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

Code Word: Abercrombie

“Explain to me again why I’m in Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Personally, I firmly believed that there could be no suitable explanation for such an atrocity.

“You have to tag one of the salesguys.” Tara’s directive didn’t sound any more reasonable the third time she said it than it had the first.

“Why?”

The cheerleading sophisticate sighed. I eyed her warily, because if she told me that information was classified one more time, I was going to have to reevaluate my position toward her as borderline tolerable. “Practice,” she said. “It’s protocol. Before we can move on to our actual mission, we’re required to assess your skills and transmit the results for approval.”

Once upon a time, the Squad had existed as a training program. Now, the closest I came to “training” before my first mission involved a salesguy at Abercrombie. It was official: the Big Guys Upstairs were severely unhinged.

“Come on, Toby. It’s not that bad.”

Tara had already given me a lightning-quick explanation of tagging, and somehow, I totally didn’t think the phrase not that bad applied. As Tara explained it, tagging someone involved identifying them as your target, and (a) putting some sort of homing device on him or his vehicle, (b) planting something on his person crucial to your mission, or(c) interacting with him in a way that alerted the rest of the group to his presence. For those unfamiliar with the whole notion of cheerleaders as spies, I’ll give you three guesses on what the acceptable form of interaction is.

Flirting. When you identify a target, if you’re going for a C tag, you flirt with him until your partner or whoever picks up on special flirt vibes and secret flirt code and begins an intricate, multiagent course of action against the tagged person.

Luckily, this wasn’t a C tag. This was a B tag. I had a stick of bubble gum. It had to go into his back pocket. Don’t ask me why. That information was classified. If this was the Big Guys’ idea of training, no wonder the other Squad training programs had been shut down.

“How am I supposed to do this without him noticing?” I hissed in Tara’s ear.

“You’re a cheerleader,” Tara said. “You figure it out.”

“Flirt?” I asked uncertainly. That seemed to be their answer for everything.

Tara slung her arm around my shoulder. “Toby,” she said with a wry grin, “it’s called misdirection.”

“It’s Tara, isn’t it?” A woman my mother’s age with a too-tight face, wearing too-tight pants and an obviously fake smile, approached us.

Tara whispered something in my ear and giggled. I forced a giggle, too, and pretended that she’d said something about a boy instead of telling me to proceed with the tag as planned.

Ever obedient (I can’t even say that with a straight face), I turned to leave the awkward “my daughter goes to your school” interaction that was already under way, but the woman’s voice stopped me.

“And who is your little friend?”

Little friend? I bristled at the term.

“This is Toby,” Tara said with all the poise in the world.

“She’s a sophomore.”

I nodded, trying to appear as if this whole conversation wasn’t nauseating. I have deep and abiding suspicions that my attempt was a failure.

“A sophomore at Bayport High,” the mother said, as if that was some kind of phenomenal accomplishment. “Are you on the squad, too, Toby?”

And the conversation went from nauseating to shocking, just like that. The Squad? She knew about the Squad?

“What squad?” I asked, trying to put a vacant look in my eyes. Come on, I told myself silently, if Bubbles the contortionist can play clueless, you can, too. Though of course, in Bubbles’s case, it wasn’t exactly a brilliant facade.

Tara rolled her eyes. “The cheerleading squad,” she told me in what I can only describe as a faux indulgent voice. “Toby just still can’t believe it.”

“Just can’t believe it,” I echoed, trying to suck a little less at not blowing our entire operation.

The woman patted me on the shoulder and then moved to squeeze me into a full-on hug. “These years are so precious,” she said.

Personal space, I thought, I’d like you to meet Nauseatingly Reminiscent Mom. NRM, this is my personal space. Please stop violating it.

“Well, you girls have fun.” With one final squeeze, she was off and shopping. “And do let me know when you have another one of those bake sales.”

I so didn’t sign on for bake sales and touchy-feely, Botox-ed über-moms.

“Happens all the time,” Tara said calmly as soon as the woman was out of hearing range. “It’s like every football parent or every mother of a freshman girl who wants to be a cheerleader acts like they know and love each and every one of us.”

“I feel violated,” I said darkly.

Tara half grinned. “You’ll get over it.” She prodded me gently in the side and I got the message. I had a stick of gum and it had to go in the hot salesboy’s back pocket. Such is the glorious life of a sixteen-year-old secret agent.

The way I saw it, I had a couple of options. I could do as Tara had suggested and flirt with him. I could try a drive-by approach in which I ran by, rammed the gum into his pocket, and left in a blur of honeysuckle highlights, but somehow, I thought that forcibly ramming gum into said mark’s pocket was not what the Squad had in mind. I could somehow get him to remove his pants….

“I’m going to have to flirt with him, aren’t I?” I said, less than overjoyed at the prospect.

“It’s not you flirting,” Tara told me. “It’s the cheerleader.”

Right. My cover. Malibu Toby, varsity cheerleader.

I knew then that I had exactly two choices: barf all over Tara in a fit of self-loathing, or suck it up and take one for the team. I gracefully opted for option B and wondered how exactly one went about flirting. I knew it involved teasing and giggling and a lot of hair tossing, but beyond that, the only picture that jumped into my head was one of Hayley Hoffman pulling her evil girl mojo on some unsuspecting senior jock.

I briefly considered the barfing option one more time, but that would have been like accepting that Hayley Hoffman should have made the Squad instead of me. I am Toby, I thought. Fear my wrath.