Free Perfect Cover by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page B

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