Perfect Cover (6 page)

CHAPTER 10

Code Word: Makeover

Unfortunately, happy explosives time couldn’t last forever, and sooner than later, I’d bid goodbye to Lucy’s lab and said hello to the twins’.

“Copper frost for the skin?”

Brittany pursed her lips at her twin’s question. “Only if we go dirrrrrrty blond on top.”

That’s the way she said it, too. Like it was from some idiotic Christina Aguilera song that was cool when we were younger.

“If we go blond, we may need to change the eyes, too.”

“Crystal clear?”

“Here’s an idea,” I said from my seat between them.

“How ’bout we leave my hair, skin tone, and eyes the same?”

“Brown, taupe, and brown? Puh-lease.”

“My skin’s not taupe.”

Brittany and Tiffany remained suspiciously quiet.

“Hyperdye for the hair,” Brittany said suddenly. “It’s totally brill. Like who’s gonna believe that she became Hollywood blond overnight? Nobody. But if we hyperdye her, and she changes her hair color like all the time…”

“People will think she’s just releasing her inner cool,” Tiffany completed her twin’s thought. “People are so dumb.”

“Hyperdye?” I asked, trying not to let them push me past the breaking point.

“It’s this totally cool stuff Chloe made for us,” Tiff said.

“It like changes colors when you do this thing to it with another one of Chloe’s gadgetmathingies.”

I groaned inwardly, because obviously that incomprehensible (not to mention ungrammatical) sentence cleared everything up. Like, totally.

“So my hair could be blue one day and red the next?” If I was going to have to dye my hair anyway, a punk look was the most I could hope for.

“Blue?”

“Red?”

The twins spoke with identical, horrified tones.

“Toby, you’re a cheerleader. Cheerleaders do not have blue hair.”

“You hyperdye it. I’ll pick the colors.” I wasn’t entirely sure how hyperdye worked, but it seemed like a good compromise to me.

“Maybe hyperdye isn’t such a great idea,” Brittany said slowly, still twitching in horror at the idea of a varsity cheerleader sporting bright blue hair. “Chloe gets kind of mad when we use it recreationally.”

A six-syllable word. Impressive from a twin.

“Can’t we just leave my hair brown?” I asked. “It’s either that or bright red. Your choice.”

For a moment, the twins stared at me, homicide in their little cheerleader eyes, but then, the twin on the left perked up a bit.

“Chocolate brown?” she suggested.

“Or maybe mahogany?”

“Honeysuckle!”

“Ohhh…or we could do mahogany with honeysuckle highlights.”

“Perfect,” they both said at once.

I tried to follow their conversation. “So we’re going with brown, then?”

The two of them stared at me like I was the stupid one. “Were you not listening at all, Toby? We’re going to go with a mahogany base and then add some honeysuckle highlights around your face to bring out those nonexistent cheekbones.”

Tiffany softened her sister’s words a little. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting me on the head like I was a small child. “We’ll hyperdye you before a mission sometime. That way, if you get caught and have to run or something, you can change your hair color like that.” Tiff snapped her fingers, and the sound, sharp as her manicured nails, echoed in my ears.

I glanced around the room nervously. Four walls, no visible door, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t “EXIT, OKAY!” under pressure. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—just me, trapped alone in what looked like the world’s most high-tech salon, with twin fashionistas who had been authorized to administer a Stage Six makeover.

At least I still had my combat boots.

Britt reached up and pushed me into a chair. Immediately, restraints locked down my arms and legs.

“Wha…?”

Without a word, the twins spun the chair around and forced my head into a sink.

“Don’t move,” Brittany advised. “Most of our stuff is kind of…you know…”

“Killer strong? Illegal?” Tiffany suggested.

“Yeah,” Brittany said. “That. Oh, and you should probably wear these sunglasses, too. Are you allergic to avocado?” Without waiting for a response, she slipped the glasses onto my face. I won’t go into the ugly details of what happened next: the dye so potent that the Squad bought it on the black market, the electron wave accelerator that the twins had co-opted to properly blend the highlights with the rest of my hair, the tanning spray that totally got up my nose, and the superstraightening serum that was, and I quote, “completely supposed to be used in some bomb thingy.” They plucked me. They waxed me. They exfoliated the crap out of me.

They put makeup on my face.

Worse, they tried to teach me how to do it and acted like I was completely intellectually delayed when I couldn’t explain the difference between lip liner, lipstick, and lip gloss. When they sat me back up and turned my chair to face a wall-length mirror, I prepared myself for the worst. What I got was absolutely shocking.

I looked just like them. All of them. Perfect tan. Perfect nails. Silky soft skin, gloriously shiny and thick hair, brushed to perfection. Big, pouty lips, and huge doe-like eyes, which they’d actually left my original chocolatey brown. I still looked like me. Sort of. It was just like me, cheerlead-o-fied.

You know those movies I was talking about earlier, the ones where the popular crowd makes over the dorky, shy girl, and even though she’s quirky and zany and a real individual, she can’t help but become enamored with her new look, because deep down, she’s always wanted to be pretty?

This is not one of those movies.

“What the hell did you do to me?” I asked, horrified. “Do you know what I look like?”

Brittany smiled. “A cheerleader?”

“I look like Barbie’s brown-haired friend! I look like something out of a commercial for capri pants, and I don’t even know what capri pants are.” I raged on, but even raging, the mirror let me know that I looked what most of the school would have termed
fabulous.
“I look,” I spat out, “like the brunette love child of Mandy Moore and Marcia Brady. If they made a TV movie of my life right now, do you know who they’d cast to play me? Do you?” I couldn’t say the name out loud. I despised tween queen actresses with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns, and now, one of them was going to be starring in
Toby: The Untold Story.

Until this moment, it hadn’t been entirely real. Sure, people were talking about me, and yeah, I’d worn pink sparkles for the first time in my life, but I’d still felt like me. Now, staring at my face covered in their makeup, I had no choice but to be honest with myself: I was becoming the thing I hated most in the world, one of
those girls.
You know them. Every school has them. They’re the girls you love to hate, but it’s okay to hate them, because they hate you, too. If they even know you’re alive. They’re the kind of girls who step on the little people with their kitten heels.

And I was one of them. Minus the heels, thank God.

“You look fabulous,” Brittany told me, interrupting my inner rant.

Tiffany smiled and hooked her arm through Brittany’s. “We’re brilliant,” she said, beaming first at her twin and then at me.

I glowered back at them, but with my shiny lips and mascara-ed eyes, the effect just wasn’t the same. Either that, or the two of them had the combined emotional intelligence of a walnut, and couldn’t read the obvious distress in my now clearly heart-shaped face.

“Access granted.” The computerized voice spoke, a previously invisible door slid open, and Tara walked in. She seemed serious. Poised. Dignified. For one of
those girls,
she wore the look well.

“Nice job,” she told the twins, who were too busy congratulating themselves and giving me an impromptu lecture on cuticle management to hear her. Tara shrugged slightly, her dark hair falling behind her shoulder. “You’ll get used to it,” she told me softly. “We all did.”

That made me think of my one-on-one time with Lucy, and everything she’d told me. The über-salon existed for a reason. I wasn’t the only transfer, which meant that I probably wasn’t the only person who’d had to be cheerlead-o-fied. I’d always pictured the God Squad as the kind of girls who were born in a tanning booth wearing a bikini and getting exfoliated. It was like being born royal: the Divine Right of Popularity. And maybe that was true for girls like Lucy and the twins. But what about the other transfers? I couldn’t help but wonder—what had Zee looked like back when she was a child prodigy PhD? What about Chloe? And…

Tara took my elbow and gently led me out of the room. “You
will
get used to it, Toby,” she said. “You’ll find a way to make it work for you, and after a while, you won’t notice so much anymore.”

The day I didn’t notice I looked like this was the day I lost the majority of my senses. I looked different. I felt different. I even smelled different.

“It’s necessary,” Tara continued, her voice even and low, “to keep up appearances. Our anonymity in the real world is based on our complete domination of the high school one. It sounds harsh, but if we look like
those girls
no one will ever see us as anything else.”

I was slightly mollified by the fact that she knew of the existence of
those girls.
I stuffed my hands into my teeny-tiny skirt pockets and glanced down at my shoes. “What’s next?” I asked glumly.

“Training,” she replied. “Espionage. World domination.”

The corners of her mouth twitched, and I could see that she was trying not to smile.

“Seriously,” I said. “I don’t think I can take any more surprises right now. No more teal hands, no more secret shower passageways.” I narrowed my eyes. “No more Brittany and Tiffany’s beauty shop of horror and doom.”

That got a full-fledged smile out of her.

“As a matter of fact,” Tara said, “you’ve just been assigned your first mission.”

I briefly forgot the fact that I looked like the female lead of a one-hour teen drama and pictured myself as the butt-kicking girl-in-power type. “A mission,” I said slowly.

Tara nodded. Her silence made me somewhat suspicious.

“Tara,” I said. “What’s my first mission?”

Tara stared straight ahead as she answered. “We’re going to the mall.”

CHAPTER 11

Code Word: Abercrombie

“Explain to me again why I’m in Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Personally, I firmly believed that there could be no suitable explanation for such an atrocity.

“You have to tag one of the salesguys.” Tara’s directive didn’t sound any more reasonable the third time she said it than it had the first.

“Why?”

The cheerleading sophisticate sighed. I eyed her warily, because if she told me that information was classified one more time, I was going to have to reevaluate my position toward her as borderline tolerable. “Practice,” she said. “It’s protocol. Before we can move on to our actual mission, we’re required to assess your skills and transmit the results for approval.”

Once upon a time, the Squad had existed as a training program. Now, the closest I came to “training” before my first mission involved a salesguy at Abercrombie. It was official: the Big Guys Upstairs were severely unhinged.

“Come on, Toby. It’s not that bad.”

Tara had already given me a lightning-quick explanation of tagging, and somehow, I totally didn’t think the phrase
not that bad
applied. As Tara explained it, tagging someone involved identifying them as your target, and (a) putting some sort of homing device on him or his vehicle, (b) planting something on his person crucial to your mission, or(c) interacting with him in a way that alerted the rest of the group to his presence. For those unfamiliar with the whole notion of cheerleaders as spies, I’ll give you three guesses on what the acceptable form of interaction is.

Flirting. When you identify a target, if you’re going for a C tag, you flirt with him until your partner or whoever picks up on special flirt vibes and secret flirt code and begins an intricate, multiagent course of action against the tagged person.

Luckily, this wasn’t a C tag. This was a B tag. I had a stick of bubble gum. It had to go into his back pocket. Don’t ask me why. That information was classified. If this was the Big Guys’ idea of training, no wonder the other Squad training programs had been shut down.

“How am I supposed to do this without him noticing?” I hissed in Tara’s ear.

“You’re a cheerleader,” Tara said. “You figure it out.”

“Flirt?” I asked uncertainly. That seemed to be their answer for everything.

Tara slung her arm around my shoulder. “Toby,” she said with a wry grin, “it’s called misdirection.”

“It’s Tara, isn’t it?” A woman my mother’s age with a too-tight face, wearing too-tight pants and an obviously fake smile, approached us.

Tara whispered something in my ear and giggled. I forced a giggle, too, and pretended that she’d said something about a boy instead of telling me to proceed with the tag as planned.

Ever obedient (I can’t even say that with a straight face), I turned to leave the awkward “my daughter goes to your school” interaction that was already under way, but the woman’s voice stopped me.

“And who is your little friend?”

Little friend?
I bristled at the term.

“This is Toby,” Tara said with all the poise in the world.

“She’s a sophomore.”

I nodded, trying to appear as if this whole conversation wasn’t nauseating. I have deep and abiding suspicions that my attempt was a failure.

“A sophomore at Bayport High,” the mother said, as if that was some kind of phenomenal accomplishment. “Are you on the squad, too, Toby?”

And the conversation went from nauseating to shocking, just like that. The Squad? She knew about the Squad?

“What squad?” I asked, trying to put a vacant look in my eyes. Come on, I told myself silently, if Bubbles the contortionist can play clueless, you can, too. Though of course, in Bubbles’s case, it wasn’t exactly a brilliant facade.

Tara rolled her eyes. “The cheerleading squad,” she told me in what I can only describe as a faux indulgent voice. “Toby just still can’t believe it.”

“Just can’t believe it,” I echoed, trying to suck a little less at not blowing our entire operation.

The woman patted me on the shoulder and then moved to squeeze me into a full-on hug. “These years are so precious,” she said.

Personal space, I thought, I’d like you to meet Nauseatingly Reminiscent Mom. NRM, this is my personal space. Please stop violating it.

“Well, you girls have fun.” With one final squeeze, she was off and shopping. “And do let me know when you have another one of those bake sales.”

I so didn’t sign on for bake sales and touchy-feely, Botox-ed über-moms.

“Happens all the time,” Tara said calmly as soon as the woman was out of hearing range. “It’s like every football parent or every mother of a freshman girl who wants to be a cheerleader acts like they know and love each and every one of us.”

“I feel violated,” I said darkly.

Tara half grinned. “You’ll get over it.” She prodded me gently in the side and I got the message. I had a stick of gum and it had to go in the hot salesboy’s back pocket. Such is the glorious life of a sixteen-year-old secret agent.

The way I saw it, I had a couple of options. I could do as Tara had suggested and flirt with him. I could try a drive-by approach in which I ran by, rammed the gum into his pocket, and left in a blur of honeysuckle highlights, but somehow, I thought that forcibly ramming gum into said mark’s pocket was not what the Squad had in mind. I could somehow get him to remove his pants….

“I’m going to have to flirt with him, aren’t I?” I said, less than overjoyed at the prospect.

“It’s not you flirting,” Tara told me. “It’s the cheerleader.”

Right. My cover. Malibu Toby, varsity cheerleader.

I knew then that I had exactly two choices: barf all over Tara in a fit of self-loathing, or suck it up and take one for the team. I gracefully opted for option B and wondered how exactly one went about flirting. I knew it involved teasing and giggling and a lot of hair tossing, but beyond that, the only picture that jumped into my head was one of Hayley Hoffman pulling her evil girl mojo on some unsuspecting senior jock.

I briefly considered the barfing option one more time, but that would have been like accepting that Hayley Hoffman should have made the Squad instead of me. I am Toby, I thought. Fear my wrath.

I wasn’t going down without a fight, and even though I was completely lost in the alternate dimension that was Abercrombie & Fitch, I decided to play to my strengths. Flirting might not have been one of them (understatement), but I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that mocking the flirtations of the Hayley Hoffmans of the world was more than one of my strong points. It was a calling.

So that’s what I did. I sashayed up to the salesguy and thrust out my chest in an Oscar-worthy parody of the flirt styles of the bitch and famous. “Do you have this in blue?” I asked, holding up a microscopic miniskirt. I pressed it against my body and posed. “Black is soooooo depressing.”

I batted my eyelashes at him at a ridiculously high velocity. And he fell for it. It was completely and utterly disgusting, and yet…strangely empowering.

“I…uhhh…uhhh…”

Two seconds, and I had reduced him to a bumbling fool. Was it wrong that I liked this? All this time I’d been knocking guys out, when I could have just made them grovel at my girly feet. Who knew?

“Blue?” He finally managed a coherent word. I almost felt sorry for him, but I was in superspy femme fatale mode. Take no prisoners!

I reached my hand toward his jeans. “Blue,” I repeated, and even though the Toby inside was wishing we’d opted for tossing our cookies before stooping so low, I forced myself to let my hand graze over his belt loops. “Like maybe the color of your jeans.”

“You mean a jean skirt?” the guy asked, coming back to his senses. “Sure, we have those.”

And just like that, my spell was broken. Was the inner Toby showing in my face? Were my eyelash bats too slow? Were my boobs too small? That was it, wasn’t it? My boobs were too small. I knew there was a reason I pummeled guys instead of flirting with them.

As the guy turned to show me the jean skirts, I lost my patience. Okay, okay, maybe I never had my patience. Long story short, I slipped the gum in his pocket, and when he turned around to look at me, I slapped him on the butt. There you have it. I’m not proud of it, but hey, it worked.

He turned a bright shade of pink, and I could feel my face turning much the same color.

“Sorry,” I said, completely straight-faced. “There was a fly.”

And then I did what any self-respecting pseudogirl would have done. I turned on my heels and walked as fast as I could out of the store. For Tara’s benefit, I even put a little shake in my hips.

She caught up with me halfway to the food court.

“I cannot believe you just did that,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was fighting down anger or hysterical laughter. “What was that?” she asked.

“That,” I said simply, “was misdirection.”