CHAPTER 5 Code Word Pep Rally
Code Word: Pep Rally
“Clap your hands, everybody! Everybody, clap your hands! Let’s hear it for the Lions—make some noise, you Bayport fans!”
Clap-down-clap-clap-down-clap-down-clap-down-clap-clap.
It had taken me hours to really get the clapping rhythm for this cheer.
I’d finally managed to do it, but only by matching the claps (two hands hitting each other) and the downs (hands hitting your knees) with zeroes and ones respectively and converting the whole thing into binary.
Twisted, I know, but that’s what happens when you choose the members of your varsity cheerleading squad based on who has and hasn’t hacked into the Pentagon.
“Clap your hands, everybody. Everybody, clap your hands!”
I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be doing this, and I certainly didn’t want to be smiling a big, goofy smile.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a choice on any of the above.
The others hadn’t quite converted me to the way of the cheerleader, but I’d accepted the fact that when you cheered, however reluctantly, you did it like you meant it.
Just because I didn’t particularly want to be a cheerleader didn’t mean that I wanted to be a bad one.
“Let’s hear it for the Lions …” I executed a back handspring. It felt somehow sacrilegious to be doing any kind of flipping that didn’t fall under the heading of martial arts. “Make some noise, you Bayport fans! Goooooooo Bayport!”
Finally, the cheer was over. I hadn’t messed it up. I hadn’t drawn any more attention to myself than was mandated by the fact that we were front and center and screaming our lungs out (or, more accurately, yelling from our diaphragms). Best of all, I hadn’t made eye contact with Jack once.
“Your form on the handspring was crap,” Chloe told me under her breath, smile still plastered to her face.
“Bite me, Chloe.”
“Let’s hear a round of applause for the heart of Bayport, the Bayport High Varsity Spirit Squad!” Mr. Jacobson had the microphone. He was absolutely brimming with pep. “Thank you, girls.”
Bah. I wasn’t talking to Mr. J. Was detention really so much to ask for?
While I was pondering this all-important question, a scowl settling slowly over my face, Tara came up beside me. “Smile,” she said, guiding me to our seats at the very front of the bleachers.
“The cheer’s over,” I reminded her.
“Your job’s not.”
I plastered a big, cheesy smile on my face. “Happy?” I asked her.
“Ecstatic.” Then she leaned forward. “If it’s any consolation, it took Chloe years to learn how to tumble. She’s just bitter that you can do a standing back tuck.”
I hadn’t even done a standing back tuck during our routine, and Chloe was punishing me for the fact that years of martial arts training had given me the ability to do one? Have I mentioned yet that she sucks?
“Cheer politics,” Tara said lightly. “It happens.”
“And now, please welcome this year’s football captain, Chip Warner!”
The student body went crazy, except for me. I clapped, like the good little undercover agent that I was, but mentally, I replayed the many occasions upon which I’d threatened Chip with bodily harm. Good times.
“Hey, guys.” Chip waited for the last hoots and hollers to settle down, and then he continued, a smile on his perfectly sculpted (and perfectly nauseating) face. “First off, I just want to thank the ladies of the varsity squad for all of their support. We love you, girls!”
“Awwwwwww.”
Apparently, I’d missed the part of my cheerleading training that involved synchronized awwwwwwing. Given that pesky gag reflex of mine, this was probably a good thing.
“Next, I just want to say that the Hillside Bobcats are going DOWN!” With those words of wisdom, Chip raised both hands in the air in a V, and the crowd went crazy.
This time, I didn’t clap. No one noticed, except for the only other person in the room not clapping.
Jack.
He was sitting next to the seat Chip had vacated, and having read every bit of intelligence the Squad had managed to gather on Jack, I knew quite well that he and Chip were cocaptains, and that the only reason that Chip was giving the speech was that Jack was jaded enough not to want to. He covered it well.
He glanced up and saw me looking at him. I swore under my breath, and he smiled and then smirked and then smiled again.
“Hello, Ev,” he mouthed. It was his name for me, short for Everybody-Knows-Toby, which was how the girls had introduced me to him my first day as the new and “improved” Toby Klein.
I glared back at him, refusing to give in to my lips’ traitorous urge to smile.
His eyes still on mine, Jack just grinned, that slow, lazy kind of grin that made me feel like I was flirting with him instead of the other way around.
Out of the corner of one eye, I saw Chloe and noticed that she, too, was looking at Jack.
Chloe was one of Jack’s exes. Brooke was the other.
Besides me, they were the only two people who might have realized that Jack’s uncle was one of the Big Guys.
Coincidence? I thought not. Both of them had dated him to gain access to his father’s law firm, our biggest …
enemy wasn’t quite the right word, but close enough.
After the second breakup, Jack had developed Conditioned Cheerleading Aversion (Zee’s diagnosis, not mine), and the only reason he’d shown interest in me was that I wasn’t like the other girls.
For instance, none of the other girls had ever tried their darnedest to avoid him altogether. None of them rolled their eyes when he went into A-list guy mode. None of them gave as good as they got.
None of them had kissed him, punched him in the stomach, and run away.
“Thank you, Chip.” Mr. J was back at the microphone. “And let me take this opportunity to say, Goooooooooo Lions!” He cleared his throat. “And, of course, Lionesses.”
Bayport was politically correct to a fault.
“I’d now like to welcome Joanne McCall, president of the Bayport High School PTA, who will read out the nominations for this year’s homecoming court.”
Blah, blah, blah, blah … wait a second. I elbowed Tara. “Check it out,” I said softly. “It’s the nauseatingly reminiscent mom from the mall.”
My very first day on the Squad, Tara had taken me to the mall to practice my spy skills, and some random mom had practically stalked us, chattering away about how exciting it was to be young and a cheerleader.
Apparently, brownnosing parents weren’t all that unusual, and I’d forgotten about it (or at least tried to cleanse my mind of the way the woman had violated my personal space).
It just figured that the nauseatingly reminiscent mom was the president of the PTA.
“I cannot tell you all how pleased I am to be here,” the NRM said.
“These high school years are some of the most exciting and precious years of your lives, and I’m happy to have the chance to share them with you.
As I’m sure most of you already know, the homecoming court consists of the queen and king, their junior and senior attendants, and the underclassman homecoming princess and sophomore attendant. ”
Raise your hand if you’re surprised that Bayport is the kind of school that has a homecoming princess. Anyone? Anyone?
“Each year, four seniors, three juniors, and two underclassmen are nominated by the students and faculty to run for the honor of being the homecoming queen.”
Did this have to take so freaking long? Who cared about the details of the process? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone to just fall down and worship Brooke now?
“The girl with the most votes will be named queen at the official homecoming game, and the remaining junior and senior nominees will be named her attendants. Additionally, the sophomore with the most number of votes will be named the homecoming princess.”
Being a logical person, I could see the flaw in this system.
As a nominee for queen, if the “princess” got enough votes, she could actually beat a senior out for that coveted spot, in which case I could only assume that the runner-up underclassman would get the princess title.
It would have made a lot more sense if they stipulated that the queen be a senior, but this didn’t seem to strike anyone else as off—either because the student body knew as well as I did that the race for queen was as good as over and Brooke had as good as won, or because I was the only person at this school afflicted with homecoming-related logic.
I braved a glance at Jack, expecting him to look every bit as tortured as I felt, but instead, he was smiling. Broadly.
“The senior nominees for homecoming queen are …” Mrs. McCall paused dramatically, as if there was anyone in the room who hadn’t figured out exactly whose names would be on that ballot. “Brooke Camden, Chloe Larson, Zee Kim, and Bubbles Lane.”
The four senior members of the Squad. Color me shocked.
Across the room, Jack’s grin grew bigger and wickeder by the second. Without a word, he simply pointed in my general direction. I turned around and glanced over my shoulder. Nothing.
“The junior nominees are Tara Leery, Lucy Wheeler, and Tiffany and Brittany Sheffield.”
Okay, was I the only one in the entire school who realized that Tiffany and Brittany were actually two separate people and that, therefore, there were four junior girls nominated for homecoming court and not just three? Sometimes, the mental math at this place was depressing.
“The underclassmen nominees are …”
Across the room, Jack’s grin had settled down to a smirk, and he pointed again. A second too late, I realized that he wasn’t pointing behind me.
He was pointing at me.
“April Manning and Toby Klein.”
Not to sound like an acronym-loving cheerleader/spy, but OMG with a side of WTF.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered under my breath.
Now Jack’s smile made sense. He knew this was going to happen.
Everyone but me had realized it. I’d said it myself—there wasn’t anyone in this room who didn’t know whose names were going to be on those ballots.
The varsity cheerleaders were called the God Squad for a reason.
And yet, somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that there were exactly two sophomores on the Squad and exactly two sophomore nominees for homecoming queen.
Now whose mental math was depressing?
“I hate my life.”
Tara and Chloe both elbowed me in the stomach at the same time.
“Ouch,” I hissed. “I still hate my …”
This time, I saw the blows coming and dodged them.
Oblivious to the violence amongst the cheerleaders, the rest of the school listened as the nominees for homecoming king—Chip, Jack, and a handful of other football players—were read off.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that there was no such thing as a homecoming prince.
Thank God.
“Good luck, boys and girls, and remember, this is a very special time in your lives.”
Yeah, I thought, a very special time for my life to suck.
I’d come to terms with the cheerleader thing.
Scratch that, I’d almost come to terms with the cheerleader thing, but I most certainly did not sign on for homecoming princess.
I had a healthy disdain for things like dances and popularity.
I hated dresses and tiaras, and I wasn’t even ready to accept the fact that people at this school even knew my name, let alone that it would be plastered on hundreds of ballots.
Life as I knew it was over. Again. And this time, things were going to get ugly.