Killer Spirit

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The four senior members of the Squad. Color me shocked.

  Across the room, Jack’s grin grew bigger and wickeder by the second. Without a word, he simply pointed in my general direction. I turned around and glanced over my shoulder. Nothing.

  “The junior nominees are Tara Leery, Lucy Wheeler, and Tiffany and Brittany Sheffield.”

  Okay, was I the only one in the entire school who realized that Tiffany and Brittany were actually two separate people and that, therefore, there were four junior girls nominated for homecoming court and not just three? Sometimes, the mental math at this place was depressing.

  “The underclassmen nominees are…”

  Across the room, Jack’s grin had settled down to a smirk, and he pointed again. A second too late, I realized that he wasn’t pointing behind me.

  He was pointing at me.

  “April Manning and Toby Klein.”

  Not to sound like an acronym-loving cheerleader/spy, but OMG with a side of WTF.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered under my breath. Now Jack’s smile made sense. He knew this was going to happen. Everyone but me had realized it. I’d said it myself—there wasn’t anyone in this room who didn’t know whose names were going to be on those ballots. The varsity cheerleaders were called the God Squad for a reason. And yet, somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that there were exactly two sophomores on the Squad and exactly two sophomore nominees for homecoming queen.

  Now whose mental math was depressing?

  “I hate my life.”

  Tara and Chloe both elbowed me in the stomach at the same time.

  “Ouch,” I hissed. “I still hate my…”

  This time, I saw the blows coming and dodged them. Oblivious to the violence amongst the cheerleaders, the rest of the school listened as the nominees for homecoming king—Chip, Jack, and a handful of other football players—were read off. It didn’t take me long to figure out that there was no such thing as a homecoming prince.

  Thank God.

  “Good luck, boys and girls, and remember, this is a very special time in your lives.”

  Yeah, I thought, a very special time for my life to suck. I’d come to terms with the cheerleader thing. Scratch that, I’d almost come to terms with the cheerleader thing, but I most certainly did not sign on for homecoming princess. I had a healthy disdain for things like dances and popularity. I hated dresses and tiaras, and I wasn’t even ready to accept the fact that people at this school even knew my name, let alone that it would be plastered on hundreds of ballots.

  Life as I knew it was over. Again. And this time, things were going to get ugly.

  CHAPTER 6

  Code Word: Hottie

  “We’re strong! We’re tough! Bayport Lions—stand up, up!”

  We were closing out the pep rally with another cheer, and as the student body rose to their feet at our command, I couldn’t help but note the fact that I was this close to upupchucking all over my Asics cheer shoes.

  “We’re strong! We’re tough! Bayport Lions—stand up, up!”

  Technically, this was a chant, not a cheer, which meant that we repeated the words and motions indefinitely until Brooke called last time. I was starting to doubt that Brooke would ever put me out of my misery, when she finally yelled those two, wonderful words.

  “Last time!”

  I hit the final pose, my arms in a high V and my mind in overdrive. In approximately thirty-five seconds, this pep rally would be over, and students would start pouring out every available exit. My mission was clear: I had to get out of Dodge before Dodge’s Most Eligible Bachelor could so much as smirk the words homecoming princess at me, or ask me to the dance. After I managed to finagle my way out of the gym unnoticed, I was going to sneak down to the Quad, drown my sorrows in whatever fruity juice-like beverage lived in the fridge, and wait for Tara to come and tell me it was time to do something that didn’t involve cheering or homecoming or pretending that Jack and I had never kissed.

  At this point, a little espionage sounded like heaven.

  Ultimately, however, things did not go exactly as planned. The moment the assembly officially ended, people rushed the gym floor, including three individuals who, for one reason or another, felt that they just had to talk to me.

  The first of the three was Noah. “To-by, To-by, To-by.”

  My brother was an idiot. Unfortunately, he was also extraordinarily loud, and his voice carried. I spent one moment vehemently hoping that his chant wouldn’t catch on, and the next plotting his immediate and violent demise.

  “My sister, the homecoming princess.” Noah batted his eyelashes at me. “Our little girl, all grown-up and…”

  I took a step forward, and Noah, smart boy that he was, took a step back.

  “Shutting mouth now,” he volunteered.

  I gave him a look that simultaneously commended his mouth-shutting decision and warned him that I wasn’t in the mood to be teased.

  “Hi Noah!” two voices chorused at once.

  I turned to glare the twins into oblivion, but somewhere between Noah’s “helllllloooooooo, ladies” and the twins’ giggled response, I was waylaid by a woman with no respect for personal space and a huge smile on her Botox-ed face.

  “Toby. It is Toby, isn’t it?” Mrs. McCall, PTA president and nauseatingly reminiscent mom, came up and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yup.” I stuck to one-word answers, hoping she’d get the drift.

  “I just wanted to congratulate you. Homecoming court—how exciting! Of course, it can’t be that much of a surprise…”

  If she only knew.

  “You girls are just so lucky.” She squeezed my shoulder. “These are such—”

  “Precious times,” I finished. “Yeah, I know, but right now, I’ve really got to—”

  I didn’t escape then, because in a move too smooth and quick for the human mind to follow or comprehend it, the NRM had been replaced with a JVB—a junior-varsity beeyotch.

  “You must think you’re pretty great.” Hayley Hoffman was smiling, but she was not happy. “You think that just because you’re varsity, it’s okay to walk all over the rest of us.”

  Coming from her, the accusation was laughable. Hayley was a lifelong cheerleader and a supremely hideous person. She preyed on the weak, drank tears for breakfast, and would have sacrificed her own child on the altar of popularity. The fact that she hadn’t made the varsity squad had a little to do with her lack of loyalty, and a lot to do with the fact that I’d convinced the others to vote in April instead.

  Hayley still hadn’t forgiven me for making the God Squad. From her perspective, I’d stolen her spot and everything that came with it, including a nomination for homecoming queen.

  “Do you honestly think you deserve to be nominated?” Hayley asked. “Do you think that’s fair?”

  “No,” I said, looking her directly in the eyes. “It’s not fair.”

  If life were fair, the word makeover would never have been invented, I wouldn’t have had the world’s biggest spankie pants wedgie, and the words hacker and homecoming princess would have had no logical connection whatsoever. Life wasn’t fair. It was twisted.

  “You don’t belong on varsity,” Hayley said, “and you sure as hell don’t belong on the homecoming court.” The and I will make you pay went unspoken, but I was very good at reading between the mean-girl lines.

  After one last glare, Hayley turned and flounced back to her sidekicks. Once upon a time, April had been one of them, but now that April had made the Squad, she and Hayley were hanging out less and less, and Hayley had already found a handful of suitable replacements—mostly other JV cheerleaders and sophomore populars who hadn’t made the varsity cut that fall.

  By the time I’d dealt with (read: tried to ignore) the tri-fecta of horror that was the Noah–NRM–Hayley onslaught, the entire student body was standing in between me and the exit, and there was no way out.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” Jack spoke i
nto the back of my head, but I knew it was him.

  Darn Noah. Darn the PTA president. Darn Hayley Hoffman.

  “Aren’t you going to say something, Ev?”

  I muttered an expletive under my breath, and Jack smiled.

  “That’s my girl.”

  “I’m not your girl,” I said sharply.

  He stepped closer, until the rest of the crowd felt miles away by comparison. “You could be.”

  There were times when I almost couldn’t restrain myself around him, times when I wanted to kiss him again so badly that my lips literally hurt. This wasn’t one of them. He was being suave and smooth, and I wasn’t falling for it.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I could also tattoo an anorexic pterodactyl on my navel, but I’m not planning to do that, either.”

  “Anorexic pterodactyl.” He repeated my words, and the self-assured smirk on his face was replaced with repressed amusement. “Sounds more like a butt tattoo to me.”

  It was comments like that one that did me in. He could wax poetic about me being his girl or how beautiful I was or whatever from now until graduation, and it wouldn’t inspire anything in me other than the desire to spell out for him just how much of a tool I thought he was. But the moment he started snarking or quipping or admiring my snarky quippiness, I was a goner.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Ev. You go to homecoming with me, and I’ll save you from having to go to the God Squad after-party.”

  He knew how to sweet-talk a girl. He really knew how to sweet-talk a girl.

  I glanced past his shoulder, trying to look away from the half grin on his lips, and I made eye contact with Tara. If I’d seen any of the other cheerleaders, it would have been different. Brooke and Chloe were a tad too possessive, and the rest of the girls were way too gung ho on the Jack/Toby relationship. As a general rule, Tara tried to remain more neutral. Her face was clear of any obvious expression, but for some reason, I knew what she was thinking.

  Squad-wise, I should say yes. If there really was something big going down in Bayport, Peyton, Kaufman, and Gray, nefarious law firm that it was, probably had a hand in it. For whatever reason, the Big Guys either didn’t know about the familial connection within their ranks (unlikely, given the fact that they were the Big Guys), or they couldn’t/wouldn’t utilize it. As a result, the only way our operation could gain access to Peyton was through Jack.

  “No.” My mouth made the decision before my head did, but I didn’t regret it. I didn’t want to like Jack, but even if I’d actually wanted to accept his offer, how could I? I had little to no tolerance for BS, and I wasn’t going to use him to get to his father again, not if there were real feelings involved.

  Which, I still maintained, there weren’t.

  “Okay, allow me to rephrase that.” Jack’s half grin turned into a full smirk. “If you go to homecoming with me, I will refrain from endorsing your candidacy for homecoming queen.”

  I stared at him.

  “Think about it, Ev. All it takes is one word from me, and you could end up as the first underclassman homecoming queen in Bayport’s history. At the very least, you’d be guaranteed princess, but if the seniors split enough votes, you could win the whole shebang. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  Oh, he was good. He was very, very good.

  There was no way to get my name off that ballot, and I could only hope that April’s well-established popularity would guarantee that she got more votes than me and therefore won the princess title. But if Jack was serious, and he started telling people to vote for me…

  Not good. So not good.

  “You wouldn’t,” I said.

  Jack leaned forward, until our foreheads were almost touching. “Wouldn’t I?”

  Damn it, I thought. He totally would.

  “Won’t the senior members of the squad be thrilled if you win?”

  Okay, now he was just gloating. If I somehow managed to defy tradition and win queen as a sophomore, I was a dead girl. Brooke and Chloe would beat me to a pulp with their bare hands, and who knew what kind of psychological torture Zee could heap upon me if she really tried? His plan was evil, and it was genius, and given his background, neither one of those things should have surprised me.

  “I hate you.” I glared at Jack.

  He moved forward again, until there was virtually no space between his lips and mine. “Right back at ya, Ev.”

  For a split second, I was terrified that he would kiss me right there, in front of everyone, but at the last instant (and right before I either grabbed him, flipped him, and hurled him to the ground or pinned him to the wall and kissed him so hard it hurt), he pulled back.

  “It’s a date.” He smiled again, and then walked away, leaving me in his wake trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

  Less than an hour ago, all I’d wanted was detention. Now, I was nominated for homecoming court and going to the big dance with the hottest guy in school. Somewhere out there, God was laughing at me. I was sure of it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Code Word: Smile

  “Go ahead,” I told Tara. “Ask me what happened.”

  She arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me. “What happened?”

  There was something in the tone of her voice, some trick to the words that made me narrow my eyes. “You already know.”

  She smiled slightly and merged onto the highway. I’d finally made it out of the gym, and now the two of us were on our way to the Marymount Hotel, where our mark, Jacob Kann, had checked in earlier that week. We’d picked up bugs and tracking chips from the guidepost, our loading center, and then—thankfully—the two of us had hightailed it out of there before any of the others had a chance to ask a single question about my interaction with Jack.

  About that time, I realized how strange it was that none of the others had managed to get a question in. These were girls who were trained to get information out of people. Plus they single-handedly ran our school’s rumor mill. So why hadn’t they asked about Jack?

  The answer was simple. “The others already know, too, don’t they?”

  How was that even possible? The gym had been crowded and noisy, and even Tara had been too far away to hear our exchange. Jack and I had kept our voices low. And yet…

  “There’s a slight chance that I read lips,” Tara admitted.

  Well, that answered that question.

  “And the others?” Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Tara ratting me out.

  Tara sighed. “I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say there’s a very good chance it has something to do with your body language and Zee’s ability to read people.”

  And there you had it. Between a linguistics expert and a profiler who could read people like one of those See Spot Run books, I had no hope for keeping any aspect of my personal life private.

  “I don’t like him,” I told Tara.

  She remained silent, but allowed the edges of her lips to twitch slightly.

  “You suck.” I wasn’t feeling very forgiving of twitchy lips and half smiles.

  “It’s not that bad, Toby,” she said. “If it wasn’t Jack, it would be somebody else. You knew coming into this what it would entail. When you become one of those girls, those guys start asking you out, and to stay one of those girls, you have to say yes.”

  The idea of saying yes to Chip or any of his followers (who I liked to think of as Chiplings) made me want to swallow my tongue in a fit of loathing. In comparison, going to homecoming with Jack was significantly less nauseating.

  “And for all we know,” Tara said, continuing her logical assessment of my situation, “Peyton might not have anything to do with the TCI influx, in which case, your date with Jack can be just that: a date.”

  I had to marvel at the fact that Tara was more or less lifting my objections to the homecoming situation right out of my head. It was scary how well she knew me—and my thought process. Being on the Squad was a lot like going to summer camp—after a few w
eeks, you start to feel like you’ve known the other campers for years. The ten of us spent so much time together—mornings before school, lunch, practice (of both the cheerleading and operative varieties) after school. The Squad wasn’t just an activity. It was a way of life.

  “Toby?” In response to Tara’s prodding, I shrugged. A large part of me still wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that I’d gone from being a loner to spending most of my waking hours around nine other girls. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about how I felt about it, because I probably should have hated it more than I did.

  “You want the hotel room or the car?” I asked Tara, changing the subject. Our plan of action was pretty simple. We needed to break into Jacob’s hotel room to plant a series of bugs so that we could monitor his phone and in-room conversations, and we needed to plant a tracking device on his car so that we could track his location, and, if necessary, tail him tomorrow.

  “I’ll take point on the room,” Tara said. “You can come with, though.”

  I knew instinctively that coming from Tara, “you can come with” translated directly to “I’ll show you general procedure for breaking into hotel rooms.” If she’d been any of the other girls, she probably would have come out and said it, but Tara was nothing if not subtle.

  “And I’ll take point on the car?” I was relatively new to the spy gig, but planting a microtracker on the bottom of a Bentley with license plate number Z1X459 seemed pretty straightforward, and I was a big fan of learning by doing. I’d spent enough time in the past couple of weeks training. I was ready for some real action.

  “You’ll take point on the car,” Tara confirmed as she pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot across the street from the hotel. She was careful to park the car so that it was obscured from the view of anyone inside the restaurant by a conveniently placed drive-through menu, and without pausing, the two of us slipped out of the car. Right before I closed the door, I remembered to pick up the tracking device. I moved to put it in my pocket before I remembered that my cheerleading uniform didn’t have pockets, and then, only mildly mortified, I slipped it into my bra.