by Kieran Scott
The phone rang and I dove for it. I had already called Jordan to tell her the good news about the squad and I knew it would only take her five minutes to call everyone I knew. This had to be one of the crew calling to congratulate me.
“Hello?”
“Dude! Wassup?”
It was Gabe.
“First of all, I’m not a dude. Secondly, ‘wassup’ was over, like, five years ago,” I said, sitting down on my bed.
“You said ‘like’! Twenty-five cents!” Gabe announced.
“Whatev,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”
“I just called to tell you I’m coming home for a few days to chill with my li’l sis.”
“You mean you heard Mom and Dad are going to Vegas and you want to abuse our pool with your friends,” I shot back.
“You know me far too well,” Gabe said. “You don’t mind if me and a couple of the guys crash, do ya?”
“No, as long as it’s just a couple of guys. You are not turning our new house into party central,” I said.
“Annisa! You hurt me! I would never—”
“Do I need to start listing your many offenses? Okay, how about the weekend Mom and Dad were in Boston and you had all those people over and my stereo mysteriously disappeared? Or when you were in tenth grade and you wanted the seniors to think you were cool, so you invited the entire school over and the back deck collapsed. Need I go on?”
“Don’t you realize I’ve grown?” Gabe lamented.
“Please. It doesn’t matter what personality you adopt, there’s always a party animal lurking underneath,” I said. “The difference is, I have to live in this house. You destroy it and I suffer the consequences.”
“Okay, killjoy. No parties!” Gabe said.
“You swear?”
“I swear!”
“Great! Then I’d love to have you,” I said brightly.
I hung up the phone and lay back on the bed, staring up at the stucco swirls in my ceiling. It would actually be kind of nice to have Gabe around for a few days. He has this way of making everything fun, except, of course, in those moments he feels the inexplicable need to torture me. But he was bringing home friends. And whomever he was hanging out with these days, I was sure they were beyond hot. Somehow they always are.
The phone rang again and I sat up straight and grabbed it. This time, it was Mindy. My first phone call from a new Florida friend. I had to write this down in my journal. October 15, 8:46 PM. I officially reclaim my blip on the social radar.
“Are you freaking out? I’m freaking out!” she said.
“Why are you freaking out?” I asked.
“There are so many cheers! And we don’t even know the pyramid yet!” Mindy said. “Sage just told me we’re going to have a practice during third period to learn it. What if I mess it up?”
“Hey, if anyone’s gonna mess it up, it’ll be me,” I told her, attempting to calm her.
“That’s true,” she said.
I blinked. “Hey!”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean that,” Mindy said. “Okay, I need more practice. See ya.”
“Yeah. Bye.”
I sat there for a moment, my heart pounding. Tomorrow the entire student body and all the teachers and administrators were going to be watching us cheer. It would be the first time most of them laid eyes on me. If I did screw up, it was going to be the first impression to end all first impressions.
I stood up shakily and returned to the mirror. More practice seemed like a good idea.
The next morning, I could barely move. Every muscle in my body ached thanks to Coach Holmes’ insane workouts and all the new stunts I’d learned. Plus, I could barely keep my eyes open after practicing half the night. I dragged myself up to school in my Sand Dune High cheerleading uniform with clashing cheerleading sneakers, wondering how I was even going to be able to lift my arms for the pep rally. Then, when I walked in the door, the weirdest thing happened—some guy said hi to me. He just walked by and said “Hi” and kept walking like he’d known me my entire life. I had never set eyes on him before.
Must’ve been a mistake, I thought.
Oh, yeah. He mistook you for one of the other hundreds of short brunettes walking around the school.
Then a pair of younger girls said hi to me as well. And a couple of guys in soccer jackets walked by me and said, “Whaddup, Sand Dune!” They turned and walked backward until I lifted my hand (ouch) and waved. I heard that a few more times on my way to homeroom: “Whaddup, Sand Dune!” Apparently it was some kind of battle cry.
Each time someone acknowledged my existence, I felt my chin rise a little higher. It was like now that they saw me in their uniform, I was suddenly one of them. “Dress the part, be the part.” That was what my drama teacher Mr. Creech used to say.
Bethany lost what little color she had when she saw me in homeroom, but she still spoke to me, which was a good sign. Sage wouldn’t even look in my direction. I just hoped she and the rest of the squad would keep an eye on me later when I was flying over their heads.
The third-period practice got me out of Spanish class, which was good because we were conjugating irregular verbs that I had never even heard of. The practice went fairly well. Even though I was aching, once I stretched out and started moving, the pain wasn’t so bad. I didn’t forget any of the words to any of the cheers, and if I missed moves, I was able to fudge them over well enough to escape notice.
In a few weeks you’re going to know all this backward and forward, I told myself whenever I started to sweat. All you gotta do is get through today.
The pyramid was the toughest part. I was going up in a liberty on the left side with Mindy, Chandra and Autumn basing. My right foot was supposed to land on the shoulder of this girl Kimberly, who was going up in a double-base stand in the middle. On the other side of the pyramid, Phoebe was mirroring me with her left foot landing on Kimberly’s other shoulder. Until that day I had never done a liberty in my life, so I lost my balance the first couple of times. Chandra drew actual blood from her tongue from biting it, but I was grateful for her efforts. The last thing I needed was another public bashing. Mercifully, by the end of practice, I had nailed the stunt at least ten times.
“Not bad,” Chandra said reluctantly. “For a spaz.”
I beamed. That was high praise from a member of this team.
My post-practice high diminished that afternoon when Mr. Loreng slapped us with a pop quiz the moment we walked through the door. Thanks to practice, tryouts and shopping with Mom, I hadn’t cracked a book all week and I was already behind because of the school switch. I ended up leaving half the answers blank, sweating in desperate silence while everyone else’s pencils scratched around me.
“How’d you do?” Daniel asked me as we walked out of the room.
“Can you say remedial math?” I joked, trying to lighten the dread in my heart.
“Cheer up,” he said, knocking my arm with his shoulder. “It’s practically your job now.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“I told you you’d make the squad. You’re gonna hafta learn to trust me, Jersey.”
My heart flopped around like a flounder on the beach and I smiled. There was definite sizzle in the air between us. He had to feel it too. But of course that was when Sage caught up with us and pulled him away. So much for that.
We didn’t have to change for gym because the period was shortened, so Mindy and I got to spend the whole forty minutes running through the routine. By the time the bell rang and people started to file into the gym, I was nervous, but not paralyzed.
“You ready for this?” Whitney asked me as the cheerleaders gathered.
“Yeah. I think I am,” I said with confidence.
As the pep rally started, the entire squad was sitting at the foot of the bleachers, legs crooked under us, poms on our laps. It was perfect for me because, while the football coach, Coach Turcott, announced the starting lineup of the football team, and the thousand o
r so students behind me broke the sound barrier with their cheers, I wasn’t able to see any of them. Their sheer volume was intimidating enough.
With each name called, another guy descended from the bleachers and joined the line of players against the far wall. There were twice as many guys as my old team and most of them were twice as big as our biggest linebacker. I had a feeling these guys actually won games. What would it be like to cheer for a team that scored touchdowns?
“Let’s have one last hand for your Fighting Crabs!” Coach Turcott shouted.
Bobby Goow—Bethany’s brother and Tara’s boyfriend, who since tryouts I’d mentally renamed Lumberjack Bob—exploded out of the line, thrusting his fists in the air and shouting, baiting the crowd. The entire place went wild. The rest of the team followed him, and before I knew it, they were piling on top of one another in the middle of the gym floor. I found myself giggling and saw that the rest of the squad was too. Why is it that guys being guys is just so darn swoon-worthy?
As the pile grew, the place went psychotic. Girls screamed. Guys lost their voices. By the time the mess was finally broken up, the crowd was like a thousand pit bulls straining at the bit. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that school spirit was a healthy thing.
“And now, your Sand Dune High School varsity cheerleaders!”
Mindy grabbed my hand and pulled me up. Whether I was ready to face the screaming throngs or not, it was time. We all ran out to the center of the court, cheering and shaking our poms in the air. When I took my position, it hit me. The wall of expectant faces. And suddenly I knew. I knew like you know you flunked a quiz the second you hand it in. Like when you suddenly realize you missed one of the lines on a standardized test and answered every single question one line too early.
Something was going to go wrong.
“Ready!” Tara shouted.
“Okay!”
“Fighting Crabs up in the stands, let’s—hear you—shout!
Fighting Crabs up in the stands, let’s—hear you—now!
All you fans yell ‘Go’!”
“GO!”
The lighting fixtures shook above our heads.
“All you fans yell ‘Crabs’!”
“CRABS!”
The floor actually vibrated.
“GO!”
“CRABS!”
“GO!”
“CRABS!”
“GO!”
“CRABS!”
“LET’S GO, CRABS!”
Everyone in the bleachers freaked out, cheering and clapping. “Whaddup, Sand Dune!” a bunch of senior guys yelled in unison, cracking everyone up.
Back home, we would have been facing halfhearted clapping and jeers. This was actually kind of nice. And I hadn’t messed up once. I found myself starting to relax as we launched into the hello cheer.
“We’ve got the power!”
“To take control!”
“To rock this joint!”
“To go for gold!”
“We welcome you!”
“To our school!”
Here, we started to climb. I was hopped up on adrenaline. Everything was coming together . . .
“Take it from us!”
“Sand Dune rules!”
My liberty went up perfectly on Sand. But on Dune? Well, on Dune the whole thing went into the crapper.
Kimberly was half a second late going up in the center. I was so focused on the crowd that I missed it, and when my foot came down on her shoulder, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Instead, my sneaker caught the edge of her sleeve, scraped down the side of her arm and landed nowhere.
My stomach left the building. My arms flailed. I think I may have grabbed someone’s ponytail on the way down. Somehow my spotters caught me before I could crack my head open. It was all a horrifying, mortifying, bone-jarring blur. All I know for sure is that by the time the word rules had finished reverberating off the walls, one side of the pyramid was a tangled blue, yellow and white mass of limbs.
Please don’t let anything be broken on anyone, please don’t let anything be broken on anyone, I thought as I removed a foot from my face.
The entire crowd was belly laughing. As I sat up, I saw Bethany front and center, giggling. Some scrawny kid with a camera circled us, blinding me with his flash.
“Get up! Get up!” Autumn yanked me to my feet and we all jumped up and down, cheering and yelling “Go, Sand Dune!” like nothing had happened. As we jogged back to the bleachers, I managed to glance at Tara. Her nose was not, in fact, broken again. But from the look on her face, she was seriously considering breaking mine.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod, omigod,” I said over and over and over again.
“It’s okay,” Mindy said, putting her hand on my back.
“Oh, it is so not okay,” Tara said from her seat a few cheerleaders away.
Eeesh.
As soon as the pep rally was over, Tara pulled me aside. I took a deep breath and looked her in the eye. I felt awful, but everyone was okay. And it wasn’t like no one had ever messed up a pyramid before. Right?
“Look, Goblonski, I’ve thought this over from every angle, and there’s nothing I can do. It’s two weeks to regionals and I need sixteen cheerleaders, so apparently I’m stuck with you.”
“Tara, I—”
“But you had better deal with your inner klutz and do it fast,” she said. “Because I am not going down at that competition. Not this year.”
She walked away and the rest of the squad filed by me, rubbing at sore spots and wincing. My heart sank slowly. I barely even knew these girls and I’d already let them down.
“Come on. Time for practice,” Mindy said, rubbing a crunchy blue-and-yellow pom against my back. I suppose it was supposed to be comforting, but it made me grind my teeth. I watched the hundreds of other kids filing out the doors toward their cars and buses, tasting freedom.
“Yeeha,” I said flatly.
But I made a vow to myself at that very moment. From then on, all I was going to do was practice. I was going to be worthy of the Sand Dune High cheerleading squad. Even if it killed me.
“You know, I think this you-being-a-cheerleader thing could actually turn out to be a positive development,” Bethany told me that evening.
We were sitting out by the pool in my backyard as the sun went down, listening to a punk rock station Bethany had programmed into every memory button on my portable stereo. Bethany was wearing a plain black tank suit and a pair of long denim cutoff shorts with an anarchy symbol painted on the butt. She was even whiter than me.
“Why? Because I nearly sent half of them to the ER today?” I asked. Every time The Big Fall replayed itself in my brain, I had to physically shake my head to keep myself from obsessing.
“No, because this could change the Sand Dune High social structure forever,” Bethany said, sitting up straight.
“Oh, come on,” I scoffed.
“No, I’m totally serious. You could be like Rosa Parks! Or Chrissy Hynde or . . . or Madonna!”
“Rosa Parks is rolling over in her grave right now,” I said, getting up at the sound of the doorbell.
“Rosa Parks isn’t dead.”
“Oh. I knew that.”
I walked through the kitchen and living room to the front door, fully expecting the mailman with one of my dad’s National Geographic packages. Instead, I found Daniel Healy standing on my doorstep, holding some kind of rubber ball and disc contraption that looked like it had been stolen off the set of Star Wars.
“Hey!” he said with a smile.
Suddenly I was hyperaware of my bikini and wondered if it was properly covering all the parts it was supposed to be covering. Had I shaved that morning? Had I shaved in the last week?
“Annisa?”
“Oh, hey! Sorry!” I said. “I just . . . I came from outside to inside and my eyes are . . . you know . . . adjusting, so—”
Just shut up and smile.
“Hi,” I said. I smiled. Better.
“Think fast,” Daniel said.
And suddenly the black-and-silver Star Wars relic was flying at my face. I reached up and grabbed it from the air before it could rearrange my face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s for you.”
“Uh . . . thanks, I think,” I said, tipping it back and forth in front of me.
“It’s a pogo ball,” Daniel told me like it was the most obvious thing in the world. He grabbed it back out of my hands and put it on the ground. From that vantage point it looked like Saturn, except it had one solid disk around the ball instead of a bunch of skinny rings. Daniel placed his feet on the disk, on either side of the ball, holding his arms out for balance. “See? You do this,” he said. And then he started to bounce up and down.
Daniel Healy, the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life, was on my front walk in his football jersey, bouncing up and down like a five-year-old, his dark blond hair flopping and flapping all over the place. From the grin on his face he was having the time of his life.
“It’s for balance and coordination,” he told me, still bouncing.
He jumped off the ball, landed right in front of me and picked the thing up again.
“See, Sage told me the pyramid collapse today was all your fault,” he said in a tone that told me a) he didn’t care and b) he thought it was silly that she’d told him at all.
“That was nice of her,” I said, laughing.
“Yeah, I thought so too,” he shot back, smiling a smile of private understanding.
Sigh. It was like we were soul mates locked in an epic struggle against the evil and selfish Wicked Witch of the West. Except, of course, he was dating said Witch.
“Anyway, I figured the pogo ball might help,” he said, holding it out to me again. I took it and held it to my chest. Could he be any sweeter? “And a word of advice,” he said, taking a few steps back down the front walk. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone messes up once in a while.”
“Hey!” I shouted after him when he reached the mailbox. He turned and looked at me. “Does Daniel Healy ever mess up?”