Perfect Cover (The Squad #1)(4)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“Where else are you gonna be?” he asked. “Cheerleading practice?”

“In your dreams, Noah.” I scratched the back of my hand a little harder and wondered if I was having an allergic reaction to something (probably Hayley Hoffman).

“You do realize that it looks like you have some kind of bizarre scratching tic, right?”

I ignored Noah’s comment and turned my attention to my hand. What in the world was wrong with it?

“Maybe it’s a psychosomatic response to your guilt for not getting me phone numbers.”

I gave Noah a look and then used the aforementioned itchy hand to thwap him under the chin.

“Oh, come on, Toby. You know you love me.” Noah grinned, and even though I didn’t find him the least bit charming, I smiled back before flicking him again and heading for the sink. I stuck my hand under the faucet and turned the water on, and the instant the water touched my skin, my entire hand changed color.

“Teal?” Noah, who’d followed me into the kitchen, asked. “Doesn’t really seem like your style, Tobe.”

“Noah,” I said calmly.

“Yeah?”

“Run.”

He was smart enough to vacate the kitchen, leaving me staring at my own bright blue hand. I soaped up and scrubbed it, but the color stayed. Ready to seriously pummel something, I grabbed a handful of paper towels and tried to rub off the color. Nothing came off on the towels, but when I looked back at my hand, the color was gone.

“Wha…?”

After a half second of deliberation, I turned the faucet back on and let a few droplets of water drip onto my knuckles, and as they wet the skin, the color reappeared. Carefully, I continued letting water drizzle onto my hand until the vast majority of it was again a bright, perky teal.

Wait a second, I thought. Perky…

I shook my head to clear it of ridiculous thoughts. The cheerleaders had not dyed my hand teal.

Or had they?

I ran the day’s events over in my mind until I came to the part where Tara handed me the note, her fingers gripping mine for the smallest fraction of a second.

“I suppose she could have done this,” I said under my breath, “but why?”

Of all of the God Squad, Tara seemed the least likely to torture an antiestablishment social reject such as myself. Then again, maybe I just had to accept the fact that this whole day had been one giant plot to get me to that meeting, dye my hand teal, and…

And what? Why go to all the trouble? We were talking about the prettiest, most popular, ditziest girls in school. I wasn’t even sure they were capable of encoding notes, let alone using invisible dye to…

Notes.

The realization hit me, and slowly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the blank sheet of paper from before. Someone had folded it like a note and somehow gotten it into my lap. When I’d dropped it, Tara had given it back to me before Hayley could open it. Tara, who had also possibly turned my hand an invisible teal.

I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the counter. It was still blank, but looking at my hand, I had to wonder. Was it really blank?

I folded a paper towel in half and wet a corner. Feeling a little bit ridiculous, I gingerly rubbed the cloth over the note, leaving a dampened streak in its wake. The moment water touched the paper, bright teal letters leapt to life. Again and again, I wet the paper towel and dragged it gently across the note, until the entire message was revealed in ink the color of my wet hand.

Practice gym, 5:30, tomorrow morning. Be there.

What, no “Go Lions!” or sis-boom-bah crap? Apparently, cheery cheerleader-speak was only for visible ink. Seriously, though, what was up with the cheerleading squad writing me coded notes and dyeing my hands with invisible ink? Was it the whole squad? I had always thought of them as being one massively popular person split into many bouncy parts, but Tara was the only one who’d actually been involved in this whole debacle, so…

Something else occurred to me then, and I backtracked. Tara had picked the note up and handed it to me, had coated my hands with whatever it was they were using for ink, but she hadn’t handed me the note. She’d been on the other side of the room when it had appeared out of nowhere. The only one near me was Chloe. Chloe, who had crashed into my chair instead of giving it a berth the size of Montana, a more typical course of action.

“This is ridiculous.” I tried to snap myself out of it, but couldn’t deny the teal hand or the invisible message or the encoded notes in my locker. Something strange was going on here, and all evidence suggested that it had something to do with the cheerleaders.

I could only think of one surefire way to find out what was going on: be at the practice gym at five-thirty the next morning. Sure, it was obscenely early, but really, what was the worst that could happen?

CHAPTER 4

Code Word: Tumbling

“Cheerleading practice? You guys woke me up at this ungodly hour for cheerleading practice?”

I am not a morning person, especially when I’m expecting a revelation of some kind and instead get eight cheerleaders telling me to stretch out so we can tumble.

What the hell was tumbling anyway?

“We always practice before school,” Bubbles said solemnly.

Why was I even talking to a person named Bubbles? Why? From the moment I’d gotten here, they’d all acted like my presence was nothing out of the norm. No one had said a word about why I was there. They’d just told me to stretch and gone back to stretching themselves, like I was supposed to read their warped little ponytailed minds.

“Can anyone here explain to me why I’m at cheerleading practice right now?” I asked, my voice dangerously pleasant. All seven of the other cheerleaders turned to their captain, and I awaited with bated breath the wisdom she was sure to impart.

“If you can’t cut the hours,” Brooke said, “don’t join the squad.”

“I’m not joining the squad,” I said. “Why would I join the squad? I don’t even like…”

I searched for something to go in the blank. People? This school? Any of you? More like (d) all of the above.

“I don’t like…cheers,” I finished, trying to be diplomatic. After all, they outnumbered me eight to one.

“Oh, really?” Brittany-or-Tiffany (it was impossible to tell the twins apart) asked, like I was trying to put one over on them. “If you don’t like cheers, then why are you here?”

Because you told me to be here, I said silently, but I wouldn’t admit that out loud. They’d ordered me here, and I’d dragged myself out of bed to come, under the delusion that I might actually figure out why they were messing with me in the first place.