A Non-Blonde Cheerleader in Love

by Kieran Scott

  “Making banners and decorations to rally school spirit is part of being a cheerleader at Sand Dune High, no matter what Coach Rincon had to say on the matter,” Coach continued, raising a hand to shut him up. “If you don’t like it, you can walk.”

  Terrell blinked. Clearly he thought he was slightly more indispensable than Coach’s comments implied.

  “You’re not serious,” he said.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Coach asked.

  She didn’t. Not even a little bit. And that vein was definitely not kidding.

  Terrell glanced at the team. We stared back. Everyone in the room held their breath. I wanted to look at Daniel, but that would have involved actual turning of my body and just then I couldn’t so much as blink. Plus, there was the fact that we hadn’t spoken all day—not since our little meltdown that morning.

  Finally, ever so slowly, Terrell smiled. And not in a good way. I had this vision of him as a larger-than-life supervillain in a black cape, snarling down at Coach Holmes.

  “Screw this,” he said, backing up from Coach and throwing his hands down. “If that’s the way you want to play it, then fine. I walk.”

  He spun on his heel and strode across the room. I turned a wide-eyed look at Chandra and Autumn, who were next to me. Phoebe and Tara slapped hands behind their backs. Unbelievable. Never in my life had I seen someone talk back to an authority figure like that. Especially not one like Coach Holmes. Even the strongest of beings cowered before her.

  But honestly, I was almost relieved to see Terrell go. As much as I had always liked the guy, he was a serious thorn in the foot of this cheerleading squad. Among the guys he was the agitator. Maybe that would be his supervillain name. Yeah. The Agitator. He’d have a big A on his chest and he’d be hovering over a huge vat of boiling lava, stirring us all up inside while he laughed his evil supervillain laugh.

  Maybe we would all be better off without him.

  “You sure about this, Truluck?” Coach Holmes shouted.

  His response was to shove through the heavy metal door and slam it as hard as he possibly could.

  “He has a lot of anger,” Autumn said a couple of hours later as we went for a water break. “You can see it in his aura. Black splotches everywhere.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d have to have a lot of anger to be able to stand up to Coach Holmes like that,” I said, leaning back against the cool wall next to the water fountain. “And bravery. And maybe a little bit of a death wish.”

  Daniel, Joe and Steven walked out of the weight room and gathered around the vending machine in silence. Tension instantly filled the gym lobby. They all pointedly ignored us as they fed their quarters into the slot and snagged their drinks. I felt like I was back in kindergarten when boys thought girls were icky and we all stayed on opposite ends of the playground. What was next? A finger-paint fight?

  “What’s their problem?” Jaimee asked quietly. “They’ve been like that all practice.”

  “They lost their fearless leader,” Chandra said grumpily.

  I reached out and rubbed Jaimee’s bare arm in sympathy. I knew the guys’ new freeze-them-out attitude was especially hard on her, since she and Steven had been best friends all their lives. Of course it was kind of tough on me too. Since one of the freezers was supposedly the love of my life.

  I tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but he was pointedly keeping his attention trained on his soda selection. Once they all had their drinks, they took them outside onto the cold stucco steps. So much for things getting better with Terrell gone. Our whole practice had been off-kilter as Coach Holmes was clearly frustrated, trying to reconfigure our stunts and pyramids for three guys rather than four. Meanwhile, the guys spoke to us only when they absolutely had to and refused to even look at us otherwise. If anything, things had only gotten worse.

  “And then there were three,” Tara said under her breath. She was being a little too gleeful about our sucky situation, if you asked me.

  “Typical Tara Timothy,” Sage said, shaking her head as she stepped up to the water fountain.

  We sucked in a collective breath as Tara’s eyes narrowed. If standing up to Coach Holmes was the most dangerous thing a person could do around here, standing up to Tara was second.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Barnard?” Tara snapped.

  Sage just blithely bent over the water fountain, took a long drink, then stood up and wiped her lips with the tips of her fingers. She slowly pushed her thick French braid over her shoulder. The scathing look she cast around at the rest of us was worthy of a Disney villain. Seriously, those animators needed to give her a call and use her as a model or something.

  “It means I hope you guys are proud of yourselves,” she said, facing Tara and Phoebe. “Not only did you get our best guy kicked off the squad, but you’ve completely annoyed the rest of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all out of here by the end of the day. They’re probably talking about quitting right now.”

  “Thank God,” Tara said.

  Oh, God. Are they? I wondered, glancing through the glass doors. It sucked not knowing what was going on in Daniel’s head. It sucked not being able to talk to him. Everything about this sucked.

  “Real nice,” Sage said to Tara. “Even you have to admit that having them on the team completely elevated the level of this squad.”

  “No, I don’t,” Tara said. Her face went from pink with exertion to red with anger in no time flat. “I don’t have to admit that. Are you guys forgetting where we were a month ago? We are national champions. National champions! And we did it without them. You can’t get much more elevated than that!”

  And that was when I saw it. The real reason Tara was so irritated about the guys. In her mind she had led our squad to a national title. Coach Holmes bringing the guys onto the squad messed with her ego. It implied that all Tara’s hard work wasn’t enough. It implied that we could still improve. To Tara, she had already made us the best we could be.

  Tara was taking the guys as a personal insult.

  Still, no one could argue with her point. We were the number-one team in the nation. Without the help of any men. Even Karianna and Lindsey looked a bit moved at the invoking of our recent triumph.

  “Whatever. Everyone at the other schools already saw us out there with the guys at the tournament,” Sage said. “West Wind is expecting us to bring them to the rivalry game. When we walk out there and it’s just us, we’re going to look like a bunch of idiots who talked a big game, but couldn’t get it done. Plus, we don’t even have a routine for a sixteen-girl squad. We’ll have to recycle something from last season.”

  Everyone stared either at the floor or at each other. If Tara knew how to rile us, Sage knew how to hit us where it hurt. She was right. If we went out on West Wind’s court for the rivalry game with last season’s routine, against the former district cheerleading champs whom we had unseated, everyone was going to think our nationals victory was just a fluke. That we were phoning it in. That we were over.

  “The West Wind Dolphins are going to laugh us off the court,” Sage said finally, looking at Phoebe. “And you and your big, fat tattletale mouth are going to be the ones to blame.”

  She might as well have just dropped an A-bomb on the school. I watched as all the blood rushed to Phoebe’s face. “Who the hell do you think you are, sophomore?” she snapped, getting all up in Sage’s face so that their noses practically touched. “We’ll kick you off this squad so fast, it’ll blow your highlights out.”

  “Phoebe! Come on!” Tara said, slack-jawed.

  “Get away from me, freak!” Sage cried.

  “Make me!” Phoebe shouted.

  “Fine!” Sage replied.

  And then she shoved Phoebe backward with both hands.

  For a split second, no one moved, and then suddenly Chandra, Tara and I were holding Phoebe back, trying to keep her from clawing Sage’s eyebrows off. I had never seen her so wigged. Apparently all the pressure had finally gott
en to her. Sage had picked the wrong cheerleader to pick on.

  “Phoebe! Chill!” Tara shouted.

  “Let go of me, Tara,” Phoebe replied, struggling. She managed to reach out and grab ahold of Sage’s T-shirt, tearing at the collar.

  “What’s going on out here?”

  The commotion had drawn the attention of the wrestling coach, Mr. Gallucci, who was now taking in the scene all baffled. Maybe there was no proper procedure in the school handbook for breaking up a catfight, because he appeared to be rooted to the spot. The door behind him opened and Christopher Healy’s head popped through.

  “Sage! Phoebe! What’re you doing?” he shouted, running out to protect his girlfriend.

  “You guys! You gotta see this!” another of the wrestlers shouted with glee.

  The doors of the auxiliary gym were thrown open and the wrestling team emptied out, all sweaty and grimy, to watch the girl-against-girl festivities. Before I knew it, Coach Holmes was there blowing her whistle, Daniel was shielding me from someone’s flailing arms (my hero) and K.C. had grabbed Phoebe’s hands and was holding them behind her back. Christopher, meanwhile, had Sage pinned against the wall, trying to calm her down.

  “You okay?” Daniel asked me, all concern.

  “Yeah,” I said with a small, apologetic, grateful smile. As of that second, I was no longer mad at him. As of that second, I just wanted to do whatever I could to make sure everything went back to normal. ’Cause let’s face it, things had definitely gotten out of control. “Thanks for coming to the rescue.”

  He grinned back. “Anytime.”

  Apparently Daniel was on the same page as me—right smack in the middle of the forgiveness chapter of Relationships for Beginners.

  Behind us, Coach Holmes and Coach Gallucci attempted to sort it all out. Coach sent the entire squad to the locker room, minus Sage, Phoebe and Tara, whom she decided to keep behind for questioning.

  “What the heck happened?” Daniel asked me, slipping his arm over my shoulders as we headed for the gym.

  I sighed as Coach Holmes made Sage and Phoebe shake hands and make up. Though neither looked very happy doing it.

  “Nothing good,” I replied.

  12

  All right, people! Let’s talk!” Tara shouted, calling the locker room to attention. Instantly everyone stopped whispering and speculating over what we had just witnessed and turned their attention to the live show. Sage and Phoebe huffed into the room ahead of Tara and dropped down on opposite benches, turning their knees away from each other. Sage crossed her arms over her chest and slumped like a little kid in time-out. Phoebe snapped the hair band she had wrapped around her wrist over and over again.

  A gray cloud rolled in over the locker room, bringing with it a rather suffocating humidity. Our energy had officially been sapped by the drama. Tara, however, had a serious manic power coming off of her in bursts. Her eyes were unusually wide as she took us all in, like a spooked horse about to bolt.

  Not a good look for her. And it didn’t bode well for any of us either.

  “Okay, listen up,” Tara said, pacing back and forth in front of us. I watched her thigh muscles flex under her short-shorts to keep from making eye contact with her and drawing her ire. “This ends here. I will not have a redux of football season. This is my senior year. This is my last season. And I am not going out like this, you got me? There will be no infighting on this squad. From here on out, we are going to have fun, we are going to work hard, and we are going to conduct ourselves like mature adults.”

  At this, everyone looked at Sage. She turned ten shades of purple, but didn’t look up.

  “So, I’ve decided that this coming Saturday, I am going to host the first slumber party of the season so that we can all chill out together and have a little fun,” Tara said, still pacing. A quick murmur of delight swept through the room. Nothing piqued a girl’s interest like a good slumber party. And I, for one, was shocked that our no-nonsense leader was focusing any of her energy on fun-having. “We’ll watch a movie, we’ll make some cookies, we’ll stay up all night. It’ll be great. Just like old times.”

  Actually she sounded more like a politician going over a platform than a girl psyched for a party, but I’d take whatever I could get.

  “Like old pre-guy times,” Chandra put in, very much on board. In fact, most of the squad was jumping right on Tara’s positivity train.

  Karianna pushed herself away from the locker she’d been leaning her shoulder on. “Wait a minute. What about the guys?”

  Tara paused. “I don’t want to hear about them. This is about us. And therefore, they will not be invited.”

  “Obviously,” Phoebe said, snapping that hair band. I wished she would stop already. She had a red welt growing on her skin.

  “This weekend is going to be strictly girls-only,” Tara reiterated.

  Challenge me and die, her tone implied.

  Had she forgotten that Coach Holmes had made it clear that she wanted us to be one cohesive team? Having an anti-testosterone fiesta wouldn’t go very far to promote that. In fact, it would pretty much obliterate it entirely.

  “Uh . . . Tara?” Autumn said tentatively. “Do you really think this is the best idea?”

  “Yeah. Coach is kind of all about the ‘one team’ thing,” I put in. “Leaving them out could be bad.”

  “How about this?” Tara said. Her nostrils flared. “How about you guys let me deal with one crisis at a time? There are far more of us and clearly we are falling apart. I’d like to get this part of the team fixed. Then maybe I’ll worry about them.”

  A few people murmured their agreement, but Autumn looked as skeptical as I felt. I had a feeling Tara would never deal with them at all, if she could avoid it. But then, I couldn’t argue with her one-problem-at-a-time logic. It seemed like a practical approach to a complicated issue. And besides, everyone was already chatting about the party, making plans. The gray storm cloud had officially lifted. This party could prove to be just what the doctor ordered.

  I just hoped the guys would understand.

  “What’s the Spanish word for ‘uneven’?” Bethany whispered to me the next day in the library. She paged through her dogeared and super-graffitied Spanish dictionary, flattening the spine on the table with a crack. “Any clues? Thoughts? Random guesses?”

  Señorita Marquez, our young, desperate-to-prove-she-was-hip Spanish teacher, had allowed us to spend the class period in the library working on her latest sadistic assignment, translating popular songs from English into Spanish. I had a feeling she thought we’d all love the task—that we’d think it was cool and different and all—but really it was torture. We even had to find ways to make them rhyme and everything. Personally, I’d much rather be back in the classroom, asking Bethany, “Invita usted a sus amigos a su casa?” for the ten-millionth time.

  Okay, so I was feeling a bit negative this morning. After yesterday’s practice and second period’s failed chemistry experiment (I was lucky I still had sensation in my fingertips, that’s all I’m saying), I just wanted one thing to be stress-free. And this was not it. But at least I was getting to spend an entire class period sitting next to Daniel, playing footsies under the table.

  A silver lining to every cloud.

  “What song are you doing?” Daniel asked her.

  “’People Are Strange,’ ” Bethany replied, gnawing on a mushy candy-less lollipop stick.

  “Your personal anthem?” he asked.

  Suddenly the toe of her boot slammed into my shin.

  “Ow! Bethany!” I cried, yanking my leg away from Daniel’s.