CHAPTER 9 Code Word Like, You Know?
Code Word: Like, You Know?
By seventh period, I was exhausted. Actively hating your newfound popularity with a fiery passion can really take a lot out of you.
And seriously, I was beginning to think that everything sucks more if you’re wearing a miniskirt.
As I opened the door to the practice gym, all I wanted to do was escape.
And lose the miniskirt. And forget about the fact that Brooke had assigned the twins to Project Give-Toby-a-Makeover. Talk about mission impossible.
I’d like to say that I walked into the gym with my head held high, completely devoid of any fear.
But a day of being “completely boo” had taken its toll on my morale, and truthfully, I would like to believe that the phrase Stage Six makeover could put fear into the heart of even the most stalwart social misfit.
“Toby! Hi!”
I didn’t know whether to be glad that Brittany and Tiffany weren’t waiting for me, or to groan at the fact that Lucy was.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t completely despise Lucy for being the perky, happy soul that she was.
I’m not entirely heartless, and especially after the way she’d put Hayley in her place at lunch, I even had what might vaguely pass as a fondness for the bouncy little weapons expert.
It was just a very particular kind of fondness—the kind where I didn’t want to spend any more time in her presence than was absolutely necessary.
“Toby! Hi!” Lucy tried again. I had a sinking suspicion that ignoring her wouldn’t make her any less friendly, and I wasn’t sure I could take “Toby! Hi!” on repeat indefinitely.
“Hey, Lucy.”
“So how was your day? Probably pretty long, I guess. But good? It was good, wasn’t it?”
I could only conclude that the speed with which Lucy was speaking was the result of some kind of highly classified government enhancement of her tongue muscles, because otherwise, it shouldn’t have been possible.
When I didn’t respond to her question, Lucy frowned.
“So your day wasn’t good?” Her voice fell, and I felt a little bit like I’d just slain the Easter bunny in front of a Sunday school class full of orphaned children.
I tried to decide whether the fact that she’d wanted me to have a good day that badly was strangely endearing or exponentially creepy.
In either case, it felt somehow wrong to sit there, letting the Happiest Girl in the World frown.
“My day wasn’t that bad,” I told her.
It was, you know, only horrendous.
Lucy gave me a tentative half smile. “It will get better,” she promised me. “Things will settle down. Like with all the rumors and stuff? It won’t last forever, and you’ll get used to it, and hey, it could be worse, right?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that in the mind of Toby Klein, things couldn’t get much worse than standing in the cheerleaders’ practice gym, waiting like an inmate on death row for the makeover that was headed my way.
“Anyway,” Lucy said. “The twins are prepping the salon, and the others are getting ready to debrief April, but Tara and Brooke thought you might still be a little confused about the way things work and stuff?”
I could tell from the tone of her voice that the words that had just tumbled out of her mouth were supposed to be a question, but they sure sounded like a run-on sentence to me.
“So I thought I’d show you my lab, and give you a rundown on Squad history and stuff.”
Her lab? As in the lab where the girl who added and stuff or you know onto the end of every sentence fooled around with explosives and weaponry? Still, it beat the hell out of getting a makeover.
Lucy was oddly quiet as she took me down to her lab (no trampoline this time—apparently there were like fifty billion entrances to the Quad, and only one of them involved belly flopping the way down)—and then, without warning, she launched into a surprisingly cogent and articulate explanation of Squad History.
“The Squad program has been around, in various incarnations, for about fifty years,” Lucy said, sounding strangely professional. “Originally, the program was geared toward recruitment and training. Playing on cheerleaders’ natural abilities for subterfuge and athleticism …”
Subterfuge? Seriously?
“… the program was designed to allow a select number of young women to complete the training necessary to become CIA operatives upon their high school graduation. The cheerleader mystique ensured that the program remained sufficiently covert.”
“Riiiiiiight,” I said. “Covert. Because no one in their right minds would suspect that the government was training cheerleaders for the CIA.”
Lucy rewarded me with the perkiest of grins, either ignoring or failing to notice the sarcasm in my tone. “Exactly.”
“By the late eighties,” Lucy continued, “most of the remaining Squad programs had been disbanded due to various budget cuts, but ours remained operational. Over time, the Bayport High Squad Program evolved to be less and less about training and more about helping the government keep an eye on a very specific group of people.”
“In other words,” I started to say, and before I’d finished the sentence, Lucy was nodding.
“In other words,” she said, “we’re like totally special.”
I would say that she’d stolen the words out of my mouth, but the totally special comment bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I’d intended to say.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me get this straight. Once upon a time, the government—God knows why—started recruiting high school cheerleaders and training them to be spies, and somewhere along the way, it actually occurred to them that this wasn’t the best use of the taxpayers’ dollars, so they stopped with the cheer-spies thing, except here in Bayport, where the Squad went from being a cover-up for some sort of spy school to being an actual operative agency? ”
Lucy nodded. “That about covers it.”
“And these people that we’re supposed to ‘keep an eye’ on?”
Lucy shrugged. “They’re the bad guys.”
How very illuminating.
I was going to ask more questions, but Lucy changed the subject with all the subterfuge her cheerleading mystique could muster. “What do you think—blow darts—in or out?”
I pictured myself blow-darting an evil football player. “In.”
I had so many more questions about the Squad—what exactly did we do?
How much training did we receive? How was this whole thing even legal?
Despite Lucy’s dumb act (and, overcaffeination aside, I was starting to suspect that it was an act), I had a feeling that she knew more than she was letting on.
At the same time, though, she was holding a knife, and I didn’t want to press her.
“So,” I said, eyeing the knife nervously. “Have you always been into weapons?”
“Me?” Lucy asked, and then she laughed loudly.
Given the insanely broad smile on her face and the extra-large knife in her hand, it was borderline freaky.
“Gosh, no. A couple of years ago, I’d never even seen a slingshot.
I just wanted to make the varsity squad, you know?
I’d been cheerleading for like ever, and making varsity seemed to be like this huge challenge and stuff.
It was just something I did, and I wanted to do it well, you know?
Cheerleading and student council and school and riding classes and …
well, you get the drift. Anyway, when they brought me onto the Squad, I had like no specialty whatsoever.
I wasn’t a transfer like you. I was just a regular old recruit, like April, but I wanted to be good at something, and their weapons person had just graduated … ”
“Hold on there, Skippy … errr … Lucy, what do you mean ‘a transfer’ like me?”
Lucy shrugged. “Some of us are Bayport natives,” she said. “We grew up here, and when we were old enough, we started cheerleading. It’s just what people do here, you know?”
I didn’t interrupt her, but did concentrate on using my nonexistent mind-control powers to compel her to get to the point.
“When I was in fifth grade, everyone wanted to be a cheerleader. I mean, I think every single girl in our class tried out. They picked forty of us that year, and then the next year, it was thirty-five, and they kept getting rid of people. Tryouts kept getting more and more competitive. By the time I made JV, there were only twelve of us.”
Lucy’s voice took on a new tone as she talked about the lengths she’d gone to in her pursuit of making varsity.
“Lucy,” I told her. “Transfer.”
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said. “Well, the way it works is like this. The Bayport Cheerleading Association runs the tryouts for JV and under, and they’re like, a bunch of overinvolved parents and all of the coaches.
And I guess maybe some of the coaches are government people or something, because by the time we reach JV, they have all kinds of reports on us.
And every year, the Squad captain gets profiles on all the current members of JV, and any other ‘people of interest’ in the sophomore class, and the members do a little digging around.
We read through the files we’ve been given, and we do a bunch of prescreening and whoever the current Zee is runs all her psycho-whatsits on them, and then if there are any open spots, we make our recommendations to the Boss Guys. ”
I raised an eyebrow.
“No idea who the Boss Guys are,” Lucy said.
“That’s why I just call them the Boss Guys.
Or maybe you were wondering about the whole ‘current Zee’ thing?
Because obviously, there’s only one Zee, but I meant, you know, whoever has Zee’s job.
Because picking the new Squad is part of the current Squad’s duty, and the current Squad is always changing and stuff, so … ”
“Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“Transfer.” I tell you, keeping the Queen of Babbling on task was a full-time job.
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said. “Well, you know how I said we fill in any extra spots with girls from JV?”
I nodded.
“Well, sometimes we don’t have that many extra spots, because ever since the Squad went from being a training thingy to an action thingy, the Boss Guys have been bringing people in from outside the system.”
“The system?”
Lucy nodded. “As in the school system,” she said. “If they find someone they want on the Squad, they fix it so that they’re transferred to Bayport. That’s how we got you. They transferred your dad, and you moved here.”
I tried to digest this information. I’d hacked into the Pentagon, and a month later, my dad had been transferred to Bayport. I’d never made the connection before, but now, it was undeniable. “Are you telling me that I moved to Bayport because somebody wanted me to eventually be Squad Girl?”
Lucy gave me a very meek smile. “Would that be a bad thing?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like the idea of the government playing puppet-master with my life, but it made me realize, maybe for the first time, that the Squad was very real, and that the Big Guys Upstairs, whoever they were, were very, very powerful.
“How many other transfers are there?” I asked.
Lucy, sensing that I wasn’t going to maim the messenger, smiled broadly. “Most of the time, the Squad’s about fifty-fifty. Half of us have been cheerleaders forever, and just happen to have an aptitude for the spy thing, and half of us are special skills peeps who are transferred in.”
“Which half is which?” I asked.
“You, Chloe, Tara, and Zee were transfers,” Lucy said happily. “Did you know that Zee has a PhD?”
“She has a what?”
“A PhD. In forensic psychology and stuff. She might have another one or something, but I’m not really sure.”
“Lucy,” I said patiently. “Zee’s a senior in high school. And her claim to fame is the fact that she can tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. Unless PhD stands for Pretty Hot Diva, I don’t think—”
“She was a transfer,” Lucy said stubbornly, like that explained it.
“So she got a PhD, and then a bunch of government guys said, ‘Hey, want to become a high school cheerleader?’ And she just said yes?”
Lucy nodded. “Pretty much,” she said. “I guess the first time around, she graduated high school when she was like eight or nine, so it was pretty much no fun at all.”
My mind was spinning. The government had transferred my parents to Bayport so that I would become a Bayport High varsity cheerleader, aka Double-0-Toby. These same government guys plucked Zee straight out of grad school and convinced her that high school would be more fun the second time around.
“And Tara and Chloe?” I asked.
“Tara’s an exchange student,” Lucy said. “You’ve probably noticed the British accent. It’s real. She grew up in England, mostly, but traveled a lot. Her parents were really gung ho on the Squad thing. And Chloe got some patent thingy when she was like ten, and they got her here the next year.”
“And the rest of you guys?” I asked. “One day, you were just cheerleaders, and the next—boom—you’re secret agents?”
I could almost understand the idea behind using a cheerleading squad as a cover-up—after all, if you stick a girl in a cheerleading skirt, no one takes her seriously—but the idea that half of us had been handpicked by the government for our “special skills” and that the other half had been chosen from the current supply of cheerleaders was still a little mind-boggling.
“Cheerleaders and secret agents have more in common than you might think, Toby,” Lucy said.
I think the word incredulous would probably be something of an understatement for the expression that came over my face at that pronouncement.
Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh, Toby,” she said, like we’d been friends for a million years and she just couldn’t get over how very silly I was in the most endearing of ways.
“Here,” she said, picking a notebook up off the counter.
“Read this. It’s this Squad history thing that Brooke got somewhere.
It’s got all of the stuff I told you in it, but it probably explains it better. ”
I seriously doubted there was anything in that book that could make me believe that high school cheerleaders were somehow predisposed to being brilliant government operatives, but it would have taken someone with a far harder heart than my own to tell that to Lucy Wheeler.
“So,” she said brightly. “We still have like twenty minutes before you have to report to the salon. Wanna blow stuff up?”
All things considered, that was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.