“Toby! Hi!” Lucy tried again. I had a sinking suspicion that ignoring her wouldn’t make her any less friendly, and I wasn’t sure I could take “Toby! Hi!” on repeat indefinitely.
“Hey, Lucy.”
“So how was your day? Probably pretty long, I guess. But good? It was good, wasn’t it?”
I could only conclude that the speed with which Lucy was speaking was the result of some kind of highly classified government enhancement of her tongue muscles, because otherwise, it shouldn’t have been possible.
When I didn’t respond to her question, Lucy frowned. “So your day wasn’t good?” Her voice fell, and I felt a little bit like I’d just slain the Easter bunny in front of a Sunday school class full of orphaned children. I tried to decide whether the fact that she’d wanted me to have a good day that badly was strangely endearing or exponentially creepy. In either case, it felt somehow wrong to sit there, letting the Happiest Girl in the World frown.
“My day wasn’t that bad,” I told her.
It was, you know, only horrendous.
Lucy gave me a tentative half smile. “It will get better,” she promised me. “Things will settle down. Like with all the rumors and stuff? It won’t last forever, and you’ll get used to it, and hey, it could be worse, right?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that in the mind of Toby Klein, things couldn’t get much worse than standing in the cheerleaders’ practice gym, waiting like an inmate on death row for the makeover that was headed my way.
“Anyway,” Lucy said. “The twins are prepping the salon, and the others are getting ready to debrief April, but Tara and Brooke thought you might still be a little confused about the way things work and stuff?”
I could tell from the tone of her voice that the words that had just tumbled out of her mouth were supposed to be a question, but they sure sounded like a run-on sentence to me.
“So I thought I’d show you my lab, and give you a rundown on Squad history and stuff.”
Her lab? As in the lab where the girl who added and stuff or you know onto the end of every sentence fooled around with explosives and weaponry? Still, it beat the hell out of getting a makeover.
Lucy was oddly quiet as she took me down to her lab (no trampoline this time—apparently there were like fifty billion entrances to the Quad, and only one of them involved belly flopping the way down)—and then, without warning, she launched into a surprisingly cogent and articulate explanation of Squad History.
“The Squad program has been around, in various incarnations, for about fifty years,” Lucy said, sounding strangely professional. “Originally, the program was geared toward recruitment and training. Playing on cheerleaders’ natural abilities for subterfuge and athleticism…”
Subterfuge? Seriously?
“…the program was designed to allow a select number of young women to complete the training necessary to become CIA operatives upon their high school graduation. The cheerleader mystique ensured that the program remained sufficiently covert.”
“Riiiiiiight,” I said. “Covert. Because no one in their right minds would suspect that the government was training cheerleaders for the CIA.”
Lucy rewarded me with the perkiest of grins, either ignoring or failing to notice the sarcasm in my tone. “Exactly.”
“By the late eighties,” Lucy continued, “most of the remaining Squad programs had been disbanded due to various budget cuts, but ours remained operational. Over time, the Bayport High Squad Program evolved to be less and less about training and more about helping the government keep an eye on a very specific group of people.”
“In other words,” I started to say, and before I’d finished the sentence, Lucy was nodding.
“In other words,” she said, “we’re like totally special.”
I would say that she’d stolen the words out of my mouth, but the totally special comment bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I’d intended to say.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me get this straight. Once upon a time, the government—God knows why—started recruiting high school cheerleaders and training them to be spies, and somewhere along the way, it actually occurred to them that this wasn’t the best use of the taxpayers’ dollars, so they stopped with the cheer-spies thing, except here in Bayport, where the Squad went from being a cover-up for some sort of spy school to being an actual operative agency?”
Lucy nodded. “That about covers it.”
“And these people that we’re supposed to ‘keep an eye’ on?”
Lucy shrugged. “They’re the bad guys.”
How very illuminating.
I was going to ask more questions, but Lucy changed the subject with all the subterfuge her cheerleading mystique could muster. “What do you think—blow darts—in or out?”
I pictured myself blow-darting an evil football player. “In.”
I had so many more questions about the Squad—what exactly did we do? How much training did we receive? How was this whole thing even legal? Despite Lucy’s dumb act (and, overcaffeination aside, I was starting to suspect that it was an act), I had a feeling that she knew more than she was letting on. At the same time, though, she was holding a knife, and I didn’t want to press her.
“So,” I said, eyeing the knife nervously. “Have you always been into weapons?”
“Me?” Lucy asked, and then she laughed loudly. Given the insanely broad smile on her face and the extra-large knife in her hand, it was borderline freaky. “Gosh, no. A couple of years ago, I’d never even seen a slingshot. I just wanted to make the varsity squad, you know? I’d been cheerleading for like ever, and making varsity seemed to be like this huge challenge and stuff. It was just something I did, and I wanted to do it well, you know? Cheerleading and student council and school and riding classes and…well, you get the drift. Anyway, when they brought me onto the Squad, I had like no specialty whatsoever. I wasn’t a transfer like you. I was just a regular old recruit, like April, but I wanted to be good at something, and their weapons person had just graduated…”
“Hold on there, Skippy…errr…Lucy, what do you mean ‘a transfer’ like me?”
Lucy shrugged. “Some of us are Bayport natives,” she said. “We grew up here, and when we were old enough, we started cheerleading. It’s just what people do here, you know?”