“Nah.” Tara shook her head as she stripped off her shirt and slipped into a sports bra. “It was either Chloe or me, and Chlo…”

“Hates me,” I finished.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Tara said. “She just doesn’t like what you represent.” Tara opened a locker and tossed me an extra set of workout clothes. I took one look at the teeny-tiny gym shorts, which had the word CHEER written across the butt, and gave Tara a look.

“It’s all part of the game,” she reminded me, and because I liked Tara and felt bad that she’d gotten the short end of the spirit stick and ended up with permanent Toby Duty, I changed clothes with only a minor level of grumbling.

“So what do I represent to Chloe?” I asked.

Tara bent down to tie her shoes, and she didn’t look at me as she answered. “What she used to be.”

“You’re kidding me.” Lucy had said that Chloe was a transfer—that she’d registered her first patent when she was ten, and it had occurred to me that the average child inventor wasn’t exactly Chloe-esque, but still…I had a hard time picturing a younger Chloe as me. In fact, I was more apt to believe that she’d been a watermelon in a former life than that we’d ever been anything alike.

“You ready?” Tara asked. I got the message: she was done talking about Chloe.

I deliberately took my time tying the sneakers she’d given me.

“Toby.”

“Fine.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. “Ready.” As we walked toward the door, I stopped. “Remind me again why we have to do this instead of downloading all of the information on the disks.” I paused. “And where are the disks?”

“We have a game on Saturday,” Tara said, answering the first part of my question. “If we don’t take ourselves seriously as cheerleaders, no one else will either. Hence, practice.”

I considered emphasizing the fact that the very phrase taking cheerleaders seriously was somewhat oxymoronic, but Tara didn’t give me the chance.

“As for the disks, I gave them to Brooke. She’s in direct contact with our superiors—she’d know if it was urgent, and if she says we practice first, then we practice first.” Tara didn’t wait for me to ask how she’d managed to give both disks to Brooke without me seeing it. Instead, she walked out the door, and I had no choice but to follow.

I don’t particularly care to relive that practice, but I’ll tell you one thing: cheerleading is hard, and not just because it should be illegal to be that happy about anything. It’s actually, physically hard. Everything hurts. You kick your leg up high next to your face, and even if you’re used to kicking karate-style, that doesn’t do much for you when you’re high-kicking like the freaking Energizer Bunny on uppers. Then there’s all these little nuances that the cheerleading Gestapo expect you to get right the first time. Point your toes! Pop your motions! Straighten your legs! Donut holes are bad, and hyperextension is good. It’s like they speak a whole other language.

By the time we took a water break, my voice was hoarse, my legs were killing me, and I felt like a complete and utter imbecile because I kept switching the words win and again in the halftime cheer.

“You’re not nearly as horrendous as we thought you were going to be,” one of the twins told me brightly.

I was too busy chugging water like a desert camel to respond.

“So,” another voice said. “You’re Toby Klein.”

I looked up from the water fountain. “Yeah,” I said. “And you’re April.”

I was the transfer. She was the regular recruit. I was a lifelong hacker. She was a lifelong cheerleader. For me, this whole cheer gig was a cover. For her, it was a way of life.

“There’s a party at my place on Saturday after the game,” April said, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Daddy’s out of town, and we’ll have the whole house to ourselves.”

I remembered Zee’s analysis of April: independent, charming, intelligent, rich.

At least she wasn’t Hayley Hoffman.

“So I see you two have met.” Her tone of voice was so very Chloe that I recognized it right away.

“Yup,” I said.

April shrugged.

“Come on, April,” Chloe said, placing herself between the two of us. “I want to show you some of our more advanced cheers.”

Chloe spared me a single look as she said the phrase more advanced. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that I belonged in the remedial cheer class.

April leaned around Chloe. “See you on Saturday?

I was about to say no, but Tara answered for me. “Of course,” she said.

Before either of us newbies could say another word, Chloe dragged April away.

“Let me guess,” I said evenly. “Chloe’s April’s partner?”

Tara nodded.

“We’re only going to have to do a Stage One on April, I think,” Brittany piped up suddenly. “Her highlights are gorgeous, but I want to even out her skin tone a little.”

I nodded. As awkward as I’d felt during our little mall mission, this was a million times worse. Now it wasn’t just me trying to adjust to the Squad: it was me and April. April, who could cheer. April, who Chloe had selected as her Mini-Me. April, who barely needed a makeover at all.

And then, as if things weren’t already bad enough, the torture started back up again. We went through the routine time after time, until I was the only one messing it up.

“That’s it for today,” Brooke said. “Let’s hit the showers.”

“Finally,” I groaned under my breath to Tara as we headed into the locker room. “I feel like my legs are going to secede and wage war on the rest of my body. All I want is to go home, and…”

I recognized the look on Tara’s face.

“I don’t get to go home, do I?”

Tara shook her head.

“Are we really hitting the showers?” I asked.

Tara bit her bottom lip and then nodded.

“Is this going to be anything like when we hit the showers this morning?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Tara walked from the gym into the locker room, and after casting a single sheepish look over her shoulder, she walked into one of the shower stalls, reached out, and twisted the shower knob. Left, right, and then left again, 180 degrees this time.

When the shower wall rotated and gave way to a staircase, I wasn’t all that surprised.

At least, I thought as the shower wall closed behind us, no one is going to tell me to point my toes in the Quad.

CHAPTER 14

Code Word: Party!

I didn’t see Brooke place the digi-disk into any kind of player, but before I could say “Go Lion(esse)s,” the index was up on the screen, and the other girls, sweaty from practice, were taking their seats at the table. Stiff and drenched in the fruits of my cheery labor, I slipped into the last available seat at the table, in between Tara and Zee.

“Chlo, can you decode?” Brooke asked. “Here’s the second disk.”

As soon as I heard the word decode, I leaned forward in my seat. I was new to this, but wasn’t decoding supposed to be my area of expertise?

Chloe tossed her ponytail over her shoulder and held my eyes with her own. “No problem,” she said, reaching forward to take the disk Tara had acquired from Brooke. She pulled something that looked like a makeup compact out of one of her shoes (how had she high-kicked with that in there? how?), and a split second later, she flipped it open, inserted the disk, and lifted a powder puff to reveal a tiny circular keyboard.

“Chloe’s compact has some basic decoding formulas programmed in. When she puts in the decoder disk, it runs the specifics through the formula and decodes the file,” Tara said.

“All of that in a makeup thingy?” I could feel my eyebrows rise as I asked the question. Tara might not have realized how complex the type of program she had described was, but believe me, I did, and the very fact that it was programmed into a unit that came with a powder puff was the equivalent of technological blasphemy.

“Voilà.” Chloe leaned back in her seat, and after another hair flip and another oh-so-pointed look in my general direction, she turned back to Brooke. “Looks like we have something we can work with.”