The Cheerleaders of Doom

by Michael Buckley

  d. BITE THE DOG BACK (10 POINTS)

  ______________

  2. A STRANGER SMILES AT YOU. WHAT DO YOU DO?

  a. RUN TO YOUR SECRET PLACE WHERE NO ONE CAN SEE YOU (7 POINTS)

  b. SMILE BACK (1 POINT)

  c. SHAKE YOUR FISTS AND CHASE HIM THROUGH THE STREETS (9 POINTS)

  d. REMIND HIM THAT BARING HIS TEETH IS A SIGN OF AGGRESSION IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM—THEN ATTACK! (10 POINTS)

  ______________

  3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO WATCH ON TV?

  a. DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT RUTHLESS DICTATORS (7 POINTS)

  b. STATIC (7 POINTS)

  c. I DON’T OWN A TV. “THEY” CAN SEE ME THROUGH IT. (10 POINTS)

  d. I HAD A TV. I HIT IT WITH A BAT. NOW IT DOESN’T WORK. (10 POINTS)

  ______________

  4. IF YOU HAD A BILLION DOLLARS, WHAT WOULD YOU SPEND IT ON?

  a. DEATH RAY (10 POINTS)

  b. SECRET FORTRESS (5 POINTS)

  c. ARMY OF GOONS (7 POINTS)

  d. ARMY OF UNICORNS WITH HORNS THAT SHOOT FIRE (TRICK QUESTION!—WHO WOULDN’T WANT AN ARMY OF UNICORNS WITH HORNS THAT SHOOT FIRE?)

  ______________

  5. CONFESS SOMETHING THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT YOU.

  a. I ATTEND A SCHOOL FOR WIZARDS (10 POINTS)

  b. I DATE A VAMPIRE (10 POINTS)

  c. I’M THE CHILD OF A GREEK GOD (10 POINTS)

  d. I’M A DETECTIVE WHO INVESTIGATES CRIMES COMMITTED BY FAIRY-TALE CHARACTERS (10 POINTS)

  OK, LET’S HEAR THAT NUMBER.

  GREAT GOOGLY-MOOGLY! I DIDN’T KNOW NUMBERS WENT THAT HIGH! EXCUSE ME WHILE I BACK AWAY FROM YOU … SLOWLY.

  The Hyena dashed into the hallway, heart racing, and slammed the door behind her.

  “I told you it wasn’t safe to go in there unarmed,” Jackson said.

  The Hyena gingerly touched the red welt around her eye. “No one told me she was such a pit bull. I fought a rabid tiger with a Wiffle ball bat once, but it was a kitten compared to her.”

  “Wheezer’s not happy about this mission,” Duncan said.

  There was a terrible crash from behind the training room door.

  “Well, she needs to grow up. She’s a secret agent and this is her job. What’s the big deal about a little exfoliating and a hot-oil treatment?”

  “No one wants to hear that they could be pretty if they just tried. It’s insulting,” Ruby explained.

  “Listen, her hair looks like a Swiffer sheet in need of a change. Her skin is sandpaper. She’s got one eyebrow, and her clothes look like a pile of dirty laundry.”

  “Wheezer looks like that because she wants to,” Flinch said.

  “Yeah, she likes being different,” Jackson said. “Cheerleaders tend to look alike. Turning her into one is her worst nightmare.”

  “It doesn’t help that the person doing the makeover is a former beauty queen, either,” Duncan added.

  “I don’t know what you guys think I do all day, but I’m a pretty busy secret agent. I got yanked out of the middle of a mission to do this, and I’ve got to get back within twenty-four hours or risk blowing my cover, putting a lot of my team in danger. So let’s make a few things clear. I’m not here to judge her. If her inner beauty makes her a supermodel, well, zip-a-dee-doo-dah. But in my experience, cheerleaders tend to have a lot of outer beauty. If she wants this mission to succeed, she needs to be pretty, and I’m going to make her that way if I have to knock her out and moisturize her stupid, unconscious face.”

  “What can we do to help?” Ruby asked.

  “Have the paramedics on standby,” the Hyena said as she did a few stretches then ran in place to warm up. When she felt ready, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a set of tweezers. “I’m going back in.”

  “Keep an eye on her teeth,” Flinch warned. “She bites.”

  “We’ve all learned that the hard way,” Duncan said.

  The Hyena took a deep breath and then opened the door.

  “I will never forget you,” Jackson said just as it slammed shut.

  The Hyena stepped into complete darkness. Matilda had broken all the lightbulbs in the room. Smart move. If she couldn’t be seen, she couldn’t be tweezed. Plus, it gave her a combat edge since her eyes had more time to adjust to the low light. Still, as a highly trained former would-be assassin and current spy, the Hyena had learned a few things about finding people who preferred to stay hidden.

  “Wheezer, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. Either way, I’m turning you into a babe.”

  “Bring it on, you beauty pageant has-been,” Wheezer’s voice said from the shadows.

  The Hyena bristled. Has-been? She was Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley Twister Princess two years in a row! She had been first runner-up in the Ms. Tweenager Pageant! She had retired at the top of her game!

  “There’s no need to get personal,” she said, but her words were drowned out by the sound of rocket engines. Suddenly, the room lit up like a fireworks display. Temporarily blinded, the Hyena did not see Wheezer fly over her head, but she felt the kick in the ear. Instinctively, the Hyena leaped out of Wheezer’s path, slamming into a wall. Her ear and her shoulder burned.

  “Count your lucky stars, Secret Agent Barbie,” Matilda shouted as she circled back for another attack. “I could have taken your head off your shoulders.”

  As Matilda boasted, the Hyena studied her for weaknesses. She could see two: anger influenced her decisions, and she left her feet exposed when she flew. The Hyena planned to use them both against her. “You’re pretty confident for a girl who needs a stepping stool to get onto the toilet.”

  Wheezer snarled and made a beeline for her.

  The Hyena had to time her attack just right. If she missed by even the slightest margin, there was a good chance Matilda would give her another black eye. So she locked eyes with Wheezer, and just before impact, she leaned backward like a sapling in the wind and snatched Wheezer by the sneakers.

  “Gotcha!” the Hyena cried in triumph, holding on to Wheezer’s foot as she sailed around the room. “That’s a little trick I learned in gymnastics—something I used in my highly successful career as a beauty pageant contestant and now as a highly successful spy.”

  She hoped she sounded confident, because she was sure she was going to die. Matilda kicked and bounced around the room in an effort to lose her unwanted passenger. The Hyena was rolled and shaken, dipped and dragged. Somehow she found the strength to climb up Wheezer’s body one inch at a time until she was sitting on her back.

  “Set us down!” she demanded.

  “No!!!”

  “Stop being a baby!” the Hyena said. “It’s not going to hurt … that much.”

  “I’m not being a baby! I don’t want to be beautiful.”

  The Hyena knew it was time to do something drastic. She clamped one hand over Wheezer’s eyes. Matilda lost control and the two buzzed around the room as blind as bats. With Matilda vulnerable, the Hyena reached around with her tweezers, grasped a rather thick follicle from between Matilda’s eyes, and yanked. Wheezer bellowed like a branded bull, and the two fell to the hard floor.

  The Hyena had no time to nurse her wounds. She jumped on top of Wheezer and pinned Wheezer’s arms down with her knees. Then the plucking really began.

  “Owww!” Matilda cried. “That hurt!”

  “Stop complaining. You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it. I like my eyebrows the way they are,” Wheezer said.

  “Eyebrows is the plural of eyebrow, but you have one giant one! You can’t be a cheerleader if you look like Bert from Sesame Street. Now hold still,” the Hyena said.

  Matilda frowned. “I want to look like this!”

  “Listen, when this mission is over, you can go back to being a hairy freak, but right now you have to save the world. And to do that, you have to be hot,” the Hyena said, yanking on another stray hair.

  “Owww!” Wheezer screamed.

  Twenty mi
nutes later Matilda’s one eyebrow was two. When the Hyena handed her a mirror to show her the results, Matilda was so exhausted from fighting that she barely registered the change. “Am I done?”

  “Done? Kid, we’ve barely begun!”

  The next seven hours were the most grueling of the Hyena’s life. She dug deep into her encyclopedic knowledge of beauty secrets as well as her extensive background in restraining people. After she strapped Wheezer to a table, she went to work conditioning, shampooing, and detangling. She exfoliated with green teas, algae, and sand. She hosed the girl down with sunless tanners and wrapped her in eucalyptus leaves stuffed with mud and chocolate. She oversaw a laser teeth-whitening process, then covered the girl’s face in avocado and cayenne pepper. Wheezer’s toenails nearly required a belt sander to polish and trim. She was dunked repeatedly into a vat of moisturizer to combat her scaly feet and arms. By the time she was finished, the Hyena was covered in scratches and bruises, a clump of her hair was missing, and one of her front teeth was loose. But Matilda Choi was beautiful from head to toe.

  The next morning at eight o’clock the Hyena limped into Nathan Hale’s gymnasium. She carried a boom box and was wearing black dancing apparel. Matilda was waiting, but she was wearing a shirt that looked as if she had stolen it from the world’s fattest man.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “I’m comfortable.” Matilda scowled.

  “You look like you’re trapped in a parachute. You can’t wear that to learn how to cheer. Your arms and legs need to be loose and free.”

  “They’re free enough to knock you out,” Matilda threatened.

  The two girls stared at one another for a long moment, sizing up who would win in a fistfight. The Hyena had to admit she wasn’t sure. “Fine!” she cried. “Wear what you want! We’ll start with some basic stuff—clapping.”

  “I don’t need a lesson on how to clap.”

  “Oh yeah? Let’s see.”

  The Hyena watched Matilda clap her hands like she had just seen a great movie. It was lazy and erratic. “Ta-da! Next lesson.”

  “That’s nice if you’re cheering on a tractor pull, but that’s not a cheerleading clap. First of all, you have to hold your hands at chin level. Your fingers need to be tight and your hands like blades. You don’t spread your arms farther apart than your shoulders. It’s very specific.”

  Matilda tried it grudgingly. She had the same reaction to everything the Hyena had her do. Wheezer could perform flawless handsprings and backflips, and jump and kick like the best cheerleader ever. But cheerleading requires enthusiasm and a smile, and Matilda didn’t have either. She mumbled a few cheers. Her smile looked like a grimace. Her body language screamed disgust and disdain. After hours of fruitless effort the Hyena threw up her hands. “This is pointless!” she declared.

  “Exactly!” Matilda said.

  “Cheerleaders have a lot of pep and enthusiasm. You act like you’re at a funeral.”

  Matilda snarled. “I’m doing the best I can!”

  “No, you’re not,” the Hyena barked. “You have a lousy attitude. Do you think the National Cheerleading Association is looking for a girl who wipes her nose with her pom-poms? You may think you’re too good for this, but there are a thousand girls out there who really want to be cheerleaders and you’re taking their spot! You can’t even give them the respect of doing a good job.”

  Matilda stomped her foot. “It’s no secret around here that I’m not a girlie-girl. I want a break.”

  “A break? The tryouts are tomorrow, Wheezer! I’m trying to teach you something that takes months to learn, and you only have tonight to learn it. We don’t have time for a break or your bad attitude.”

  The Hyena wanted to clobber Wheezer—really, just kick her in the backside with her boot—but what would it solve? Nothing! She was wasting her time. The NERDS would have to find Gerdie Baker some other way. The Hyena stomped across the gymnasium floor and out into the hall. There she punched a locker and growled.

  “You’re approaching her the wrong way,” Duncan said. He was standing in the doorway and had clearly seen the whole thing.

  “Oh yeah? How would you do it, sticky?”

  “I’d stop trying to get her to adapt to your teaching and start adapting to her way of learning,” Duncan said. “She’s not like a lot of girls. She’s interested in things most girls turn their noses up at. Find a way to connect to those things.”

  “So stop everything and get to know her? We don’t have time.”

  Duncan nodded. “OK, then here are Matilda’s five favorite things in order: professional wrestling, Ultimate Fighting, punching people in the face, punching people in the belly, kicking people.”

  “Cheerleading is not a combat sport!” the Hyena said.

  “Isn’t it? There’s a lot of kicking and punching the air,” Duncan said, then he turned and walked back down the hallway.

  The Hyena watched the chubby boy waddle away and thought about what he had said. Cheering and wrestling were so totally different. She looked up at the clock and sighed. They were running out of time, and she had run out of ideas. She might as well give it a try.

  She pushed open the gymnasium doors and stepped inside. Matilda was lying in the center of the basketball court staring up at the ceiling. “Back for more?”

  The Hyena stood over the girl. She stared down at her for a long time, trying to find the connection that Duncan spoke of—but cheerleading was all kicking and jumping and acrobatics, and wrestling was all …

  “Let’s try the clap one more time,” the Hyena said.

  Matilda got to her feet and rolled her eyes. She put her hands in position but without any excitement.

  “I want you to imagine that there is a bad guy’s head between your hands.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re going to box his ears, which will mess up his balance and make him cry,” the Hyena explained. “You don’t want him to get away, so you have to keep your hands within your shoulders.”

  “That’s good advice,” Matilda said, her eyes suddenly sparkling.

  “Plus, you keep your hands straight and tight. A quick and hard clap could burst his eardrums, which is a plus.”

  “Like this?” Matilda asked, suddenly producing a perfect cheerleading clap.

  The Hyena smiled. “Exactly. It’s very dark and troubling, but it’s perfect. Now let’s try some high kicks.”

  Matilda frowned.

  “You know, like kicking someone in the face.”

  Matilda smiled.

  The two girls went to work. The Hyena taught the tiny spy everything she knew, tailored to Matilda’s violent hobbies. When Matilda imagined she was crushing someone’s head using the T Stunt or corkscrew backflip, she did it with zeal.

  They worked all through the night, and when the sun came up, the Hyena smiled. Matilda was a first-rate cheerleader, even with the bloodlust in her eyes.

  The Hyena walked out of the gymnasium and found Agent Brand standing in the hallway.

  “My work here is done,” she said.

  “Cheerleading?” Molly said skeptically.

  “Cheerleading?” Matilda’s brothers cried in unison.

  “Cheerleading?” Ben said. “You want to be a cheerleader?”

  Matilda nodded.

  Mickey laughed. “That’s hilarious!”

  The other boys laughed uproariously. Marky fell off the sofa and groaned between giggles.

  “Shut up, monkeys,” Molly snapped, then turned her attention back to Ms. Holiday.

  “My daughter wants to stand in front of football teams and wave pom-poms?” Molly asked. Her face was like stone.

  “Um, yes,” Ms. Holiday said. The librarian had come to the Chois to convince Matilda’s parents to allow her to try out for the NCA. Ben Choi seemed thrilled—and slightly bewildered by his daughter’s new look. Molly, however, was intense and suspicious. She had totally stolen Ms. Holiday’s confidence. Lisa felt as if the woman could hear he
r thoughts. “Just to be clear, competitive cheerleaders don’t cheer for athletic teams. It’s a sport unto itself, combining cheering with acrobatics and dance.”

  Ben spoke up, nodding. “Molly, cheering is very popular. I took some photographs of it for a magazine. People love it.”

  “That makes no sense,” Marky said. “If there is no team, who are they cheering for?”

  “Marky, hush!” Molly scolded, then turned back to Ms. Holiday. “That makes no sense.”

  Ms. Holiday turned to Wheezer, who sat on a couch nearby. She hoped the girl might help win over her mother, but Wheezer just shrugged.

  “If she makes the squad, she will go to a cheerleading camp right here in Arlington, where she and other girls her age will prepare for the national competition held on the Mall in D.C. She will be gone for a week, and completely supervised the whole time.”

  “Why does the school care about cheering in the summertime?” Molly said.

  Ms. Holiday blinked. She wasn’t prepared for such a question, even though it was perfectly reasonable. Of course the school didn’t care about cheerleading! What could she say? Mrs. Choi looked as if she could smell a lie from a thousand miles away.

  “They think it will help me come out of my shell,” Matilda said.

  “I’ve seen you come out of your shell. Tell them you should go back in,” Moses said. This made the other boys fall all over themselves once again.

  Molly stood up. “All of you. Go bounce an egg! Out!” she bellowed.

  The boys ran out of the room like they were trying to escape from an erupting volcano. When they were gone, Molly returned to her seat. Her eyes locked on to Ms. Holiday’s once more. The librarian could feel the suspicion radiating off her.

  “It will also teach me some leadership qualities,” Matilda said.

  “Leadership?”

  “Sure!” Ms. Holiday said. “It will teach her how to work in a team.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Matilda does not need to know how to work in a team. She needs to know how to lead one. She comes from a family of very strong women. Her brothers will need her guidance. You saw them! What can silly cheerleading give my daughter to make her brothers fear her?”