“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