Tara leaned over to whisper in my ear. “You might want to switch to SDA mode,” she advised. “Brooke probably won’t kill you for the PDA, but Chloe might.”
I didn’t have to ask what PDA was, but I tried to sort out the other acronym.
The barest hint of a grin flicked across Tara’s face at my puzzlement. “Stealth Displays of Affection.”
Based on the looks the twins—our resident flirting experts—were giving me, I could only conclude that as soon as we wrapped up with Operation Cheer Scouts, there might be an SDA tutorial in my future.
Not nearly soon enough, the topic of conversation changed to a teen slasher movie coming out the next weekend, and I felt a piece of paper being shoved unceremoniously into my lap under the table. In an attempt to prove that I could be stealthy, I unwrapped it and read without anyone else at the table noticing.
I need to talk to you.
For a note from one of my Squadmates, it wasn’t very high-tech. No codes. No invisible ink. But then again, the message wasn’t exactly the stuff that national security was made of. Girls across the country probably passed notes like this every day. I scanned the table, trying to figure out who’d sent it to me, and when my eyes landed on Chloe, I groaned internally.
She was staring straight at me, and her not-a-glare glare changed into something else. She held my eyes for a moment, and then spoke. “OMG. I totally forgot to pick up the banner paint, and we were going to make banners for Friday’s game at practice today. I’m going to go see if Mr. J will let us sneak out to pick some up. You want to come with, Toby?”
I really didn’t, but since Chloe had never voluntarily spent time in my presence, I got the distinct feeling that whatever she wanted to talk to me about, it was big.
“Sure!” I tried to match her peppy tone. “I’ve always wanted to pick out banner paint.”
I could see Brooke repressing an eye roll at my response, and even I had to admit that it wasn’t exactly one hundred percent believable, but if any of the guys at the table thought it was strange, they didn’t comment on it. Even Jack just looked at me, a half smile on his face, like he knew that banner paint was seriously up there on the list of things I couldn’t have cared less about, but wasn’t going to blow my cover, because he was the master of pretending to care about things that didn’t matter himself.
As Chloe and I walked away from the table, part of me had to wonder whether I fell into that category, or if I was the only thing in Jack’s charmed life that didn’t.
“Arrrrr, mateys! It be homecoming season, and we be the homecoming pirates.”
Dear God, I thought in silent prayer, when I turn around, please don’t let that be Noah.
“Arrr!” a dozen more voices chorused.
I turned around, and there was Noah, along with Chuck and the slew of freshman boys who’d been at my house that morning. All of them were dressed up like pirates, and three of them were actually standing on a table in the middle of the cafeteria. Noah brandished a makeshift sword.
“Who you be voting for, mateys?” he asked his pirate followers.
In what I can only conclude was the product of a great deal of rehearsal, the other boys chorused in unison, “The homecoming pirates be voting for Toby Klein. She be worth her weight in pirate’s gold. Arrrrrr!”
What was my brother thinking? Did he honestly think making a complete fool out of himself would encourage anyone to vote for me? That was insane. Or, at least, I hoped it was insane, because if by some miracle Noah’s pirate act actually convinced so much as a single person to write my name down on that ballot, I was going to stuff not one, but both of my poms into a part of his anatomy where the sun doesn’t shine.
“Arrrr!”
To her credit, Chloe didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder at the boys, and a large portion of the student body followed her lead. Still, I couldn’t help but notice as we left the cafeteria that a disturbing amount of freshmen and sophomores were cheering Noah on.
As Chloe and I walked toward the vice-principal’s office, the silence between us was nearly tangible, but I finally broke it.
“If there was a way to deport my brother to Antarctica, you’d tell me, right?” That was about as much of a peace offering as I could give her. If we were going to be stuck in the same room for any amount of time, I preferred to get rid of any latent hostilities first.
“If you win homecoming queen,” Chloe snipped, “I’ll deport him myself.”
Something about the expression on her face convinced me that she wasn’t joking, and I spent several seconds hoping that senior members of the Squad didn’t actually have a way of deporting people, because I couldn’t actually let someone ship my brother off the continent.
Chloe rolled her eyes and snorted simultaneously. “Gullible much?”
Chloe’s tone reconfirmed two things for me. First, that when it came to me, hostility was Chloe’s middle name, and second, that my first impression of this whole homecoming situation had been entirely accurate.
Things were definitely going to get ugly.
On the plus side, though, talking Mr. J into excusing us from our last two classes turned out to be a piece of cake. After all, heaven forbid we run out of banner paint!
“You do realize how twisted this is, right?” I didn’t particularly want to talk to Chloe, but once we were safely away from the office, I couldn’t keep the opinion to myself.
“Don’t look a gift vice-principal in the mouth,” Chloe said glibly. Almost belatedly, she rolled her eyes, as if she’d remembered at the last second who she was talking to and that an eye roll was the mandated response. “But, yes, for the record, I do get that this is ridiculous. We all do. We’re not stupid.” Chloe paused as the two of us entered the Quad, and when she continued, her voice was slightly less blatantly nasty and marginally more condescending. “Look at it this way—if Jacobson didn’t have a job at Bayport, he’d have a job somewhere else, and the cheerleaders at that school probably wouldn’t be skipping class to deal with terrorist threats.”
That was, in all likelihood, an understatement.
All things considered, though, it was a miracle that none of the other parents had ever complained. Then again, if any of the parents did complain—about their kids not making the varsity squad, about the blatant favoritism in the school, about the fact that there wasn’t a single noncheerleader nominated for homecoming court—the Big Guys Upstairs would probably just pull some strings and have that parent transferred out of the Bayport school district, the same way they’d somehow managed to have me transferred in.