Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(34)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I tried translating the numbers to letters. Using the phone keys as a guide, 2 was either A, B, or C. 4 was G, H, or I. 1 and 0 didn’t have corresponding letters, and 6 was either M, N, or O. I closed my eyes and let the different combinations play over the backs of my eyelids. ABC/GHI/ MNO. Bin. Ago. Bio. Cho.

Cho. That was a name, wasn’t it?

I tried the other number. ABC/DEF/ABC/GHI/DEF. More letters this time meant more combinations, and more nonsense. Ceche. Adaif. Beaid.

In other words, a whole lot of nothing.

I scrambled the letters in the second word set, looking for new combinations and still came up absolutely blank.

023243. 024106.

I sat there until my eyes watered. My foot fell asleep beneath me. My butt was as numb as the endless strings of possible decodes had made my mind. I was tempted to take another shower, thinking the steam might loosen up something inside my brain, but when I looked at my watch, it was already two in the morning.

Just another half hour, I promised myself. If I don’t get it in another half hour, I’ll sleep on it. Sleeping was almost as good as steam for unlocking an answer dormant in my own mind. As I sat there, staring straight ahead and willing the answer to come to me, I reached absentmindedly for the iPod Bubbles had given me. I traded my computer headphones for the iPod ones, and the iPod in question immediately began playing a preselected playlist, and I couldn’t get it to go back to the main menu.

“Ready, OKAY! B to the A to the Y to the Port, Bayport Lions take the court! L to the I to the O-N-S; when we leave, you’ll be a mess. Go, fight, win. You’ll see us again. BAYPORT!”

Oh no.

“Bay-port Li-ons! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap) Bay-port Lions! (clap clap, clap-clap-clap)…”

Please, for the love of all things good and right in this world, I thought, please don’t let them have made MP3s of their cheers.

“B to the A to the Y to the Port…”

No wonder Bubbles had instructed me to listen to this while I slept. I’d be cheering in my sleep—literally. As the very thought of this made my skin crawl, I turned the iPod off. I couldn’t think about numbers and cheers at the same time. It was scientifically impossible.

My phone picked that moment to ring (not anything from American Idol, thank God), and for a moment, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Did the others have me under constant surveillance? Did they know I’d turned the iPod off? I picked up the phone, but when I flipped it open, it turned out to be a text message, which was (all things considered) both a good thing and a bad thing.

It was a good thing because it meant that I didn’t have to talk to anyone whose voice I’d just heard on the “Best of Bayport Spirit Squad” mix.

It was a bad thing because it meant that my regular ring (and not just the text message sound) might still be one of any number of pop songs I abhorred. It was also a bad thing because although the text message did not in any way suggest that I was under constant Squad surveillance, it did inform me of a rather unfortunate circumstance.

Practice gym. 5:30. Tomorrow morning.

It didn’t take me long to do the quick mental math. If I crawled into bed this second, and if I actually managed to fall asleep and not, for instance, spend the next three hours trying to get the chorus of “Bay-port Li-ons” out of my head, then I’d get a full three hours of sleep before my whole torturous existence began again the next morning. And that was assuming that I could actually tear myself away from the code long enough to concentrate on the whole going-to-sleep thing.

As it turned out, after I made it to my bed (minor miracle #1), I didn’t fall straight to sleep, but I didn’t lie there staring up at the ceiling and thinking about numbers or cheers, either (minor miracle #2). Instead, I thought about Tara and the foreign operatives who probably weren’t Tara’s parents. Even if they weren’t, the operatives weren’t nearly as anonymous and unreal as they’d been before I’d found out that in my partner’s case, a tendency toward espionage was as hereditary as good skin.

Superslowly, my body still aching with the day’s cheer-capades, I fell asleep.

024106. 02-41-06. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.

I stand in front of my locker, turning the dial. Left, then right, then left again. My body turns sideways, and I turn the dial up and down, then down and up. 0-24-10-6. 0-23-24-3.

The lock opens, and with sweaty palms, I rip it off the locker. This is it. This is the answer. Somewhere in the background, a dark-haired boy floats by. And then a giant slice of cheese.

But I’m concentrating on the locker. My hands are so sweaty, and the latch keeps slipping. I don’t have time. I have to open it. My fingernails are growing as I’m groping at the locker door. The nails grow longer and longer, until even my sweaty fingertips aren’t touching the locker latch. I fumble with it again, my long nails (hot pink, of course) doing the dirty work, and finally, it pops open.

Bubbles is sitting inside my locker, her feet behind her head. “Surprise!”

I bolted straight up in bed. Talk about nightmares. The sad thing was, Bubbles ending up in my locker wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. From what they’d said in our original meeting, fitting into tiny spaces was more or less her forte.

“Surprise!”

“AAAAGGGGK!”

Someone slapped a hand over my mouth and I stopped screaming. Tiffany (I was getting better at telling the twins apart) leaned forward. “Shhhh,” she said. “It’s like five in the morning. You don’t want to wake your brother and parents up.”

I glanced past Tiffany, because I’d yet to see one of the twins without the other, and sure enough, Brittany was on the other side of the room, rifling through my closet. She had an enormous trash bag (suspiciously full), and even from this distance, I could see that my closet was now home to an obscene number of sparkly items and a disproportionate amount of pink and superbright blue.

“We totally forgot about the rest of your wardrobe yesterday,” Tiffany said. “And, hello! It’s called Stage Six for a reason, right?”

Only one thing kept me from screaming then, and it wasn’t the fact that Tiffany had very wisely kept her hand over my mouth. I quite simply could not risk waking Noah. If he’d freaked out about Bubbles hanging out my window, I somehow doubted he’d be okay with the twins reorganizing my closet, especially since they were wearing what appeared to be a combined total of eighteen square inches of clothing apiece.

“What time is it?” I asked, but since Tiffany’s hand was still firmly in place over my mouth, it came out sounding more like a meow/lawn mower hybrid than actual English words.