The Cheerleaders of Doom

Maddie sat across from McKe

“T 2 the H!” she cried. “You better let me out of here!”

“Pufferfish, what did she say?” Maddie asked.

A girl with superkinky blonde hair stepped forward and opened a laptop. “Just a second. According to my search, she’s a talking in text messages. ‘T 2 the H’ means, ‘Talk to the hand’.”

“OMGYG2BK!”

“OMGYG2BK?” Maddie asked.

Her friend typed furiously. “Um, just a second. That means ‘Oh, my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding.’” The girl shook her head. “It’s like she speaks another language.”

“Yeah, it’s called a

“LDO!” McKe

“‘Like duh, obviously,’” the frizzy blonde translated.

“I was on homecoming court. I’m a cheerleader. I have nine thousand Facebook friends and twelve thousand My space friends. I’m topping out at seventeen thousand Twitter followers. Everyone knows me! IMDB!”

The blonde girl started typing. “That means, ‘I’m da bomb.’”

“Gerdie, let’s—”

“Who? My name’s not Gerdie, idiot!”

“We don’t need to play this game any longer,” Maddie said.

“I hope your parents have great lawyers, ’cause my dad is a crazy great lawyer and he’s going to sue you for every pe

“‘Hate to be you,’” the blonde girl translated.

“Please calm down, Gerdie,” the newbie said.

McKe

Another figure blocked her way. He was cute, with blue eyes and wavy blond hair. But when he smiled—ugh! She remembered him from her abduction—he had a mouth full of metal. Now that he was up close she could see his braces were moving around as if they were alive. They spilled out from between his lips and transformed into huge spindly spider legs and lifted the boy off the ground. McKe

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Maddie said.

“Help! Help!”

“Gluestick, Flinch?”

A roly-poly boy ran up the side of the wall, then across the ceiling, then down the other side to block her way. Frantically, she scurried to another side of the room, but a jittery Latino kid with a crazy look on his face was blocking that way, too. She turned again only to find him standing there as well. How did he move so fast?

McKe

“I am so posting this!” she snarled.

But she never got a chance. Maddie jumped out of her chair, snatched the phone, and then, much to McKe

“OMG! You are in big trouble, you freaks!” she shrieked.

“Gerdie—”

“Who is Gerdie?”

“You! You are Gerdie Baker,” the girl with the computer said as she held up the bridge device. “And this machine you invented is very dangerous. You’re causing all kinds of damage to the national power grid, not to mention all the strange stuff that’s getting yanked into our universe.”

“UGTBK!”

The girl went back to her laptop. “‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

“I didn’t invent this machine!” McKe

McKe

“So Tiffany gave you this?” the chubby one asked. “She invented it?”

“I don’t know who invented it, but I highly doubt it was Tiffany. She’s as dumb as a box of rocks. I swear her mom sets her clothes out in the morning and has to remind her which are pants and which are tops. Please don’t tell her I said that. She can be very mean. SWMBO.”

The blonde typed furiously. “‘She who must be obeyed.’”

“All I know is it showed up about three weeks ago,” McKe

“Well, you’ve got to get back to the squad,” Flinch said to Matilda. “Figure out which of the other girls brought it in.”

Matilda shook her head. “This mission is over. We have the device. Let’s just toss Texting Tina in some cell for a while until this blows over.”

“A cell? Like a jail? I’d never make it. They only let prisoners go online a half hour a week!”

Just then, a man entered the room. He was a hottie, even though he was totally old. McKe

“I’m afraid this mission is far from over, Wheezer. Just because we have this bridge device doesn’t mean Gerdie won’t build another one. We have to find her so she can help us stop the tears in the universe. They’re popping up all over the place now. Agents are telling us they’ve found a nuclear sub sitting in the middle of that park you girls were in last night. It’s not one of ours—the crew was made up of angry beavers.”

“I have always suspected the beavers would rise up against us,” Jackson said, laughing.