Perfect Cover
Authors: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Contents
CHAPTER 2 Code Word: Boobalicious
CHAPTER 9 Code Word: Like, You Know?
CHAPTER 10 Code Word: Makeover
CHAPTER 11 Code Word: Abercrombie
CHAPTER 13 Code Word: Cheer Shorts
CHAPTER 18 Code Word: Bee-yotch
CHAPTER 30 Code Word: Attraction
CHAPTER 32 Code Word: Pressure
CHAPTER 34 Code Word: Halftime
For Michelle, coach, friend, and honorary big sis,
who really did tell me, “If you don’t feel stupid,
you’re not doing it right.”
CHAPTER 1
Code Word: Pom-pom
If you’d told me at the beginning of sophomore year that I was going to end up a government operative, I would have thought you were crazy, but if you’d told me I was destined to become a cheerleader, I would have had you committed, no questions asked. At that point in time, there were three things in life that I knew for certain: (1) I was a girl who’d never met a site she couldn’t hack or a code she couldn’t break, (2) I had a roundhouse that could put a grown man in the hospital, and (3) I would without question chop off my own hands before I’d come within five feet of a pom-pom.
I liked to fly below the radar. I was the girl slouched in the back of your geometry class, not the one shaking my booty on the field. In fact, in the year and a half since we’d moved to Bayport, I’d spent more time in detention than at pep rallies and considered myself lucky; unless
school spirit
referred to a school-board-sanctioned wine, I had no intention of buying.
And then, one day out of the blue, the note appeared in my locker.
Toby Klein—
You are cordially invited to an information session on the Bayport High Varsity Spirit Squad today at four in room 117. Go Lions (and Lionesses)!
The year before, a bunch of angry feminist mothers had sued the district for having a male mascot, so now we were officially the Bayport Lion(esse)s. I kid you not. That’s just one of the many reasons I couldn’t fathom the idea of actually supporting the school in any way, shape, or form. That and the fact that I’d had to forcibly remove a football player’s hand from my brother’s arm three times in the last month. Emphasis on the word
forcibly
. If they touched Noah again, someone was going to lose an arm. Go Lions!
I turned the note over in my hand. Wow, I thought, the God Squad must really be scratching bottom if they’re recruiting
me
. Maybe they just couldn’t stand it that there were actually a few sophomore and junior girls who weren’t willing to sell their souls for cheerleading immortality. There was a reason the varsity cheerleaders were collectively referred to as the God Squad, and it wasn’t because they were religious; it was because at Bayport High, they were gods: the ultimate social power. Most people did everything short of bowing down to worship them on a regular basis.
I was not most people.
Slamming my locker shut, I moved to throw the note away, but decided to save it for ammunition in case anyone in my carpool got too rowdy. As I moved to jam the invite into my pocket, light caught the letters, and for just a second, a few of them jumped out at me.
“Stupid glitter pens,” I muttered, but automatically, my mind began cataloging the letters I’d noticed. I stuffed the note into my jeans, took four steps down the hallway, and then stopped. My brain does tricky things with letters and numbers: scrambles them and unscrambles them, analyzes their combinations, looks for patterns. When I was little, I loved palindromes and anagrams and any secret language more complicated than Pig Latin. Standing there in the hallway, my letter-savvy mind did its thing, and I pulled the invitation back out of my pocket.
After a quick glance around the hall to make sure no one was watching, I held the small white card in the light again and, one by one, picked out the letters that appeared slightly more sparkly than their counterparts.
Toby Klein—
You are
c
ordially invited t
o
an infor
m
ation s
e
ssion on the Bayport High V
a
rsity Spirit Squad today at four in room 117. Go
L
ions (and Li
one
sses)!
There it was in black and white, or, more specifically, in hot pink glitter pen. COME ALONE.
After that, I really did throw the note away, because there was no way it had been written by an actual cheerleader. Most of them probably couldn’t even spell
cordially
, let alone embed secret instructions in an invite to one of their oh-so-special meetings. Someone was definitely playing a trick on me, and I had a pretty good idea who that someone was. I also had a pretty good idea what I was going to do about it.
Proximity—namely the fact that my brother’s locker was only three down from mine—was on my side.
“Very funny, Einstein.” Since I’d trashed the message and therefore had nothing to throw at him, I settled for flicking my brother on the back of one of his ears.
“Hey!” Noah tried not to lose what little cool he had, but failed miserably. After glaring at me for a second (like that did any good), he changed tactics. “Toby,” he said in a low whisper, “I’m working my magic here.”
And that was why Noah kept getting attacked by football players with no necks and something to prove. No matter how many times I assured him that hot senior girls weren’t under any circumstances interested in scrawny freshman goofballs, he still couldn’t help trying out his “charms” on the older women.
It was a miracle he wasn’t dead, and given the current circumstances, there was a decent chance that I was going to kill him myself.
“Work’s over,” I said. I didn’t even spare a glance at the current object of his affection before literally dragging him to the side of the hall. “You got anything you want to tell me?” I asked. For a girl my size (five three), I can sound pretty mean when I want to.
“Ummm…not that I can think of,” Noah said, giving me one of his most “charming” grins.
“Try harder.”
“Well…I…uhhh…did tell Chuck that you’d take him home after school.”
“Try again,” I said darkly. That wasn’t what I was shooting for. Still, I had to wonder if Noah had been planning on giving me any forewarning at all that Chuck I’m-in-Love-with-Noah’s-Older-Sister Percy was hitching a ride home. That kid made Noah look like Prince Charming.
“I went through your lingerie drawer looking for gift ideas?” Noah tried again.
“You what?” I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that my brother had seen my underwear, or the fact that he was probably on the verge of
buying
underwear for a senior girl whose boyfriend I’d inevitably be forced to physically restrain.
“Don’t worry,” Noah said quickly. “Your stuff didn’t give me any ideas.”
And now he was insulting my intimates. It was a miracle I’d let him live past childhood.
Noah wrinkled his forehead, completely unaware that I was plotting his death. “What
are
you talking about?”
“The note.” I decided then and there that I didn’t want to learn any more of the many reasons that I should have been interrogating him. “The card in my locker.”
Noah continued with his blank look.
“The invitation from the Bod Squad,” I said, using the term he and his friends had adopted for the God Squad.
At the phrase
Bod Squad
, Noah’s eyes lit up. Before he could get any unsavory ideas, I plowed on. “You know, the whole ‘come to our secret lair in room 117’ thing.”
Noah opened his mouth and then closed it again. “You’re joking about the secret lair thing, right?” he asked a few seconds later. “Because if they did have a secret lair, that would be really hot.”
“You didn’t send it?” I asked. Noah was many things, but he wasn’t a liar, or at least he wasn’t a good one.
“Pretend to be a bunch of cheerleaders?” Noah asked.
Why did I feel like I was giving him ideas? I looked down at my watch. “Go to class,” I said finally, not wanting him to be late for fifth period. “And stay away from my underwear.”
A second later, Noah was jackrabbiting toward his next class and I was walking slowly in the general direction of my own. Personally, I wasn’t in any hurry. It had gotten to the point where Mr. Corkin and I had an understanding: I hated his class, and he hated me. It was a give-and-take relationship, and because of that, I took my time walking down the hallway and stopped at my locker again, just for the heck of it. Who cared if it had been less than a minute since I’d visited my locker last? Who cared if the bell had just rung? Delaying the inevitable was an art, and I was an artist.
31-27-15.
My combination was an anagram of a six-digit prime number. The fact that I knew that should tell you a little bit about me.
I opened the locker, briefly wondered if there were any orange Tic-Tacs left inside, and then immediately stopped thinking about freshening my breath. There, on top of a history book I hadn’t bothered to read, was another note.
Toby Klein—
Y
ou have been selected t
o
attend a pr
e
limina
r
y meeting w
i
th the Bayport High
C
heerleading Sq
u
ad! Congra
tu
lation
s
. How does it feel?
Go Big Gold!
How in the world had they gotten another note into my locker so quickly
and
without my noticing? Talk about strange.
This time, the invitation was written in purple gel pen, but when I held it up to the light, some letters were a shade darker than the others, like the note’s author had traced them over twice. I quickly scanned the letters, but this time, they didn’t spell anything.
“Miss Klein? Need I even ask if you have a hall pass?”
Our vice-principal didn’t hate me nearly as much as he probably should have given my complete and utter lack of school spirit and my slight tendency toward jock-directed violence, but he was still the vice-principal.
“’Fraid not,” I said, holding up my hall-passless hands to illustrate.
“What’s this?” Mr. Jacobson’s eyes widened at the sight of the little white notecard. “You got an invitation to the Spirit Squad’s information meeting?” he asked. “That’s quite an honor.”
And you wonder why I think this school’s messed up.
“Yeah.” I took in Mr. J’s encouraging smile. “Whatever.”
“Toby,” Mr. J said, and I could feel a lecture coming on. “It’s an honor to be selected. You should go.”
I hated to break it to him, but there was no way in Hades.
“Can’t,” I said, trying to soften the blow. “I’m late for Corkin’s class, and that means detention. Darn.”
While Mr. J launched into a lecture on personal responsibility and trying to make things work, I played around with the letters in my head. YOERICUTUS?
YO RICE UTUS?
Nope.
STORY ICE UU?
Damn
U
s.
“Toby, are you listening to me?”
“Sort of.”
Mr. J smiled despite himself. “I think it would be good for you to get involved with some extracurriculars,” he said finally. “You should go to that meeting this afternoon. Mr. Corkin can spare you for one afternoon detention.”
Wait a second, I thought, had I just been given detention immunity? Maybe I would go to this “meeting” after all. If it meant being able to thwart Corkin’s diabolical plan of sticking me with yet another afternoon of torturous doldrums, it was totally worth it.
“Toby, go to class.” Mr. J’s words interrupted my train of thought. Obediently, I turned in the direction of the history room, and suddenly, the correct anagram of the scrambled letters fell into place.
CURIOUS YET?
I hated to admit it, but by the time I broke the news of my vice-principalian pardon to my faculty nemesis, I definitely was.
Since when did cheerleaders write in code?