Toby Klein—

You have been selected to attend a preliminary meeting with the Bayport High Cheerleading Squad! Congratulations. How does it feel?

Go Big Gold!

How in the world had they gotten another note into my locker so quickly and without my noticing? Talk about strange.

This time, the invitation was written in purple gel pen, but when I held it up to the light, some letters were a shade darker than the others, like the note’s author had traced them over twice. I quickly scanned the letters, but this time, they didn’t spell anything.

“Miss Klein? Need I even ask if you have a hall pass?”

Our vice-principal didn’t hate me nearly as much as he probably should have given my complete and utter lack of school spirit and my slight tendency toward jock-directed violence, but he was still the vice-principal.

“’Fraid not,” I said, holding up my hall-passless hands to illustrate.

“What’s this?” Mr. Jacobson’s eyes widened at the sight of the little white notecard. “You got an invitation to the Spirit Squad’s information meeting?” he asked. “That’s quite an honor.”

And you wonder why I think this school’s messed up.

“Yeah.” I took in Mr. J’s encouraging smile. “Whatever.”

“Toby,” Mr. J said, and I could feel a lecture coming on. “It’s an honor to be selected. You should go.”

I hated to break it to him, but there was no way in Hades.

“Can’t,” I said, trying to soften the blow. “I’m late for Corkin’s class, and that means detention. Darn.”

While Mr. J launched into a lecture on personal responsibility and trying to make things work, I played around with the letters in my head. YOERICUTUS?

YO RICE UTUS?

Nope.

STORY ICE UU?

Damn Us.

“Toby, are you listening to me?”

“Sort of.”

Mr. J smiled despite himself. “I think it would be good for you to get involved with some extracurriculars,” he said finally. “You should go to that meeting this afternoon. Mr. Corkin can spare you for one afternoon detention.”

Wait a second, I thought, had I just been given detention immunity? Maybe I would go to this “meeting” after all. If it meant being able to thwart Corkin’s diabolical plan of sticking me with yet another afternoon of torturous doldrums, it was totally worth it.

“Toby, go to class.” Mr. J’s words interrupted my train of thought. Obediently, I turned in the direction of the history room, and suddenly, the correct anagram of the scrambled letters fell into place.

CURIOUS YET?

I hated to admit it, but by the time I broke the news of my vice-principalian pardon to my faculty nemesis, I definitely was.

Since when did cheerleaders write in code?

CHAPTER 2

Code Word: Boobalicious

They were the most popular, had the perkiest smiles, and wore the shortest skirts. They were the best, the brightest (yeah, right), and the most boobalicious. They threw the most exclusive parties, hooked up with A-plus-list jocks, and ate lesser females for lunch. They were the varsity cheerleaders, and I was at one of their meetings.

It was official: I’d sold my soul to get out of detention.

“As you know, very few sophomores make the varsity squad.” Brooke Camden, squad captain (or, as I liked to think of her, head bitch), raked her eyes over the occupants of room 117. The other varsity cheerleaders smiled sick little grins, and Brooke continued. “Most of you tried out for the JV squad. Some of you made it, some of you didn’t, but making JV is no guarantee. We only take the best. The rest of you will be cheering for freshmen until you graduate.”

Ho-hum.

“We don’t have tryouts, we don’t care if your mom was a cheerleader at her high school, and we don’t explain our decisions.”

All hail Brooke, Queen of Cheerleaders!

I glanced around at the varsity hopefuls in the room. Half of them were on the verge of tears, one of them looked a single haughty smile away from a nervous breakdown, and a few of them, already JV cheerleaders themselves, seemed to be putting every ounce of energy they had into appearing popular, perky, and worthy of pom-poms.

Gag me. Was this really better than detention? I was starting to have my doubts.

As Brooke lectured on about the massive responsibility of representing all that was good and beautiful at Bayport High, I turned my attention to the other God Squad members in the room. As impossible as it seemed, I had to admit that, given the fact that the invitation had proved to be legit, there was at least a decent chance that one of them had encoded the secret messages into my notes.

I glanced at each of them and ran through their names in my head. Brooke, Tara, Tiffany, Brittany, Lucy, Bubbles, Chloe, and Zee. Brittany and Tiffany were twins, and Lucy might as well have been their triplet. They were blond, bubbly, and gorgeous, and had a combined IQ of 37. I immediately scratched them off my list of suspects. Chloe Larson, Brooke’s second-in-command, was smarter than she let on, but also wouldn’t have touched my locker with an eighty-foot pole. That left Tara, Bubbles, and Zee.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a person named Bubbles could have encoded anything.

“Any questions?” Brooke asked, leaning back against the blackboard.

“I have a question.” Hayley Hoffman raised one manicured hand into the air. She was exactly the kind of girl the God Squad was looking for: JV cheerleader two years running, blond hair that she bleached blonder, and social claws that consistently demolished anyone and everyone who stood in her way and half of the people who didn’t. When Brooke inclined her head toward Hayley’s raised hand, Hayley stared directly at me. “Was this meeting by invite only?” she asked. “Or could just anyone come?”

I didn’t know whether to be angry that she was implying I wasn’t good enough to attend the meeting, or deeply offended that she thought I wanted to be there in the first place.

“This meeting,” Brooke said, her voice every bit as bright and deadly as Hayley’s, “was your first audition.” Her eyes flitted to the rest of us, making it perfectly clear that this message wasn’t just for Hayley. “You came, we watched.” She smiled, no teeth. “We weren’t impressed. Any other questions?”

This time, there were no takers.

“In that case,” Brooke said, “we’ll be in touch.”

And just like that, the meeting was over.

That’s it? I thought. This was what I was supposed to be “curious” about? Forget curious. I was completely baffled.

The only thing I knew for sure was that Hayley was right—I didn’t belong here. Of all the girls who’d received a summons to this invite-only meeting, I was the one who even a dumb four-year-old would have circled in one of those “which one does not belong?” tests. Besides Hayley, there were a slew of other JV cheerleaders, some of them sophomores and some of them juniors who hadn’t been chosen for the God Squad the year before. Then there were the noncheerleading populars: the too-cute editor of the yearbook, the part-time model, and the girl whose hot older brother was newly single. Given the fact that Bayport was one of the richest school districts in the country, everyone in this room could just as easily have been auditioning for a television show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Bitchy.

Everyone except me.

Chloe Larson rammed her body into my chair and then proceeded to give me the evil eye. “Watch where you’re going.”

It was all I could do to keep myself from rolling my eyes. I was sitting down, and she had run into me. Cheerleaders: they thought they owned the air the student body breathed.

“I guess some people are just perpetually in the way, you know?” Hayley’s words broke into my thoughts. I debated giving her a reason to get another nose job, but decided against it. I was a third-degree black belt; she was a junior-varsity cheerleader. Where was the fun in that?

Instead, I stood up, ready to go back to my normal life of beating up football players and hacking into the school’s database to change my grades and Mr. Corkin’s middle name. And that’s when I saw another note. It must have been in my lap, because it fell to the ground when I stood. Hayley’s eyes lit up, and she dove for it, but another manicured hand beat her there.