On the surface, the scrapbook seemed straightforward enough: pictures and pieces of fabric and neatly written paragraphs about games, halftime routines, and private jokes. It was at least twenty-five or thirty years old, and as I flipped the pages, I couldn’t help but notice how cheer fashions had changed over the years. The skirts were significantly shorter now, and half of our tops revealed midriff. Our plethora of cheer uniforms (because we wore our uniforms every game day and couldn’t repeat outfits in a given week) boasted more eclectic styles, too.
I paused, wondering if Zee could somehow reverse the fashion programming the twins had obviously crammed into my head somewhere along the way.
“Look at the code,” I told myself sternly. “Not the clothes.”
I scanned through all of the written material, looking for letters that were bolded or tilted or written in a slightly different script than the others. That was the Squad low-maintenance encoding technique of choice.
I found nothing.
Okay, I thought. This could get interesting.
I tried looking for words that felt out of place in context with the others on the page. If I could identify at least one word that had been chosen for a property other than its meaning, I might be able to pick up on some pattern or trick to it. The third letter of the third word on the third page, combined with the fourth letter on the fourth page, or something like that.
Ten minutes later, all I’d managed to pull from the book using that method was sweet taco, which I seriously doubted had any meaning relevant to the history of the Squad program.
I went through all of the numbers mentioned, and substituted in their alphabet and reverse alphabet correlates, but came up with nothing but garbage.
“Hmmmmm.” I actually made the sound out loud, knowing that it was ridiculous to do so and not really caring.
There was a chance that the code required a second text. Most good codes did. That way, you couldn’t decode one unless you had both, decreasing the likelihood that someone who wasn’t supposed to would break it. But, I told myself, I was supposed to be able to break this one. Lucy had given it to me. If I’d needed a second source to sort out the code, she would have said something, or at the very least given me the second source in one form or another.
Since the only thing other than the book that Lucy had given me in recent memory was a throwing knife barreling toward my face, I dismissed my “multiple sources” theory and flipped through the pages again. Absentmindedly, I reached up and touched the towel around my head, and in the back of my mind, I wondered how much longer I was supposed to leave the conditioner in.
How long were Laguna Beach episodes anyway?
As I mussed with the towel, a single piece of hair fell out of its hold, and a drop of water fell onto the book. I haphazardly shoved the hair back under the towel, and stared at the wet mark, half expecting for some cheerleading or espionage deity to descend from the heavens and smite me for desecrating ye olde sacred history of the Squad.
The drop dried soon enough though, and I escaped any smitings that might have been heading my way.
And then, just like that, I knew.
“It’s not encoded,” I murmured. “It’s invisible.”
The girls on the Squad were almost as fond of invisible ink as they were of sparkly gel pens. I just had to figure out what the trigger to visibility was, and then I’d be set. It obviously wasn’t water, which was the only trigger I’d run across before. A specific chemical combination was possible, but unless it was the chemicals involved in powdered blush or something like that, it didn’t seem entirely likely. That left heat and light.
I grabbed the lamp off my desk, and positioned it so that I could hold a single page of the book directly above the lightbulb. At first, nothing happened, but then, as the pages heated up, the words written behind the visible script popped to the surface, and I read.
And read.
And read.
For the most part, there was nothing that I hadn’t been told before. The program had been created because, at the height of the Cold War, the government had secretly decided to begin training younger and younger agents, and while select boarding schools and military academies provided male trainees, they’d had difficulty locating a group of females who consistently and predictably fulfilled their requirements. The special task force assigned to recruitment was looking for girls who were beautiful and able to use their looks to their advantage, girls who were smart but didn’t seem on the surface to be much of a mental threat. Girls who were athletic, manipulative, and capable of keeping their true identity a secret.
And somewhere along the way, someone had suggested cheerleaders.
It was a miracle that person hadn’t been laughed right out of Washington, but they hadn’t been, and a handful of pilot programs were started at select schools across the country. Trainees were chosen based on a complex algorithm of requirements, ranging from IQ to athletic prowess and psychological fitness. Upon graduation, they were given tests and some of the girls were offered positions at Quantico or within the CIA, Secret Service, or some kind of covert ops division I didn’t quite understand.
Caught up in what I was reading, I turned the page, but didn’t pay enough attention to what I was doing, and was soon bombarded with the smell of scorching paper. I jumped, pulling the book back, and considered the notion that perhaps people should refrain from giving me things that they didn’t want wet, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
Even though the pages hadn’t caught on fire (yet), I blew on them for good measure and then plopped down on the floor.
What had I been looking for in the book? The question hit me as I blew. I knew how the program had started, I knew that if I kept on reading, I’d get to the part of the history where the program was disbanded in the early nineties, with the exception of a single Squad, located conveniently near a law firm that the government wanted to keep a particularly close eye on. Our Squad was operational, far more so than any of our predecessors, and when we graduated, we didn’t have to deal with more training; we got our choice of assignments.
Even though the invisible letters were once again hidden from my eyes, I glanced down at the book, as if the pages themselves should somehow provide the answers to whatever questions I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask. What was I thinking? Did I really expect the book to have anything to say about my current predicament? Like maybe a previous Squad member had written down everything she’d learned the hard way about dating the heir to an evil empire. Or maybe I subconsciously thought that the book held the secrets to making a homecoming nomination disappear, or the answer to the many questions about our case that I’d asked myself at dinner. Better yet, I might have even expected it to contain some insight on how exactly somebody could go from Son of Evil to Force of Good overnight.