“No killing members of the Squad.” Brooke issued a drive-by order in a tone so serious that it might have been amusing were it not for the fact that one of the “hottest” girls in school was asking me about my impossible, obnoxious, and supposedly endearing younger brother. Noah considered himself a ladies’ man, which basically meant that he was forever trying to charm older, unavailable girls who almost invariably had large, angry boyfriends who didn’t find Noah’s overtures adorkable in the least.
I’d spent years trying to convince Noah that he wasn’t irresistible, and for some reason, the twins—heck, the entire Squad—seemed to enjoy undoing all of my hard work. As far as I’d been able to tell, none of them (with the possible exception of Lucy, and I so wasn’t ready to mentally go there) were actually interested in Noah, but they got a kick out of flirting with him, just because they knew it irritated me. As for Noah, he’d spent more time moonwalking and victory dancing in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life, which was really saying something.
“You know, he is kind of cute, Toby.” Tiffany appeared beside her twin and gave me an impish look.
This went beyond friendly teasing, and there was no way I could let it stand. Even if we were, by some stretch of the word, friends, I had a moral obligation to discourage their feigned interest in my brother, for the good of the world as well as my own sanity. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to go with the truth. “Yeah, well, he kind of wants you guys to have a naked pillow fight in our living room.”
For some reason, the twins thought this was an absolute riot, which just goes to show that their mother probably dropped both of them on their heads repeatedly as small children.
“Ha-ha,” I said dryly. “My brother likes naked girls. Yes, very funny.”
They continued laughing and I decided it was time for a change of subject. Luckily enough, I knew exactly which direction I wanted to push this conversation. A few weeks earlier, I’d discovered something about one of our contacts in Washington that had rocked me to the core, and since then, I’d been trying to figure out which, if any, of the others knew about it. The twins were among the last on my list, and now seemed as good a time to broach the subject as any.
“Speaking of things that don’t involve my little brother”—I gave them each a look that, had it been any more pointed, would have been capable of drawing blood—“we haven’t heard anything from the Big Guys in a while.”
“Brooke talks to them all the time,” Tiffany said. “They’re the ones who told us about the TCIs. Obvi.”
“Plus they sent us this really cool volumizing mascara last week,” Britt added. “It’s made by like NASA.”
I couldn’t begin to fathom why NASA would be designing mascara, but didn’t bother to ask Brittany if she was mixing up her acronyms. I had more important things on my mind. “Don’t you guys ever wonder who the Big Guys are?” I asked.
The twins stared at me, clearly not comprehending such curiosity.
I tried to put this in terms they would understand. “For all we know, they could be really hot or something.”
That got identical contemplative looks out of the two of them, until Brittany realized that our superiors in Washington were “probably like really old,” and then the two of them shrugged off the entire conversation and began to apply a second coat of glitter to my body, on the off chance that my sparkle had waned during the course of our conversation.
Each and every girl on the Squad was a master of deception, but the more time I spent with them, the better I got at reading the subtleties of their body language, their tones of voice, and their patterns of behavior. For the twins, worrying about my “sparkle quotient” was more or less the norm, and every instinct I had told me that all they knew about our superiors was that they had access to cosmetic prototypes that would have made other fashionistas drool.
Like the other girls I’d spoken to, save for one, the twins didn’t know anything about the man who’d been our liaison in Washington on our last mission. The only person I hadn’t spoken to about it was Brooke, and that was because Brooke and I didn’t talk. She issued orders. If I was in a good mood, I considered following them. Besides, I was positive that Chloe knew something she wasn’t sharing, and if Chloe knew the truth, Brooke did, too.
They just didn’t want the rest of the Squad to know it.
The fact that the twins were getting a little too personal with their glitter distribution kept me from dwelling on my little mystery too much. I was afraid that if I let Brittany and Tiffany continue with their dastardly glitter ways, I’d be sparkling where the sun don’t shine in no time.
“Don’t you two have somebody else to glitter?” I narrowed my eyes, and to my incredible relief, they stopped the glitter application to answer my question.
“Oh, no,” Tiffany said seriously. “You’re the only one who needs G.A.”
G.A.?
“Glitter Assistance,” her twin clarified.
When it came to makeup, the twins didn’t trust me to know my lips from my lids. You confuse eyeliner and lip liner once, and you’re branded for life.
As if they somehow knew that a brief makeup-related thought had crossed my mind, the twins whipped out tubes of lip gloss in synchronized motions, and before I could so much as threaten bodily harm, my lips were pink and shiny and tasted vaguely like strawberries.
It was times like these that I really needed to do something, anything, that made me feel like me. Not too long ago, I’d found out that I wasn’t the only Squad member who’d been cheerlead-o-fied upon joining up, and I didn’t want to get to the point where my cover became my identity. I was still me, and unlike Zee and Chloe, I had no desire to forget it and become somebody else.
“Anyone want to spar?” I asked. There was nothing like a good fight to make me feel like myself again. It must have had something to do with those “aggressive tendencies” my school counselors were always talking about. Luckily for me, one of the perks of being on the Squad was the amazing underground facility called the Quad. I was still finding my way around, but the week before, I’d discovered a first-class training room, with plenty of space for a little friendly hand-to-hand.
“School starts in twenty-eight minutes,” Tara told me.
I think she vastly underestimated my need to hit something. Or someone.