by Kieran Scott
“Ms. Gobrowski,” he said, pursing his lips as he handed me my paper.
There was a huge D at the top of the page. A big, fat D. I dropped into a desk and shoved the paper into my bag before Sage could see it and comment. A D. My first grade from a Sand Dune teacher was a D. I’d never gotten a D in my life.
“Good Monday morning, class!” Mr. Loreng said once we were all seated toward the back of the room. “I hope you’re all bright eyed and bushy tailed today, because today we’re going to talk about your quarterly exam!”
Everyone around me groaned and sunk in their seats. Mr. Loreng, who was sporting a fisherman’s cap with actual lures sticking out of it, grinned wickedly.
“The exam will take place in class one week from Tuesday. This gives you exactly eight nights of studying to prepare—”
“But Mr. Loreng, it’s spirit week,” Sage blurted out from the seat behind mine.
I swear I saw little pitchforks appear in Loreng’s eyes. “I hate to be the one to remind you, Miss Barnard, but you’re here to study, not to run around committing acts of hari-kari in the name of football dominance.”
Everyone averted their eyes and shifted in their seats. I got the feeling that no teacher had ever put the perfect Sage in her place before. This was serious.
“Now, if you underachieved on the quiz I just handed back, this is your chance to prove yourself,” Loreng continued.
He handed out sheets filled with topics to study for the exam. They may as well have been written in a foreign language. I hadn’t even heard of some of this stuff. And it said we were going to have to do five proofs. I hate proofs. They’re so annoying and pointless. Why do I have to prove a concept if countless mathematicians and sophomore students before me already have? Isn’t there such a thing as having too much proof?
“We are so dead,” Sage said under her breath.
“Tell me about it,” I replied.
For once, she said nothing snotty in return. We were in this one together.
“Goobooski! God! Where is your head today!?” Tara shouted at me that afternoon.
“We know it’s not up her skirt,” Chandra said, causing a round of scoffs and laughter.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” I said, red from exertion and embarrassment. “I just have brain freeze on this section for some reason.”
We had spent the entire practice working on the routine for regionals, and Mindy and I were playing a serious game of catch-up. While everyone else was tired and sweaty we looked like we’d just run the New York City Marathon. My bod was just not used to this much exercise. Practice had already run over by half an hour and I’d just missed my count for the final lift—again.
“All right, girls, let’s call it a day,” Coach Holmes said, stepping forward. “Everyone’s tired and you’ve worked hard. We’ll get this part down tomorrow.”
“But Coach,” Tara began. “We just have to—”
“I’m going back to my office for a few minutes. Why don’t you lead the squad through cooldown?” Coach Holmes said in a no-nonsense tone.
Tara nodded. “Okay,” she said, though I could tell she was biting her tongue. The second the gym door slammed behind Coach Holmes, Tara reeled on us, her mouth set in a straight line.
“Everyone sit,” she said.
“I thought we were going to cool down,” Felice protested. “You know if you wait too long to stretch after a workout—”
“Felice,” Tara snapped.
“Fine,” Felice said quickly, and she hit the floor with the rest of us.
“Look, I don’t know what all of you are thinking, but we are never going to get through this week with these kinds of attitudes,” Tara began, standing in front of us. “This was the worst practice I’ve ever seen. No one has any energy, we’re not hitting our moves. And it’s not just Goberkowski either.”
I blinked. Had she actually just sort of let me off the hook? Or simply singled me out again?
“No one here looks like they care one way or another how we perform at regionals,” Tara continued. “Now, I know I want to win. What I need to know is whether you guys even want to be bothered competing.”
A tense silence filled the air. A couple of the girls stared at the floor, clenching and unclenching their jaws as if they were debating whether or not to talk back. In the end, no one said a word. Tara was just too intimidating. I was starting to think she wasn’t exactly leadership material. Well, maybe in the Marines.
“Okay, how about this,” Tara said finally, breaking the silence to bits. “Do any of you have any suggestions about what we can do to pull this squad together? Because right now, this is not a team, it’s a joke.”
It came to me out of nowhere. It was like a file cabinet had opened in the back of my mind and started spewing out data I had filed away. My heart fluttered with excitement. It was perfect. It would show them that I knew about their traditions, that I wanted to be part of the team, that I was willing to take risks. And it could be fun too. Wicked fun.
I looked around. No one seemed to be on the verge of saying anything. I raised my hand tentatively.
Tara rolled her eyes. “This should be good.”
Okay, she was getting on my last nerve.
“What is it, Annisa?” Whitney asked, sounding interested.
Tara tilted her head and shifted her feet, surprised that Whitney had gotten my back. But she didn’t say anything. Everyone just waited.
I looked from Mindy to Autumn to Whitney and smiled conspiratorially. “Two words,” I said. “Prank. War.”
The squad jumped up, cheering and shouting. Suddenly I was thrust onto their shoulders and lifted into the air as they all shouted, “Hip, hip, hooray! Three cheers for Annisa!!!”
Okay, not quite. But they did slowly begin to stir. A few girls who had been lounging defiantly sat up straight. Glances were exchanged, smiles began to appear. This was it. We all felt it. It was the plan of a lifetime. And it was mine!
“It’s perfect,” Whitney said. “It covers all the bases. It’s a classic spirit week activity, it’ll rally the school—”
“We get to trash the Dolphins,” Jaimee put in.
“And it’ll be kick-ass fun,” Chandra said. Was it just me, or was she eyeing me with new respect?
“All in favor?” Tara said.
Everyone raised their hands. I couldn’t have stopped grinning if the ceiling had fallen in on me right then and there. Was this the beginning of the end of the team-wide freeze-out?
“All right,” Tara said, sitting down with the rest of us. “I say we start tonight. Now all we need is a plan. . . .”
Bethany’s room was exactly how I imagined it would be. Actually, that’s not really true. It was exactly how I imagined it would be times ten.
The walls were black. The blinds were dark purple. There were curtains of all colors, textures and patterns bunched onto curtain rods all around them. She had a queen-sized four-poster canopy bed strung with even more curtains and sporting at least twenty dark velvet and silk pillows. The wall behind her bed was papered with concert posters from Ozzfest, Lollapalooza, Korn, MxPx, Limp Bizkit, the Flaming Lips and a few bands I’d never even heard of. There was also a huge poster of Britney Spears with the eyes gouged out and some unsavory details added in with black marker.
“I got my dad to order us a pizza,” Bethany said as she swiped a tangle of clothes off an old wooden chair and pulled it over to her desk so I could sit with her. “Hope you like onions and peppers.”
“I’ll just pick them off,” I said.
“So, what’d you do at practice today?” Bethany asked. “Did they make you wax your legs yet?”
“Actually, you’re not going to believe this,” I said, sitting down next to her. “We are going to reinstate prank war!”
Bethany’s hand dropped onto the keyboard. “Don’t mess with me.”
“I’m not! I’m totally serious. I’m even the one who suggested it.”
“And those gra
ham crackers went along with it? Did you slip hallucinogens in their Gatorade or something?” Bethany asked.
“Um . . . no,” I said, laughing.
“Do you even realize what this means?” she said. “Annisa, you’re not just changing things, you’re a full-on revolutionary.”
I blushed. “It’s not that big a deal. . . .”
“Are you kidding? Getting Tara Timothy and the blah-rah squad to do anything even remotely interesting is definitely a radical act,” Bethany said. “We’re talking about a group of people who consider Justin Timberlake to be a crossover artist, who . . . who think that wearing blue nail polish is subversive. Annisa, these people have eaten the same salad with the same nonfat dressing and the same bottle of water every single day at lunch since the sixth grade. They do not do daring.”
“Wow,” I said. “Then go me.”
“You’re freakin’ right,” Bethany said with a nod. “Go you.”
Later that night, it was war time. We all gathered in the high school parking lot and piled into cars. It took about fifteen minutes to get from Sand Dune High to West Wind—a sprawling gray structure with a green dolphin statue right smack in the middle of its front lawn. Whitney pulled her Beemer into the circular drive and parked right near the exit. She turned around and looked at me, Autumn and Mindy, who were mushed into the backseat.
“I’m parking here just in case we need to make a quick getaway,” she said with a wink. “My car will not get caught, got it, ladies?”
“Got it,” we all answered.
Whitney was pretty cool to have around.
Tara, Jaimee, Whitney and Erin popped their trunks open. Inside of each were dozens of rolls of blue and yellow streamers, bags and bags of balloons and a few huge scrolls of white paper that turned out to be painted NET THE DOLPHINS banners.
“They banned these a couple of years back when the environmental club caused a big drama over how un-PC they were,” Whitney explained as we rolled them out on the ground. “Now at least we can put them to good use again.”
“Rookies are on balloon duty,” Tara said, tossing a couple of bags of balloons at Mindy and me. “Get blowing.”
I took a deep breath and looked at Mindy. “Sure. Happy to help,” I said.
“You know, I’m beginning to think that Tara Timothy isn’t such a nice person,” Mindy said as we sat down on the steps of the school.
I grinned. “Sarcasm from Mindy McMahon! That’s new.”
“I have a dark side,” Mindy said, completely without irony.
We got to work blowing up the balloons while Tara, Chandra, Sage and Autumn got into shoulder sits and stands and started stringing streamers through every tree on campus. Felice and Erin put Jaimee up in a double-base extension so she could hang one of the banners from the awning that covered the front doorway while a few of the other girls went to hang one up on the gym wall.
“Where’s Phoebe?” I asked, scanning the rest of the team.
“Tara said she wasn’t feeling well,” Mindy said with a shrug.
“Car!” Whitney shouted, diving behind the dolphin statue. Mindy and I scrambled into the bushes and Jaimee just froze, unable to dismount in time. The car blew by, blasting Bruce Springsteen and breaking the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour. We all climbed carefully out of our hiding places.
“Maybe I’ll just keep watch,” Whitney suggested.
“Sounds like a plan,” Tara replied.
Mindy looked really pale as we took our seats again.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just . . . if we get caught—”
“We’re not gonna get caught,” I said.
“I know, it’s just . . . my parents will kill me,” Mindy said, fiddling with a limp balloon.
“Come on. We’re just messing around,” I said.
“Yeah, well, Matt and Mary McMahon’s daughter does not mess around,” Mindy said. “Matt and Mary McMahon’s daughter doesn’t really do much of anything.”
I got that sensation around my heart that you get when there’s a lot more to what someone’s saying than they’re letting on. I didn’t know Mindy that well yet, so I didn’t want to pry. Instead, I put my hand on her back and said, “You know, the faster we blow these suckers up, the faster we’ll get the heck out of here.”
Mindy cracked a grin. “Good point.”
After we’d blown up a couple dozen balloons and were feeling the dizziness, we handed them up to the other girls to tape around the banners. Soon Tara and the rest of the squad joined us, having tastefully decorated the trees, and we all stepped back to take a look at our work.
“Well? What do we think?” Tara asked.
It looked good—the three banners, the balloons, the sagging streamers. But it wasn’t exactly a battle cry. It was more like a battle nudge.
“We need more,” we all said in relative unison.
That was when we stopped being careful, and went a little crazy. Maureen, Karianna and Michelle, a few of the juniors on the team, took over active balloon duty. Mindy, Jaimee, Autumn and I grabbed a few rolls of streamers and ran around the parking lot, twisting them around the handicapped signs, the guardrails and the fence that lined the far side. We did a job on the bushes by the front door as well, practically suffocating them with our colors. The rest of the team hit the football field, using whatever we had to cover their home-side bleachers with Sand Dune High colors. Whitney, meanwhile, took on the dolphin statue as her own personal project.
By the end of the night we were standing in front of the school, just tossing rolls of streamers into the trees Mischief Night style, laughing, squealing and dancing to the stereo that blasted from Whitney’s car. We even stopped hiding whenever someone drove by. We were having too much fun to care.
“You know, Gobrowski, this is one of the best ideas you’ve ever had,” Erin told me as I sat on her shoulders to toss the last of the blue streamers.
“You don’t even know me,” I said with a laugh.
“Don’t argue with me, I’m trying to be nice,” Erin replied with a grin.
“All right! That’s the last of it!” I shouted once the streamer was gone.
We all cheered. The place looked like a party store had exploded on its roof. Blue and yellow streamers and balloons hung from every possible corner. There were balloons everywhere. The West Wind High Dolphin stood there, in all its glory, with a wig of blue and yellow streamer hair and a pair of impressively-sized yellow balloon breasts.
I could just imagine the faces on the West Wind students when they showed up for school in the morning. It was going to be classic. It was too bad we couldn’t be there to see it.
“Well, girls, I think we’ve done it,” Tara said.
“A picture for posterity?” Whitney suggested, whipping out a digital camera from her jacket pocket.
We all gathered in front of the dolphin statue, huddled together and grinned for the camera. As Mindy slung her arm over my shoulder and Felice pulled me closer to her side, I felt as if I had arrived. The Florida Annisa was finally here.
“Now, everyone say, ‘Sand Dune Rules’!” Whitney said.
“Sand Dune Rules!”
The flash went off and Whitney came over to show us the picture on the little digital screen. I was so happy, I could have busted out in a cheer right then. There I was, undeniably frozen in time, a member of the Fighting Crabs cheerleading squad.
“Those unbelievable bastards,” Tara said.
“How? How did they do it? How did they know?” Sage asked.
“It’s, like, a tapestry,” Jaimee put in.
“I think you mean travesty,” Felice corrected her.
“They must’ve been up all night,” Mindy said. “This had to have taken hours.”
“Sho’nuff,” Kimberly said.
I had never seen so much toilet paper in one place. It was everywhere. It covered the tree trunks and draped from the palms. It was wrapped around the school sign with a
bow like a present. It decorated the columns and beams like maypoles. It was even taped to the front doors, spelling out SAND DUNE SUCKS!
“Somebody must’ve driven by West Wind last night,” Whitney said.
“Very creative for a last-minute retaliation,” I said as the crowd in front of the school grew and grew.
We all stood there, students, janitors and a spare few faculty members, a colorful sea of plaid shirts, plaid skirts, plaid scarves and plaid pants, looking up at the TP fluttering in the breeze. If an alien had landed in the parking lot at that moment in search of intelligent life, he would have fired up his booster jets and turned right back around.
“Ladies,” Tara said, her eyes narrowed. “This is war.”
“All right! Show’s over, people! Get inside and get to homeroom unless you all want to be sitting in detention this afternoon!”
“Who’s that guy?” I asked, eyeing the handsome older man who was wrangling up the onlookers. He had broad shoulders, lightly tanned skin and beach-blond hair. In his blue linen suit and plaid tie he looked like a displaced surfer.
“That would be Principal Wharton,” Whitney said as we all started up the steps together. “More commonly known as Buzzkill.”
“Let’s go, people,” Principal Wharton called out, clapping his hands for emphasis. “It’s just a little toilet paper. Not all that interesting.” When he noticed the squad moving together, he hustled over to us and held out his arms. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not so fast.”
“But Principal Wharton, you told us all to get to class,” Whitney said coyly, her eyes wide and innocent. “I would hate to be late for homeroom.”
It was all I could do to keep from laughing.
“I’m impressed with your dedication, Miss Barnard, but there’s something we all need to discuss,” Principal Wharton replied. “Tara, I want to see you, your squad and the members of the varsity football team in the auditorium as soon as the first-period bell rings.” He looked at all of us with his dark blue eyes as if he was looking right through us. “Spread the word. It’s time for a little chat.”