CHAPTER 28 Code Word Smile
Code Word: Smile
By the time Lucy parked her car in front of the school, I’d managed to come to terms with Operation Playboy.
So maybe I hadn’t gotten to go all Kung Fu Toby on an enemy operative, and maybe our success on the mission had had more to do with Lucy’s breasts than with either of our abilities as secret agents, but no good could come from dwelling on the details.
We’d incapacitated our mark and left him for the Big Guys to pick up.
We’d confiscated a tiny disk that we’d already verified (via Lucy’s CD player, which had more uses than playing horrible nineties girl band CDs) had information on it regarding operatives scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and South America.
We’d saved the day, and quite possibly dozens of lives. That—and the fact that Lucy had sworn never to mention the actual disk-getting methodology—was just going to have to be enough for me. For now.
When we got back to the gym, I reluctantly handed the disk over to Chloe. I was deluded enough to expect her to say something along the lines of “thank you” or “good job,” but the words out of her mouth didn’t even remotely resemble a compliment.
“Get dressed. Practice in ten.”
I severely hoped she was talking about ten hours, because I’d just finished my second classified operation of the day, and I couldn’t forget about the fact that I still had one left to go.
I needed some downtime. I needed to change out of this outfit into something that didn’t have the word CHEER embossed across it.
I needed to take a shower and burn the memory of Heath Shannon’s tighty whities from my mind.
I did not need to deal with herkies and toe touches and hurdlers and handsprings and …
Even thinking the words had my still-dislocated crotch protesting in vain.
And yet, I somehow sucked it up enough to trudge into the locker room, where I found another pair of teeny-tiny pants (this pair opted for LIONS! over CHEER in the butt-message department) waiting in my locker. Beside me, Tara changed into her own shorts (no writing—lucky her) silently.
“Mission went well,” I said. “Find anything interesting in his wallet?”
“Not really,” Tara said. “Find anything interesting in his underwear?”
Her voice was so deadpan casual that it took me a minute to register her meaning.
“Lucy!” I yelled.
Tara grinned. “Your communicator was on,” she said. “You were pretty verbal about your objections.”
“What objections?” Bubbles asked. I swear, she came out of nowhere.
“Nothing,” I said, shooting Tara a warning look.
“Nothing,” Tara agreed.
“How were things here?” I asked, changing the subject before Bubbles could ask any more questions.
Bubbles didn’t answer. I elaborated. “Party planning? Banner painting? Whatnot?”
Bubbles bit her bottom lip.
“Bubbles?” Tara prodded. “What’s going on?”
“We were working on some stuff for the party,” Bubbles said, “and our line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead.”
Tara took off then, running toward the Quad.
I turned my attention back to Bubbles, to grill her for more specifics, but she was gone. That girl was stealth incarnate.
When Tara came back five minutes later, I was more than ready for some answers. Whether or not I wanted to be, I was part of this now. This was my squad, my team. Something was going on, and someone was going to tell me what it was, or things were going to get ugly.
“Tara?” I didn’t say anything more than her name.
“The line of communication with Brooke and Zee went dead shortly after they arrived in Al Jawf,” Tara said. “Approximately half an hour ago.”
“And that’s bad?” I guessed.
Tara sat down to put on her athletic shoes. “It wouldn’t be horrible,” she said, her voice eerily devoid of emotion. “Sometimes the satellite signal fails; sometimes if you end up underground, the signal doesn’t reach.”
“Okay,” I said. Tara stared down at her shoes, her face perfectly calm. It was that look that made me ask more. I was noticing more and more that when Tara was perfectly anything, it was a surefire sign that she was hiding something. Perfection was tricky that way.
“It wouldn’t be horrible,” I said, repeating her words. “But?”
“It wouldn’t be horrible, but right before we lost the signal, April and Bubbles heard gunfire.”
“Gunfire?”
“Shots were exchanged.” Tara finished lacing up her shoes. “You’d better put yours on,” she said, handing me an identical pair.
“Shots were exchanged?” I asked. “SHOTS were EXCHANGED?”
Tara moved quickly, and before I could prepare myself, she had me pressed up against the locker banks, her face close to mine. “Keep your voice down,” she said.
I hadn’t realized that my posh partner could sound quite like that. I could have fought her, and I almost did, but after the past forty-eight hours, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yet.
“Shots were exchanged?” I whispered.
She nodded, eased the pressure off my body, and gestured with her head to the shoes. “You’d better put your shoes on,” she said for a second time.
I looked down at the shoes, but didn’t move to put them on. “Brooke and Zee were shot at, and we haven’t heard from them since?”
Tara nodded.
“And you want me to put on my shoes so that we can go practice our halftime routine?”
Tara nodded again.
Around me, all of the others were suiting up, preparing themselves to Go, Fight, Win!
“We’re not going to send in backup?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
Tara shook her head. “Our original orders were really specific. This is a two-person mission. No backup under any circumstances.”
“And if the Guys Upstairs said it, it must be done,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Forget the fact that they might not actually know everything. Forget the fact that Brooke and Zee might be in danger.” I gave Tara a look that should have pinned her to the wall the way her arms had pinned me.
“You can’t just leave them there. We’re supposed to be a team. ”
Tara didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t let it go.
“We can’t just do nothing. What if they’re injured? What if the operative they went to rescue is injured?”
“I alerted Central when I called in about the disk.” Chloe spoke softly, appearing next to me.
“They haven’t heard from Brooke either, but they’ve got tracers on their agent, and he’s on the move.
Their statisticians think that, based on movement patterns, it’s likely that Brooke and Zee are with him. ”
“And ‘likely’ is good enough for you?”
Personally, I was ready to take a little visit to Libya myself.
It was totally and completely bizarre, but the feeling bubbling up inside of me was eerily similar to the one that made me bail Noah out of trouble again and again.
Ginormous football players, international terrorists …
what was the difference? Somebody was messing with something that was mine.
That “loyalty” thing Zee had made such a big deal of was forcing me into action.
Zee and Brooke were on my Squad. They were my …
okay, maybe we weren’t exactly friends, but maybe we could have been.
Or maybe we would be, but right now, that didn’t matter. I was ready to kick some butt.
“If Central hasn’t heard from them by tonight, they’ll send in some agents from the surrounding areas.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Tara lifted a hand to touch my arm.
“They’d be able to reach them before we could,” she said. “And if something happened to Brooke and Zee, our cover’s pretty much blown there. If they’ve captured two teenage operatives, none of us are going to be any less suspicious than Average Joe Spy.”
“So we just stay here and do nothing?” I asked. I hated doing nothing.
“No,” Tara said. “We cheer.”
Whether or not cheering was preferable to doing nothing was a matter of some debate.
On the one hand, practice would distract me from my insane urge to hijack a helicopter and fly it to Libya.
On the other, I hated our halftime routine with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns. It was a toss-up, really.
“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!”
My voice was loud and clear—and distinctly pissed off, but at least this time, I was getting the words right.
“Bay-port Li-ons.” I clapped my hands five times like a good little cheerleading newbie. “Bay-port Li-ons.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.
By the time we got to the end of the routine the first time, my hands had gone numb from all the clapping, and they were turning a nice shade of borderline purple.
“It’s called cheerleading,” Chloe told me, rolling her eyes. “Not ‘angry punks with self-mutilating tendencies.’”
“Don’t clap so hard,” Lucy translated. “Cup your hands like this.” Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. She demonstrated. “See?”
“And smile,” Bubbles said. “Then you won’t sound so angry.”
“But I am angry.”
“Doesn’t matter,” April said. She might have been as new to the secret agent game as I was, but she was a veteran cheerleader.
“It doesn’t matter if you just broke up with your boyfriend or if you’re fighting with someone else on your squad or if you’re cheering on a sprained ankle.
When you perform, you smile. You’re loud, you’re proud, you’re in charge, and you’re on top of the world.
Your team is the best. You’re the best, and while you’re cheering, that’s all that matters. ”
Apparently, cheerleaders were supposed to be able to turn on the happy at the sound of a single “Ready? Okay!” Before I’d become one, it had never actually occurred to me that their smiles might be fake.
They were on the top of the social chain.
They were pretty and popular, and they had nothing to worry about except what color bloomers to wear under their cheer-skirts, and so they smiled.
For the first time, I understood what Lucy had meant when she’d told me that cheerleaders were predisposed to being good spies.
I could even understand why the Squad program might have been initiated in the first place.
If you were the government, and you were looking for a group of athletic, beautiful teenage girls who were generally thought to be morons, but who were actually masters at manipulating their own emotions and showing the world (or the crowd, as the case may be) what they wanted it to see, there was a certain kind of person who fit the bill.
The kind who cheered.
“Let’s try it again,” Chloe said. “Without the anger management issues.” She paused and then said the words that, as captain, Brooke would normally have yelled to start us off. “Ready? Okay!”
I forced myself to think of this as practicing in a different way.
I wasn’t practicing a halftime routine. I was practicing the innocent, ditzy look I’d give to an enemy operative before I clocked him with a seventy-mile-an-hour roundhouse.
I was practicing keeping my emotions off my face and out of my voice.
I was perfecting my cover, so that someday, I could be the one rescuing Brooke and Zee. Or Lucy. Or Tara, or any of the others.
“B to the A to the Y to the Port …”
Scarily enough, when I thought about things that way, I was good. My smile was broad, my eyes were bright, and my voice was nothing short of peppy.
Wherever Brooke and Zee were, I was just going to have to trust that they were okay. After all, when it came to the art of deception, I only had to look at the beaming faces around the room to come to the conclusion that I was completely surrounded by masters.