The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “Phoebe? Phoebe?” Robbie Ballard squawked. He poked Wes Porter in the side. “Phoebe says Purple Paisley looks like a petunia!”

  “Yuck! Yuck!” Wes Porter croaked back. Behind him, Mazie Calloway and Marylin giggled.

  Paisley shrugged, still smiling. “Phoebe likes flowers,” she said. She didn’t sound the least bit offended.

  It was Paisley’s turn to give her social studies report to the class. Instead of having her do a regular report on just one country, Mrs. Watson had asked Paisley to discuss all the different places she and Phoebe had traveled. Paisley lugged a large shopping bag to the front of the room. The first thing she pulled out of the bag was a long strand of beads.

  “Phoebe and I got these in Kenya, in a place called Samburu,” Paisley began, handing the beads to Matthew Sholls in the first row. “The day we got them, this little brown dog tried to adopt us. See, we were hiking through this village . . .”

  Everyone in the class sat mesmerized as Paisley continued to talk and pass around the things she pulled from her shopping bag. Here was a red-and-yellow serape someone had given Phoebe in Ecuador. Next came a turban like the kind bedouin men wore in Egypt. Everyone laughed and clapped when Matthew Sholls tried on the kilt Paisley had picked up in Yemen; it was called a futa, and men wore them all the time there.

  “That was fun,” Paisley told Kate after social studies, when they were sitting at their usual cafeteria table by the “Olympic Dreams of the Sports Superstars” mural. “I’d forgotten I had half that stuff. Phoebe and I were up practically all night digging through storage boxes.”

  “I really liked your report,” Andrew O’Shea said, sitting down next to Paisley. “One day I’m going to go to all those places too.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of catching some terrible disease?” Marcie wanted to know. Marcie was the sort of person who worried a lot about catching terrible diseases.

  “I heard camels are really stubborn,” Jason Frey said, scooting a chair in between Amber and Timma. “Is that true?”

  “Did you ever ride in a caravan?” Trevor Parlier asked as he dropped his lunch bag down next to Kate’s.

  “Great braces, Paisley.”

  Everyone looked up. Mazie Calloway was standing in the aisle next to Paisley’s chair.

  “Why don’t you come over and sit with us?” Mazie asked Paisley, nodding toward the middle school cheerleaders’ table. “Ashley wants to check out your braces. She might get some just like them.”

  Paisley smiled her purple smile. “Why don’t you come sit over here?” she asked Mazie. “We can make room for everyone.”

  I will remember this day for the rest of my life, Kate thought as she watched a gaggle of moonbeam-blond middle school cheerleaders with lizard-skinny legs troop with their lunch trays toward Kate’s table.

  “There’s room for everyone,” Paisley said as she pulled more chairs to the table. “Plenty of room.”

  Later Kate wished Paisley’s social studies report hadn’t been such a big hit. Maybe if Paisley had just handed around postcards from her travels, Mrs. Watson and Ms. Carter-Juarez, the school principal, would not have decided Paisley should be in a magnet school for Accelerated Children.

  “Accelerated Children? What does that mean?” Kate asked the night Paisley called to tell her about the new school. “Do you have motors stuck on you to make you go faster?”

  “I think it just means they let you work at your own pace,” Paisley explained. “I hope the kids there think purple braces are okay.”

  Kate knew that wherever Paisley went, the kids would think her purple braces were okay. Paisley had that effect on people. She made you forget about stupid stuff like cheerleading and who was supposed to sit at what table. Hanging out with Paisley the last few weeks, Kate had realized how much stuff like cheerleading and talking about kissing boys bored her. It occurred to her that maybe she was the one who was leaving Marylin behind, when she’d always thought before that Marylin was the one who had left. It made her feel a little guilty, to be honest. Poor Marylin, fated to live such an automatically boring life while Kate got to do all kinds of interesting stuff with Paisley.

  The next day at lunch the cafeteria felt like Paisley had never been there. The middle school cheerleaders sat at their table in the first row by the emergency exit door and pretended that no one else existed. Kate saw Andrew O’Shea trip over thin air and nearly drop his lunch tray on the way to his old seat by Trevor Parlier and Jason Frey. It seemed that as soon as the mysterious force had found out Paisley was at a different school, it had taken over again.

  “I heard that Mazie’s dad owns the Fairview Country Club,” Amber said chewing on a carrot. “He’s not just a member; he owns it.”

  “I wonder what her house is like,” Marcie said. “Do you think her mom is nice?”

  Kate picked at her turkey sandwich. It looked flat, as though the mysterious force had gotten into her bag and squashed her lunch.

  I’ve had just about enough of this, she thought.

  Kate carefully wrapped up her squashed turkey sandwich and put it back in her lunch bag. Then she stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Marcie asked. “Are you sick?”

  Kate marched resolutely to Andrew O’Shea’s table. “Scoot over,” she told Trevor as she pulled up a chair. “Anyone want to trade for a turkey sandwich?”

  Then she turned and looked toward her old table by the “Olympic Dreams of the Sports Superstars” mural. Marcie, Amber, and Timma were staring at her, their faces full of wonder.

  “Well?” Kate called to them, raising her eyebrows as high as they would go. “What are you waiting for?”

  kiss

  There weren’t any bleachers at the soccer field, so all the parents who came to watch the game had to bring their own chairs or else stand up. Marylin’s mom was sitting on a long, folded-out beach chair next to the drama club’s bake sale table. She was dressed in a business suit and had a laptop computer on her knees. Marylin wished her mom had dressed in sweats and tennis shoes like all the other mothers. It was hard for her to concentrate on cheerleading with her mom sticking out like a sore thumb.

  “Go, Mavericks!” Ashley Greer yelled, and then all the cheerleaders were yelling, “We’re number one!” and “We’re the best!” Marylin yelled out, “Go, team!” as loud as she could and jumped up and down.

  “Go, Wes!” a voice called from behind her. Marylin turned around to see a boy leaning against a bike, one fist raised in the air. He had dark-brown hair, and eyes that were so blue, Marylin could see that they were blue from ten feet away.

  “That’s Wes Porter’s brother,” Mazie Calloway said in a loud whisper to Marylin. “He’s only got one leg.”

  “I see two legs,” Marylin said. “How could he ride a bike with only one leg?”

  Mazie shook her head, as though she couldn’t believe how dumb Marylin was. “One of his legs is fake. He had cancer last year, when he was in, like, seventh grade.”

  The boy didn’t look like the sort of person who’d had cancer to Marylin. He looked like her cousin Shelton, who was always building forts in his backyard and then tearing them down. You had to be pretty healthy to destroy things the way her cousin Shelton did.

  “Are you sure he had cancer?” she asked Mazie.

  Mazie nodded. “Positive.”

  “Team Appreciation Cheer!” Jessica Donovan called out. Jessica was an eighth grader who was the captain of the cheerleaders. Marylin got in line with the other girls and faced the crowd. She put on her best cheerleader smile. She tried not to notice that Wes Porter’s brother was smiling back at her. Too much interpersonal contact with team supporters was not professional, according to Ms. Lyttle, the cheerleading coach.

  During half-time Marylin’s mom brought her a juice box. “You’re working hard out here,” she said. “You need your vitamins.”

  “Hey, Mrs. McIntosh,” Mazie said. “So how do we look? Better than the team, that’s for sure.”
<
br />   The team was behind four to nothing. Marylin hoped it wasn’t the cheerleaders’ fault. During the first half they had accidentally done a basketball cheer during an important penalty shot. Wes Porter’s brother had yelled out, “Hey, wrong sport!” and a bunch of people in the crowd had laughed.

  “You all look wonderful,” Marylin’s mom assured Mazie. “Maybe the team will have a better second half.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” Wes Porter’s brother stood behind Marylin’s mom. He was holding a dirt-crusted glove. “Did you drop this?”

  Marylin’s mom peered at the glove. “No, that looks like it’s been out here awhile. But it’s nice of you to ask,” she said, smiling at the boy.

  “Okay,” the boy said, sounding disappointed. He looked at Marylin. “You didn’t drop this glove, did you?” he asked. Marylin shook her head no.

  The boy shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said, and then he let the glove fall to the ground. Marylin watched as he walked back over to his bike. You would never know he had only one leg, Marylin thought. He walked exactly like a two-legged person.

  The team lost five to one. By the end of the game the cheerleaders’ jumps barely lifted them off the ground. Marylin’s voice sounded like someone had rubbed sandpaper over the top of it. She sort of liked it that way, though. It made her sound older.

  “My mom will take us to the party tonight,” Caitlin Moore told Marylin as they were packing up their cheerleading gear. “Be ready at seven thirty, okay?”

  Marylin nodded. She waved at the other cheerleaders as they walked off toward the parking lot. Marylin’s mom was standing on the field talking to the school principal, Ms. Carter-Juarez. Looking around to make sure no one was paying attention, Marylin picked up the glove that Wes Porter’s brother had let drop to the ground and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

  I think I have one just like it at home, she had been prepared to say if anyone caught her. But no one did, so she didn’t have to make up an excuse for taking something just because Wes Porter’s brother had touched it.

  “So who’s going to be at this party?” Marylin’s mom asked that night ten minutes before Marylin was supposed to leave. “Anybody I should know about? Any cute boys?”

  “Mom!” Marylin pretended she was shocked her mother would ask such a thing.

  Marylin’s mom plopped down on the edge of Marylin’s bed. “What? Can’t I be curious about the cute boys in your class?”

  Petey came to the doorway. “You’re too old for cute boys, Mom,” he said. “You have to stick to Dad.”

  “Thanks a lot!” Marylin’s mom said, throwing a pillow at Petey. “Just my luck.”

  Marylin ignored her mom’s last remark. In her opinion, if her mom could find a few nicer things to say about her dad, maybe they wouldn’t fight so much and her dad wouldn’t always been gone on business trips. Maybe Marylin could grow up in a happy home.

  But she kept her opinion to herself, since she wasn’t in the mood to discuss her parents’ relationship. Instead she looked in the mirror for the ten millionth time. She thought her hair might look really stupid. All the other cheerleaders had great hair. They had award-winning hair. Marylin’s hair was just okay, as far as she was concerned. For a minute she considered dying it, and then she remembered what she’d been meaning to tell her mom ever since she got home from the game.

  “Flannery cut off all of her hair and dyed it red!” Marylin exclaimed. “She looks like she just got back from outer space. She’s so weird now!”

  “You’re kidding,” Marylin’s mom said. “I can’t believe Penny would let her do something like that.”

  “I don’t think she asked her mom if she could. I think she just went ahead and did it.”

  Marilyn pulled at her bangs, wondering if braids would look good. Braids were out of the question for Flannery now, that was for sure. She barely had enough hair to run a comb through. She wondered if Flannery missed wearing braids. That’s what she had worn for the cheerleading tryouts.

  “I guess I’ll try out after all,” Flannery had told Marylin, way back when practically the entire middle school had been buzzing about who had a chance to make the cheerleading squad and who didn’t. Only people like Kate acted like they didn’t care.

  “What about your ankles?” Marylin had asked. “Didn’t your doctor say you couldn’t try out because of your ankles?”

  Flannery shrugged. “He said they were better. He was more worried what it would do to a natural cheerleader like me not to be on the squad. Really, it’s like breathing. Someone like me needs to cheer to survive. I realized that after coaching you all that time. I only hope I don’t bump you off the squad.”

  When Marylin walked into the gym for tryouts, she saw the members of last year’s cheerleading squad congregated by a table at the far end of the basketball court. Marylin noted that they all had long necks, like swans in warm-up clothes. They chatted amiably among themselves and raised knowing eyebrows at one another as they surveyed the nervous group of girls flittering around the edges of the gym, chirping like nervous sparrows.

  Finally the tallest cheerleader stood up and blew a whistle. Everyone quieted. “When I call out your name, please come front and center and show us your routine. Remember, be loud, be proud, and smile!”

  The cheerleaders behind her whooped and applauded, and a few of the girls in the crowd did too. Marylin thought maybe she should jump up and down, but she didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself, in case the panel of cheerleaders thought she was show-offy. Although, if you thought about it, cheerleaders were sort of supposed to be show-offy. By the time Marylin had decided maybe she’d clap just a little bit, everyone else had stopped, so she just stood there quietly.

  The first few girls who tried out were awful. Marylin knew she shouldn’t be happy that some people couldn’t do a cartwheel to save their lives, but she couldn’t help herself. Then Ashley Greer was called. You could just tell she was a natural cheerleader, the way she bounced on the balls of her feet and smiled so hard it made Marylin’s face hurt to look at her. “Ready, okay!” Ashley yelled, and then she went into her routine. The cheerleaders behind the table began scratching rapid notes on their clipboards. Ashley was in, you could just tell.

  When Marylin’s name was called, she ran to the center of the court, thinking, Bounce! Bounce! Bounce! And then, to her horror, she yelled “Bounce!” at the top of her lungs and everyone giggled. “Bounce!” she yelled again, hoping it would seem like she’d done it on purpose the first time.

  “Bounce, everyone! Get on your feet!” Marylin bounced a few times herself when she hit front and center, and suddenly it was as if she’d bounced herself into another person. All the jittery nervousness that had filled her like helium a few moments before magically became superpowered cheerleading energy surging through her arms and legs. “Ready, okay!” she shouted, not caring that she was copying Ashley. It just sounded like the professional, cheerleading sort of thing to say.

  As she clapped and stomped her way through her routine, Marylin noticed the cheerleaders behind the table scribbling on their clipboards. Her smile brightened by several hundred watts. She was in, she could just feel it.

  She was in, that was, if Flannery didn’t push her off the squad. Marylin leaned back against the gym wall as Flannery tromped out to the center of the court. Flannery nodded at the panel of judges, then put her hands on her hips. “Let’s go!” she called.

  But Flannery didn’t go. Marylin wasn’t an expert or anything, but she’d seen enough cheerleaders in action to know that you had to have a special quality to cheer. You had to look like you were light as air and strong as steel at the same time. You needed to look like a boy could lift your entire body up on his little finger, and as if you could do a triple flip off his fingertips.

  Flannery looked like she needed a nap. There was just something about the way she stomped across the floor. It was more like a really old person who was mad about something shuffling down the ha
llway to tell you about it. She didn’t lift her arms up high enough. And halfway through her routine, she started scowling instead of smiling.

  “You did great!” Marylin lied when Flannery had finished, and Flannery nodded, a confident grin on her face. “I aced it!” she said. “I’m just a natural, I guess!”

  When Flannery got cut after the first round of tryouts, she wasn’t exactly gracious about it. “I guess I didn’t bribe the right people,” she said so that all the cheerleaders at the judges’ table could hear her. Marylin found herself slowly edging away from her, so that nobody would put the two of them together in their minds.

  The next week Flannery had started hanging out with Bebe Hurst and Trish Simon, two well-known eighth grade cigarette smokers. Marylin had felt sort of bad about it, but she was so busy learning cheers and smiling all the time, well, there hadn’t been a whole lot she could do, except give Flannery friendly waves in the hallway. Of course, it was Marylin’s job now to give everyone friendly waves in the hallway, but she tried to make her waves to Flannery especially cheerful.

  “I guess it’s a good thing for Flannery that hair grows out,” Marylin’s mom said. “So is she going to be at this party tonight?”

  Marylin shook her head. “I think it’s just going to be sixth grade cheerleaders and soccer players.” And maybe Wes Porter’s brother, she hoped, since the party was at Wes Porter’s house. She’d been thinking about him all afternoon. She kept forgetting he had only one leg.

  “When was your first real kiss with Dad?” Marylin asked her mom now, trying to remember exactly what Wes Porter’s brother looked like. “Did it just happen, or is it something you planned?”

  “What a question!” her mom said, laughing. “I guess it just happened. We were at a costume party. He was dressed up like Elmer Fudd.”

  “What did your friends think about him?”

  Marylin’s mom considered this for a second. “I don’t remember. I’m sure it didn’t matter. When you think you’ve found the right person, you don’t care much what other people think.”