by Dana Burkey
Nodding, I simply began taking instructions from Tonya as she directed me to stand where Leanne had been. With the help of Kelsee, Connor, and Matthew, I was up in the air in no time, and when I came down I was always caught quickly and without elbowing anyone in the head. I found myself really nervous stunting with Matthew and Connor since I was still wearing a lot less clothing than I was used to. It was hard not to notice that every time I came down, whether on purpose or as a fall, they were catching me and touching my bare skin. My cheeks were likely bright red by the time we took our first water break, and not just from the hard work I was undertaking.
“You’re doing really awesome,” Kelsee assured me as I sat with her and drank from my TNT water bottle.
“I feel like I’m falling more than staying up though,” I commented, pushing a stray strand of hair out of my face. “I don’t think I’ve seen Leanne even wobble, let alone fall.”
“She’s also been cheering a lot longer than you,” Kelsee assured me. “She started at the gym a few years ago, but cheered at a different gym before that. And she’s also 16, so has had a lot more air time over the years.”
“How long have you been cheering?” I asked, thankful to have someone to chat with despite neither Lexi or Halley being at the gym.
“I’ve been on teams here at TNT since I was 5,” she explained. “I’ve been on Nitro for 2 years.”
“Nitro?” I echoed back to her.
“That’s the squad we’re all on,” Kelsee said simply. “Anyone you see wearing teal is on the team. Just like everyone that wears red is on your squad.”
It felt weird to have her describe the team I had been practicing as my squad. Sure, I had been cheering with them for a week, but it was hard to call it home. I was still in it for the cat, and not much more. Learning the tumbling and stunting was fun, but with only Halley and Lexi taking the time to really get to know me so far, it felt less like a team and more like a group of girls that happened to dress alike as we sweated together twice a week.
“You ladies ready to try again?” Connor asked walking over to Kelsee and myself.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I nodded.
As Kelsee stood up, Connor reached down and took my hand to help me up. He pulled me to my feet then held onto my hand for an extra second before turning and walking back to the mat. I followed him, and noticed Leanne shooting me a glare. I wasn’t sure what I had done to make her mad. Considering her less than friendly welcome when she first me, I tried not to let it get to me. Instead, I look a deep breath and tried to get ready to get lifted and tossed once again.
“What happened to your leg?” Kyle asked me as we sat in my basement Monday evening. We had a pile of Legos laid out on the floor, and the start of a massive building was in the works already.
“I fell Saturday,” I said simply, trying not to make a big deal about the large bruise covering the side of my left leg just above my knee.
“Really?” Peter asked, stopping his building to look right at me. “And what were you doing when you fell?”
“Stuff,” I shrugged, focusing on a piece as if it was the most important thing I had ever seen. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It looks like a big deal,” Kyle replied, oblivious to the fact I was trying to move on from the topic. “You don’t bruise too easy so you had to have fallen onto like a massive rock or something, right?”
“Or something,” Peter added, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at me.
“What?” I asked him, dropping the Legos in my hand.
“Why won’t you just tell us what happened?” he challenged me.
“Why does it matter what I was doing?” I replied in a similar tone. “Why do you need to know?”
“I don’t need to know,” he shrugged. “I just think it’s interesting that you’re keeping secrets from your best friends.”
“You’re keeping secrets from us?” Kyle asked, finally catching on to the seriousness of the discussion brewing between Peter and myself.
I gritted my teeth, staring at Peter in my best imitation of the looks Leanne was so good at. This was the second time he was bringing up cheer since he saw my bag. The first time was when we were swimming Friday afternoon. It had been easy enough then to dismiss his questions about where I was learning all the new diving board tricks. I simply had to start a game of Marco Polo as a distraction, then avoided doing the moves in front of Peter or Kyle for the rest of the day. This time, however, I couldn’t just stop what I was doing to end the questioning. My bruise was blue and purple and drastically stood out against my skin, despite my end of summer tan. It was like a beacon, just begging Peter and Kyle to ask me about cheer.
“I’m not keeping secrets,” I finally said. “I just don’t think it’s a big deal.”
“Don’t think what’s a big deal?” Peter encouraged. “The fact that you have a bruise? Or the fact that you turned into a super girly girl?”
“I’m not a girly girl,” I replied, shocked at his accusation. “I’m still the same Max as before, I’m just trying a new sport.”
“What sport?” Kyle asked, both confused and interested.
“Cheerleading is not a sport,” Peter corrected me with a laugh.
“Cheerleading?”
“It is a sport,” I replied to Peter, ignoring Kyle’s question. “There’s a lot of stretching and conditioning and hard stuff that goes into cheerleading. The people at the gym are stronger than some athletes I’ve seen on any team I’ve been on before.”
“Yeah right.” Peter was still laughing, clearly thinking my frustration at him was funny. “If you have to wear booty shorts and glitter and big girly bows to do something, then it’s not really a sport.”
It took everything in my power not to punch Peter in that moment, but I knew my dad would most likely hear about it. And that could jeopardize a lot, including my future kitty. “You don’t know anything!” I said to Peter instead, instantly annoyed that it was the best thing I could come up with at the time.
“You’re really a cheerleader?” Kyle asked, staring at me in confusion.
“Yes,” I said more harshly than I meant to. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Yes, Kyle. I have been training at a cheer gym the last week or so and that’s where I got this bruise.”
“How did you get a bruise like that in cheerleading?” he asked me with an adorable tilt of his head.
“It’s not normal cheerleading,” I began, focusing on Kyle in an attempt to ignore the looks Peter was sending my way. “I’m a flier right now, so I get tossed up in the air and then get caught again after I do some tricks like spinning around or jumping.”
“Did someone drop you?” Kyle asked, a worried expression growing on his face.
“No, my stunt team caught me,” I quickly assured him. “I just didn’t spin around the whole way and kind of bumped my leg into Matthew’s shoulder on my way down,”
“You cheer with boys?” Peter asked suddenly.
“Did it hurt?” Kyle spoke as if not hearing his brother's question.
“It only hurt a little,” I lied. It hurt a lot. In fact, after that I had sat with ice on and off my leg for all of the next team’s practice before I biked home.
“Oh good!” Kyle smiled.
With that he went back to building. I was surprised that he was convinced and moved on so quickly, but was also glad the spotlight was off of me for at least a moment. I was about to go back to building myself, when I realized that Peter was still looking at me with a serious look on his face.
“What?” I asked, an edge creeping back into my voice.
“So there are guys on your team and you get thrown in the air?” When I paused to think exactly how to answer, he continued. “What kind of cheerleading are you doing Max?”
Ten minutes later, we were pulling up yet another cheer video on my phone. I didn’t use my phone for much, not really caring about social media or texting with anyone but Peter. And, since it was summe
r and Peter was usually at my house, I didn’t have to worry about staying in contacting with anyone really. But, after trying to tell Peter about the squads at TNT, I gave up and pulled up the video my dad had first shown me.
“You do that at the gym?” Kyle had asked in shock while Peter just stared at the screen with a relatively bored expression.
“Not that exactly,” I explained quickly. “I can only do some of the stuff on the video, but eventually I might be able to do the really hard stuff.”
Knowing that seeing it would be easier than trying to explain it, I pulled up a video of TNT’s Blast squad from the year before. It was a YouTube video someone had posted from a practice one day, and I quickly spotted both Halley and Lexi in the video. I also thought I saw Anna, but it was hard to be sure since everyone had their hair done fancy and were wearing their cheer uniforms instead of the practice ones I was getting used to. I pointed them out to the boys, but they didn’t seem all that interested in the basic stunts compared to the small peek they had of harder cheerleading in the gym’s intro video.
“This is the move I fell doing,” I told them a few minutes later as we watched a video of Nitro from a big competition. I rewound a few seconds and showed it to them again before we watched the rest of the video. “I can’t get my body to spin around as fast as she did. I’m going to work on it again at some point, but since my team can’t do that kind of move at our level it’s not super important for me to land it right away.”
“So this is really what you do?” Peter asked me, his face a completely different display of emotions than it was when we first started talking about cheer.
“Yes,” I nodded slowly. “I mean, just the stuff that the red team did, but eventually I should be able to do some of the other stuff too I guess.”
There was a pause then. Peter watched the video playing on my phone. The college team in the video kept throwing girls up and then they would catch them after the girls did backflips and other twists in the air. It was hard to imagine that I would be able to do something quite that hard ever, especially if I stopped cheering after another week, but it was still fun to show Peter all of it.
“I’m sorry,” Peter finally said.
“What? Why?”
“I saw the glitter and the bow and assumed you were jumping around cheering for football or whatever,” he explained. “I thought you were becoming some girly girl and that you totally changed just to fit in with people like the girls at the trampoline park. But this is kind of cool.”
“Uh, thanks,” I replied, not really sure what else to say.
Peter, Kyle, and I watched a few more videos then went back to our building project. Once we did it gave me some time to think. What Peter said was true-I was doing something pretty cool. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that cheer was the only thing I had in common with the girls I was meeting so far. I wasn’t changing who I was and becoming a girly girl or anything. But when Peter pointed out the fact that I wasn’t like the other cheerleaders, it made me realize how true it was. If it wasn’t for my practice uniform and my ability to do a back handspring, I wouldn’t fit in with the girls at the gym at all. The thought made me both happy and sad at the same time. I was happy I wasn’t changing who I was to fit in, but it made me sad to realize I would never really fit in with them at all. Even Halley and Lexi weren’t the type of girls I would normally hang out with. Were they really people I could get to know and call friends? Or were they just nice to me since I was able to do cool tricks and could fill an open spot on their team? I tried to focus on the Lego city we were building, but couldn’t seem to shake the worries out of my mind.
After Peter’s comments Monday night, I found the idea of going back to the cheer gym less and less exciting. Realizing that I would never fit in with the people there, even if I thought trying the new skills and tricks was fun, made me want to quit before I got any more interested in it. It made tumbling class and practice hard on Tuesday. My thoughts had me so confused and frustrated I found the moves more difficult than I was used to, as if concentrating on my body position like Greg or the other coaches told me to was suddenly next to impossible.
“Are you feeling okay?” Lexi asked me after practice as we were changing our shoes. I was hoping to make it out of the gym before anyone tried to figure out what was going on, and her question proved my luck had run out.
“Just distracted today,” I shrugged. “I have a lot on my mind.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” she offered, a look of concern on her face.
“Not really,” I said, feeling a little bad. Lexi was super nice, and part of me wanted to be friends with her and let her know what was bothering me. But, there was a bigger part of me that knew she would likely never understand how I was feeling about the gym.
“Okay. So are you excited about this weekend?” When her change in subject clearly confused me she continued. “This weekend is camp.”
“Like summer camp?” I asked, remembering a camp near where I grew up in Oregon.
“No, it’s cheer camp,” Lexi grinned, clearly looking forward to the event. “All the teams spend the weekend at the gym so we can work on cleaning up our routines and doing some fun games! Then on that Sunday when we perform for our families at the showcase.”
I nodded and replied with a weak, “Oh yeah,” and prayed it would convince Lexi that I knew what she was talking about. Thankfully between my response along with the arrival of her brother to pick her up, I was off the hook. Once I was done changing my shoes and slipped my basketball shorts on over my practice uniform, I headed outside and biked the short ride home. Using my phone yet again to look up cheerleading related things, I logged onto the TNT cheer website as soon as I was inside the house, and immediately went to my dad for help.
“I don’t have to go to this camp thing, right?” I asked, hopping up to sit on the kitchen counter while my dad finished cooking dinner.
“How was cheer?” he asked, focused on slicing vegetable.
“Dad,” I said with a sigh. “Did you know about camp?”
“I forgot to pick up carrots yesterday, but I don’t think it’s going to make a big difference,” he said, again focusing on dinner.
“Dad, please,” I tried again, my voice taking on a whiny tone that was annoying even to myself.
With a long exhale of breath, my dad finally turned to face me. Thankfully dinner was still in the prepping stages, so he leaned against the counter and looked at me for a long minute before finally deciding to talk. It was likely that he took that time to decide just how to phrase the words I knew were coming.
“Yes, I knew about camp,” he finally admitted. “And before you even ask, you have to go.”
“But Dad-,” I started, only to get cut off.
“Max, you agreed to two weeks,” he reminded me. “And technically that won’t be up until Saturday. But camp will only be half over and everyone is expected to stay all weekend, so you have to stay until Sunday for the showcase.”
“That’s not fair,” I pouted.
“You mean to tell me you don’t like cheer so far?” he challenged.
“The tricks are fun,” I said before I thought better of it.
“Then what’s the problem with going to camp?”
“I don’t fit in Dad.” When he didn’t immediately reply I continued. “I’m not into glitter and bows and all the stuff the girls at the gym like.”
He seemed to consider it for a minute, as if my words were making sense. I could feel a smile growing on my face instantly. Things were going my way. Without too much work my dad was seeing that quitting the team was a good idea, and it might not only get me out of camp, I hoped it would get me out of the rest of the week at cheer.
“How about this,” he finally said. “You go to camp. You go the whole weekend. And when the weekend is over, if you still don’t feel like you fit in, not only will you get a cat but you never have to go back to the gym at all, even though I
paid for the whole season.”
“You paid for the whole season already?” I asked in both shock and horror.
“Of course,” his tone was even, but I had a feeling he was rather proud of this guilt trip. “I had to pay for the whole season so the outfit, shoes and classes would all be covered.”
“Was it a lot?” I asked, having a feeling I already knew the answer.
“It was worth it to see you follow in the footsteps of your mother,” he said simply.
I let out a sigh then and hopped off of the counter. I got a drink of water, realizing then that I was still pretty thirsty from practice. I swallowed down all of that water, then filled it up again and took a few sips. It gave me a little more time to think through what my dad had just said, as well as helping me calm down while thinking about being trapped in the gym for a weekend before having to perform in front of a bunch of people.
“I’ll go to camp,” I finally said with a sigh. “But I’m not making any promises past that. The girls at the gym are nothing like me, and I don’t feel like I fit in at all.”
“As long as you give camp a try, I’ll be happy,” my dad said, reaching out and pulling me into a hug. I pretended to resist for a minute, but then gave into it as I always did.
“So,” I said as I finally pulled away from the long hug. “I looked it up the other day and vets say it’s better to get two cats so they can have someone to play with when you're not home.”
“Is that so?” He asked, going back to vegetable prep.
“Yup,” I nodded. “It’s science. So we better get two cats. You know, so they don’t get sad when summer’s over and I go back to school and all that.”
“Two weeks for two cats?” He paused. “I guess so, but you’re on litter box patrol for good.”
“Deal,” I grinned, glad I wouldn’t have to decide between the two names I had picked out. “When can we go pick them out?”
“How about after the showcase on Sunday?” my dad suggested.