“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 firstmission 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 phrasenot that badapplied. 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.
