Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(3)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I glanced at each of them and ran through their names in my head. Brooke, Tara, Tiffany, Brittany, Lucy, Bubbles, Chloe, and Zee. Brittany and Tiffany were twins, and Lucy might as well have been their triplet. They were blond, bubbly, and gorgeous, and had a combined IQ of 37. I immediately scratched them off my list of suspects. Chloe Larson, Brooke’s second-in-command, was smarter than she let on, but also wouldn’t have touched my locker with an eighty-foot pole. That left Tara, Bubbles, and Zee.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a person named Bubbles could have encoded anything.

“Any questions?” Brooke asked, leaning back against the blackboard.

“I have a question.” Hayley Hoffman raised one manicured hand into the air. She was exactly the kind of girl the God Squad was looking for: JV cheerleader two years running, blond hair that she bleached blonder, and social claws that consistently demolished anyone and everyone who stood in her way and half of the people who didn’t. When Brooke inclined her head toward Hayley’s raised hand, Hayley stared directly at me. “Was this meeting by invite only?” she asked. “Or could just anyone come?”

I didn’t know whether to be angry that she was implying I wasn’t good enough to attend the meeting, or deeply offended that she thought I wanted to be there in the first place.

“This meeting,” Brooke said, her voice every bit as bright and deadly as Hayley’s, “was your first audition.” Her eyes flitted to the rest of us, making it perfectly clear that this message wasn’t just for Hayley. “You came, we watched.” She smiled, no teeth. “We weren’t impressed. Any other questions?”

This time, there were no takers.

“In that case,” Brooke said, “we’ll be in touch.”

And just like that, the meeting was over.

That’s it? I thought. This was what I was supposed to be “curious” about? Forget curious. I was completely baffled.

The only thing I knew for sure was that Hayley was right—I didn’t belong here. Of all the girls who’d received a summons to this invite-only meeting, I was the one who even a dumb four-year-old would have circled in one of those “which one does not belong?” tests. Besides Hayley, there were a slew of other JV cheerleaders, some of them sophomores and some of them juniors who hadn’t been chosen for the God Squad the year before. Then there were the noncheerleading populars: the too-cute editor of the yearbook, the part-time model, and the girl whose hot older brother was newly single. Given the fact that Bayport was one of the richest school districts in the country, everyone in this room could just as easily have been auditioning for a television show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Bitchy.

Everyone except me.

Chloe Larson rammed her body into my chair and then proceeded to give me the evil eye. “Watch where you’re going.”

It was all I could do to keep myself from rolling my eyes. I was sitting down, and she had run into me. Cheerleaders: they thought they owned the air the student body breathed.

“I guess some people are just perpetually in the way, you know?” Hayley’s words broke into my thoughts. I debated giving her a reason to get another nose job, but decided against it. I was a third-degree black belt; she was a junior-varsity cheerleader. Where was the fun in that?

Instead, I stood up, ready to go back to my normal life of beating up football players and hacking into the school’s database to change my grades and Mr. Corkin’s middle name. And that’s when I saw another note. It must have been in my lap, because it fell to the ground when I stood. Hayley’s eyes lit up, and she dove for it, but another manicured hand beat her there.

“I believe this is yours.” Tara Leery was a British exchange student and, as far as I’d been able to tell, the cheerleader most likely to have a functional cerebrum.

Tara handed the note to me, brushing her fingertips against the back of mine. She held my hand for a moment and then turned, and without another word, she followed Chloe “Out-of-My-Way” Larson out of the room.

I watched them leave and then looked back down at the note.

“Maybe someone’s finally sending you the memo on combat boots,” Hayley said, and then, in a confidential whisper, she added, “For the record: so over.”

“Oh,” I said thoughtfully. “I got that memo. I filed it away with your boyfriend’s petition for a brain and the lost-and-found ad for your virginity.”

I admit it. I’m not the nicest person. I have been known, on occasion, to use my sharp wit and clever puns for evil, rather than good. I don’t smile at people just because they smiled at me first, and if I have something to say to someone, I say it to their face. I am, in other words, the anti-cheerleader.

Hayley recovered from my below-the-belt comment about her none-too-secret loss of virginity to a delusional football player who had also slept with her best friend and somehow thought that neither girl would figure it out. Hayley made her best attempt at glaring me into oblivion, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and flounced off, four JV cheerleaders following in her wake.

“Was it something I said?”

As soon as she was out of sight, I decided to make one last concession to my curiosity, after which I would never even think the word cheerleader again.

I opened the note in my hand, half expecting another encoded message. No such luck. The paper was blank.

CHAPTER 3

Code Word: Perky

“What was it like? What were they wearing? Did they happen to mention—”

“How a dweeby little freshman could win their undying affection?” I finished Noah’s sentence for him. “No.”

My brother wasn’t the least bit deterred. “Did you talk to Brooke at all?”

I groaned inwardly. He had to have a thing for Brooke Camden. Why couldn’t he crush on someone his own age? Or better yet, someone from his home world, Planet Goofball.

“Well?” Noah prompted.

I scratched the back of my hand absentmindedly. “I went,” I told him. “I watched. I wasn’t impressed.”

Noah wouldn’t let the issue go. “Did you at least get a couple of phone numbers?”

“Noah, for the last time, if you’re not careful, you’re going to get yourself killed, and one of these days, I’m not going to be there to save you.”

Most younger brothers would have been offended at the very thought of being “saved” by their five-foot-three-inch sister. Noah was not most brothers.