“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.
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.