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…