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“So,” she said brightly. “We still have like twenty minutes before you have to report to the salon. Wanna blow stuff up?”
All things considered, that was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.
CHAPTER 10
Code Word: Makeover
Unfortunately, happy explosives time couldn’t last forever, and sooner than later, I’d bid goodbye to Lucy’s lab and said hello to the twins’.
“Copper frost for the skin?”
Brittany pursed her lips at her twin’s question. “Only if we go dirrrrrrty blond on top.”
That’s the way she said it, too. Like it was from some idiotic Christina Aguilera song that was cool when we were younger.
“If we go blond, we may need to change the eyes, too.”
“Crystal clear?”
“Here’s an idea,” I said from my seat between them.
“How ’bout we leave my hair, skin tone, and eyes the same?”
“Brown, taupe, and brown? Puh-lease.”
“My skin’s not taupe.”
Brittany and Tiffany remained suspiciously quiet.
“Hyperdye for the hair,” Brittany said suddenly. “It’s totally brill. Like who’s gonna believe that she became Hollywood blond overnight? Nobody. But if we hyperdye her, and she changes her hair color like all the time…”
“People will think she’s just releasing her inner cool,” Tiffany completed her twin’s thought. “People are so dumb.”
“Hyperdye?” I asked, trying not to let them push me past the breaking point.
“It’s this totally cool stuff Chloe made for us,” Tiff said.
“It like changes colors when you do this thing to it with another one of Chloe’s gadgetmathingies.”
I groaned inwardly, because obviously that incomprehensible (not to mention ungrammatical) sentence cleared everything up. Like, totally.
“So my hair could be blue one day and red the next?” If I was going to have to dye my hair anyway, a punk look was the most I could hope for.
“Blue?”
“Red?”
The twins spoke with identical, horrified tones.
“Toby, you’re a cheerleader. Cheerleaders do not have blue hair.”
“You hyperdye it. I’ll pick the colors.” I wasn’t entirely sure how hyperdye worked, but it seemed like a good compromise to me.
“Maybe hyperdye isn’t such a great idea,” Brittany said slowly, still twitching in horror at the idea of a varsity cheerleader sporting bright blue hair. “Chloe gets kind of mad when we use it recreationally.”
A six-syllable word. Impressive from a twin.
“Can’t we just leave my hair brown?” I asked. “It’s either that or bright red. Your choice.”
For a moment, the twins stared at me, homicide in their little cheerleader eyes, but then, the twin on the left perked up a bit.
“Chocolate brown?” she suggested.
“Or maybe mahogany?”
“Honeysuckle!”
“Ohhh…or we could do mahogany with honeysuckle highlights.”
“Perfect,” they both said at once.
I tried to follow their conversation. “So we’re going with brown, then?”
The two of them stared at me like I was the stupid one. “Were you not listening at all, Toby? We’re going to go with a mahogany base and then add some honeysuckle highlights around your face to bring out those nonexistent cheekbones.”
Tiffany softened her sister’s words a little. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting me on the head like I was a small child. “We’ll hyperdye you before a mission sometime. That way, if you get caught and have to run or something, you can change your hair color like that.” Tiff snapped her fingers, and the sound, sharp as her manicured nails, echoed in my ears.
I glanced around the room nervously. Four walls, no visible door, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t “EXIT, OKAY!” under pressure. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—just me, trapped alone in what looked like the world’s most high-tech salon, with twin fashionistas who had been authorized to administer a Stage Six makeover.
At least I still had my combat boots.
Britt reached up and pushed me into a chair. Immediately, restraints locked down my arms and legs.
“Wha…?”
Without a word, the twins spun the chair around and forced my head into a sink.
“Don’t move,” Brittany advised. “Most of our stuff is kind of…you know…”
“Killer strong? Illegal?” Tiffany suggested.
“Yeah,” Brittany said. “That. Oh, and you should probably wear these sunglasses, too. Are you allergic to avocado?” Without waiting for a response, she slipped the glasses onto my face. I won’t go into the ugly details of what happened next: the dye so potent that the Squad bought it on the black market, the electron wave accelerator that the twins had co-opted to properly blend the highlights with the rest of my hair, the tanning spray that totally got up my nose, and the superstraightening serum that was, and I quote, “completely supposed to be used in some bomb thingy.” They plucked me. They waxed me. They exfoliated the crap out of me.
They put makeup on my face.
Worse, they tried to teach me how to do it and acted like I was completely intellectually delayed when I couldn’t explain the difference between lip liner, lipstick, and lip gloss. When they sat me back up and turned my chair to face a wall-length mirror, I prepared myself for the worst. What I got was absolutely shocking.
I looked just like them. All of them. Perfect tan. Perfect nails. Silky soft skin, gloriously shiny and thick hair, brushed to perfection. Big, pouty lips, and huge doe-like eyes, which they’d actually left my original chocolatey brown. I still looked like me. Sort of. It was just like me, cheerlead-o-fied.
You know those movies I was talking about earlier, the ones where the popular crowd makes over the dorky, shy girl, and even though she’s quirky and zany and a real individual, she can’t help but become enamored with her new look, because deep down, she’s always wanted to be pretty?
This is not one of those movies.
“What the hell did you do to me?” I asked, horrified. “Do you know what I look like?”
Brittany smiled. “A cheerleader?”
“I look like Barbie’s brown-haired friend! I look like something out of a commercial for capri pants, and I don’t even know what capri pants are.” I raged on, but even raging, the mirror let me know that I looked what most of the school would have termed fabulous. “I look,” I spat out, “like the brunette love child of Mandy Moore and Marcia Brady. If they made a TV movie of my life right now, do you know who they’d cast to play me? Do you?” I couldn’t say the name out loud. I despised tween queen actresses with the passion of a thousand fiery burning suns, and now, one of them was going to be starring in Toby: The Untold Story.
