Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(17)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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, because they hate you, too. If they even know you’re alive. They’re the kind of girls who step on the little people with their kitten heels.

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.

“It’s necessary,” Tara continued, her voice even and low, “to keep up appearances. Our anonymity in the real world is based on our complete domination of the high school one. It sounds harsh, but if we look like those girls no one will ever see us as anything else.”

I was slightly mollified by the fact that she knew of the existence of those girls. I stuffed my hands into my teeny-tiny skirt pockets and glanced down at my shoes. “What’s next?” I asked glumly.

“Training,” she replied. “Espionage. World domination.”

The corners of her mouth twitched, and I could see that she was trying not to smile.

“Seriously,” I said. “I don’t think I can take any more surprises right now. No more teal hands, no more secret shower passageways.” I narrowed my eyes. “No more Brittany and Tiffany’s beauty shop of horror and doom.”

That got a full-fledged smile out of her.

“As a matter of fact,” Tara said, “you’ve just been assigned your first mission.”

I briefly forgot the fact that I looked like the female lead of a one-hour teen drama and pictured myself as the butt-kicking girl-in-power type. “A mission,” I said slowly.

Tara nodded. Her silence made me somewhat suspicious.

“Tara,” I said. “What’s my first mission?”

Tara stared straight ahead as she answered. “We’re going to the mall.”

CHAPTER 11

Code Word: Abercrombie

“Explain to me again why I’m in Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Personally, I firmly believed that there could be no suitable explanation for such an atrocity.

“You have to tag one of the salesguys.” Tara’s directive didn’t sound any more reasonable the third time she said it than it had the first.

“Why?”

The cheerleading sophisticate sighed. I eyed her warily, because if she told me that information was classified one more time, I was going to have to reevaluate my position toward her as borderline tolerable. “Practice,” she said. “It’s protocol. Before we can move on to our actual mission, we’re required to assess your skills and transmit the results for approval.”

Once upon a time, the Squad had existed as a training program. Now, the closest I came to “training” before my first mission involved a salesguy at Abercrombie. It was official: the Big Guys Upstairs were severely unhinged.

“Come on, Toby. It’s not that bad.”

Tara had already given me a lightning-quick explanation of tagging, and somehow, I totally didn’t think the phrase not that bad applied. As Tara explained it, tagging someone involved identifying them as your target, and (a) putting some sort of homing device on him or his vehicle, (b) planting something on his person crucial to your mission, or(c) interacting with him in a way that alerted the rest of the group to his presence. For those unfamiliar with the whole notion of cheerleaders as spies, I’ll give you three guesses on what the acceptable form of interaction is.

Flirting. When you identify a target, if you’re going for a C tag, you flirt with him until your partner or whoever picks up on special flirt vibes and secret flirt code and begins an intricate, multiagent course of action against the tagged person.

Luckily, this wasn’t a C tag. This was a B tag. I had a stick of bubble gum. It had to go into his back pocket. Don’t ask me why. That information was classified. If this was the Big Guys’ idea of training, no wonder the other Squad training programs had been shut down.

“How am I supposed to do this without him noticing?” I hissed in Tara’s ear.

“You’re a cheerleader,” Tara said. “You figure it out.”

“Flirt?” I asked uncertainly. That seemed to be their answer for everything.

Tara slung her arm around my shoulder. “Toby,” she said with a wry grin, “it’s called misdirection.”