Most younger brothers would have been offended at the very thought of being “saved” by their five-foot-three-inch sister. Noah was not most brothers.
“Where else are you gonna be?” he asked. “Cheerleading practice?”
“In your dreams, Noah.” I scratched the back of my hand a little harder and wondered if I was having an allergic reaction to something (probably Hayley Hoffman).
“You do realize that it looks like you have some kind of bizarre scratching tic, right?”
I ignored Noah’s comment and turned my attention to my hand. What in the world was wrong with it?
“Maybe it’s a psychosomatic response to your guilt for not getting me phone numbers.”
I gave Noah a look and then used the aforementioned itchy hand to thwap him under the chin.
“Oh, come on, Toby. You know you love me.” Noah grinned, and even though I didn’t find him the least bit charming, I smiled back before flicking him again and heading for the sink. I stuck my hand under the faucet and turned the water on, and the instant the water touched my skin, my entire hand changed color.
“Teal?” Noah, who’d followed me into the kitchen, asked. “Doesn’t really seem like your style, Tobe.”
“Noah,” I said calmly.
“Yeah?”
“Run.”
He was smart enough to vacate the kitchen, leaving me staring at my own bright blue hand. I soaped up and scrubbedit, but the color stayed. Ready to seriously pummel something, I grabbed a handful of paper towels and tried to rub off the color. Nothing came off on the towels, but when I looked back at my hand, the color was gone.
“Wha …?”
After a half second of deliberation, I turned the faucet back on and let a few droplets of water drip onto my knuckles, and as they wet the skin, the color reappeared. Carefully, I continued letting water drizzle onto my hand until the vast majority of it was again a bright, perky teal.
Wait a second, I thought. Perky …
I shook my head to clear it of ridiculous thoughts. The cheerleaders hadnotdyed my hand teal.
Or had they?
I ran the day’s events over in my mind until I came to the part where Tara handed me the note, her fingers gripping mine for the smallest fraction of a second.
“I suppose she could have done this,” I said under my breath, “but why?”
Of all of the God Squad, Tara seemed the least likely to torture an antiestablishment social reject such as myself. Then again, maybe I just had to accept the fact that this whole day had been one giant plot to get me to that meeting, dye my hand teal, and …
And what? Why go to all the trouble? We were talking about the prettiest, most popular, ditziest girls in school. I wasn’t even sure they were capable of encoding notes, let alone using invisible dye to …
Notes.
The realization hit me, and slowly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the blank sheet of paper from before. Someone had folded it like a note and somehow gotten it into my lap. When I’d dropped it, Tara had given it back to me before Hayley could open it. Tara, who had also possibly turned my hand an invisible teal.
I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the counter. It was still blank, but looking at my hand, I had to wonder. Was it really blank?
I folded a paper towel in half and wet a corner. Feeling a little bit ridiculous, I gingerly rubbed the cloth over the note, leaving a dampened streak in its wake. The moment water touched the paper, bright teal letters leapt to life. Again and again, I wet the paper towel and dragged it gently across the note, until the entire message was revealed in ink the color of my wet hand.
Practice gym, 5:30, tomorrow morning. Be there.
What, no “Go Lions!” or sis-boom-bah crap? Apparently, cheery cheerleader-speak was only for visible ink. Seriously, though, what was up with the cheerleading squad writing me coded notes and dyeing my hands with invisible ink? Was it the whole squad? I had always thought of them as being one massively popular person split into many bouncy parts, but Tara was the only one who’d actually been involved in this whole debacle, so …
Something else occurred to me then, and I backtracked. Tara had picked the note up and handed it to me, had coatedmy hands with whatever it was they were using for ink, but she hadn’t handed me the note. She’d been on the other side of the room when it had appeared out of nowhere. The only one near me was Chloe. Chloe, who had crashed into my chair instead of giving it a berth the size of Montana, a more typical course of action.
“This is ridiculous.” I tried to snap myself out of it, but couldn’t deny the teal hand or the invisible message or the encoded notes in my locker. Something strange was going on here, and all evidence suggested that it had something to do with the cheerleaders.
