise, it shouldn’t have been possible.
When I didn’t respond to her question, Lucy frowned. “So your day wasn’t good?” Her voice fell, and I felt a little bit like I’d just slain the Easter bunny in front of a Sunday school class full of orphaned children. I tried to decide whether the fact that she’d wanted me to have a good day that badly was strangely endearing or exponentially creepy. In either case, it felt somehow wrong to sit there, letting the Happiest Girl in the World frown.
“My day wasn’t that bad,” I told her.
It was, you know, only horrendous.
Lucy gave me a tentative half smile. “It will get better,” she promised me. “Things will settle down. Like with all the rumors and stuff? It won’t last forever, and you’ll get used to it, and hey, it could be worse, right?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that in the mind of Toby Klein, things couldn’t get much worse than standing in the cheerleaders’ practice gym, waiting like an inmate on death row for the makeover that was headed my way.
“Anyway,” Lucy said. “The twins are prepping the salon, and the others are getting ready to debrief April, but Tara and Brooke thought you might still be a little confused about the way things work and stuff?”
I could tell from the tone of her voice that the words that had just tumbled out of her mouth were supposed to be a question, but they sure sounded like a run-on sentence to me.
“So I thought I’d show you my lab, and give you a rundown on Squad history and stuff.”
Her lab? As in the lab where the girl who added and stuff or you know onto the end of every sentence fooled around with explosives and weaponry? Still, it beat the hell out of getting a makeover.
Lucy was oddly quiet as she took me down to her lab (no trampoline this time—apparently there were like fifty billion entrances to the Quad, and only one of them involved belly flopping the way down)—and then, without warning, she launched into a surprisingly cogent and articulate explanation of Squad History.
“The Squad program has been around, in various incarnations, for about fifty years,” Lucy said, sounding strangely professional. “Originally, the program was geared toward recruitment and training. Playing on cheerleaders’ natural abilities for subterfuge and athleticism…”
Subterfuge? Seriously?
“…the program was designed to allow a select number of young women to complete the training necessary to become CIA operatives upon their high school graduation. The cheerleader mystique ensured that the program remained sufficiently covert.”
“Riiiiiiight,” I said. “Covert. Because no one in their right minds would suspect that the government was training cheerleaders for the CIA.”
Lucy rewarded me with the perkiest of grins, either ignoring or failing to notice the sarcasm in my tone. “Exactly.”
“By the late eighties,” Lucy continued, “most of the remaining Squad programs had been disbanded due to various budget cuts, but ours remained operational. Over time, the Bayport High Squad Program evolved to be less and less about training and more about helping the government keep an eye on a very specific group of people.”
“In other words,” I started to say, and before I’d finished the sentence, Lucy was nodding.
“In other words,” she said, “we’re like totally special.”
I would say that she’d stolen the words out of my mouth, but the totally special comment bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I’d intended to say.
“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.