As soon as they were out of sight of the house, Drew glanced at Mally. “Put your belt on, Brynn,” he said, longing to touch her hand. You didn’t do that with Mallory, though. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Didn’t sleep.”
“How come?”
“Storm kept me up,” she said.
There wasn’t a drop on Drew’s car. The old grooved places in the sidewalks were dry. “I slept right through it. Must have been a bad one, to wake you up,” he said.
Merry answered, without opening her eyes, “It was.”
MEETING PLACES
With Caitlin Andersen in her proper place
behind
her, Mer-edith took her stance for “No More Take Backs,” their cheer dance at the Big Twist Junior Invitational.
It had gotten them this far.
Ridgeline was third in the competition, on the second day. All the parents had come along and spent the evening in the restaurant of the fancy hotel next to the conference center in Donovan, a ritzy town two hours upstate. Merry and Mallory had been up half the night, ordering room-service Caesar salads and riding the elevators with the other cheerleaders, twenty-five teams from all over New York. For once, Mally forgave her sister for being a fake athlete and joined in the craziness. She didn’t even seem to mind the choruses of “I’m so sure” and “I was like . . . so what?”
They’d probably stayed up too late, Merry thought.
She was tired. Her reactions were probably slower than they should have been. But adrenaline was a beautiful thing. And she’d had two cups of strong tea with lunch.
Ahead of them were the Donovan Eagles from a richie prep school out on Long Island. In first were the girls Merry had to admit were better—the girls from PS 15, in Spanish Harlem. They were not only better, they were better-looking, too. The Donovan Eagles were almost neck and neck with the PS 15 Rockets in school cheers and quad routines. And when it came to dance, the girls from PS 15 blew both Merry’s squad and the preps out of the water. Solid tumblers all, Merry’s squad needed a rhythm transfusion. Plus, there were three or four girls on Ridgeline’s team who were . . . well, Merry would never say gross, but a little thick. Like, couldn’t get a thigh boot on to save their lives. The long-haired girls from the city made Merry feel like some kind of black-haired leprechaun, in her cheesy green-and-white uniform that was new about a year before Merry was born. The Donovan girls had probably snipped the tags off their teal-and-gray sweaters that morning before the first round.
She would have to pull off something amazing.
She knew what it was.
Anyone could do a mount to a lib if she had speed and balance, but hardly anyone could do a front flip dismount. Merry could. She and Kellen, with Caitlin and Kim as spotters, had practiced it in secret before winter break. But could she do it in competition after two months off, when she’d been back in action for only a few weeks?
She and the others sprinted out onto the floor.
As they took their places for practice before the music began, Merry looked up and, in the stands, she saw David. Had he driven all the way from Ridgeline to this big convention hotel two hours from their house just to see Kim compete?
Or to see her?
To see
her
?
Merry’s heart thudded, the way her mother once described it—like a bird in the cage of her ribs.
“Can you do it?” she asked Kim and Kellen as they warmed up for the morning finals. “Just like we practiced? After the catch you put me into a stand, and I know I can land it.”
“I’m not doing it unless we tell the others,” Sunday Scavo spoke up. “Because we could all get kicked off.”
“Not if we win.”
“Duh. If we win, and you get hurt . . . it’s all of our butts,” Sunday said. She waved at her parents. Merry couldn’t understand how Sunday could even speak to her parents, who had named her Sunday River Scavo after the ski resort where they were when she was conceived—my God! It was disgusting. She wondered what her name would be: Juneberry? Sugar Maple? You only had to count backward to figure out her parents had been at the family camp one spring weekend, at one of the cabins, which were all named for New England trees, when they got the idea that resulted in her and her sister. Campbell and Tim didn’t go for weekends to the cabin camp anymore, not since Tim bought the store.
But they always went in summer! And Adam—come to think of it, which she did not want to, Adam was born in April, nine months after their July vacation. At least she didn’t have to think about her parents doing it more than once a year.
The first-place team was performing to “Beautiful, Beautiful Girl,” letter perfect, every move crisp as a flag in a stiff breeze. Left hurkey. Right hurkey. Huge, huge kicks. Big synchronized jumps. Sexy, sexy contortion moves. Double backovers, endlessly. Merry watched in agony. The one thing they lacked was a super flyer—and Merry’s team lacked one, too.
They lacked Merry.
“Listen, Kim, Sunny, Crystal, Caitlin, Mimi! All you guys. Kellen and I have to do this! They’re gonna take this away! We’ve worked for this for two years! This is our last year before high school!” She looked from face to face. “We all want to get moved up to varsity as freshmen! Don’t we? I can do this. Full forward pike after the catch. We just don’t do the final stand. We do this instead.”
She planned a dismount so daring it would either wow the judges or get her squad disqualified. What Merry had going for her was how much more cheerleaders were getting away with in competition now—from uniforms with strings of lights built into the see-through tops to purple faux-hawks and navel rings. What she had against her was tradition. Either way, she thought, they might as well go down in glory, and walk away with the chops if not the trophy. She would perform the stunt just the way she and Kellen and Kim had in their little after-practice practice sessions.
After she did her stand on top of the pyramid, one leg extended, then dropped into the basket, Kellen and Sunny would go into a lunge and lift her onto their knees. From their shoulders she would do a forward flip—like a dismount from a balance beam—and land (well, hopefully) on the gym floor.
The problem was, this kind of move wasn’t permitted for cheerleaders in competition in Merry’s age group.
The problem was that their knees were higher and even unsteadier than a balance beam and there was no mat underneath. Coach killed her every time she saw Merry do that move, or a twist catch, or anything she wasn’t supposed to be doing. But when Coach yelled at her, it was almost like the way you yelled at a little kid, half laughing as you did it.
“Coach Everson says she’s told you no upside down, not even in high school,” said Sunday. “Only college. It’s, like, illegal.”
Crystal Fish, with one leg extended in standing splits against the concrete wall of the practice gym, said, “Please, Coach would slaughter us. You just started back
not even two months
ago. You’re her little doll face. If you hit your hand, we’ll be toast. Include me not.”
“We’ll be able to catch her no problem and once she’s in the stand, I’ll give her help going over,” said Kellen Fish, Merry’s anchor and Crystal’s big brother. Kellen was a freshman.
“Then we can both get killed,” Crystal said placidly. “That would wipe out our whole family.”
“Listen,” Merry begged. “We need to do this! Otherwise . . . we just don’t have anything. The girls from P.S. 15 actually should win, because they had to sell Sally Snax to even buy their uniforms. They get the sympathy vote. And the other girls probably don’t even have to go to class for weeks before a meet. You know, private school rules?”
“Merry . . . don’t make us get in trouble. It’s just a meet,” said Kim.
“And like we won’t have ten more next year,” Crystal said languidly. “I plan on living to be twenty. Your units up there in the old bleachers will kill us if coach doesn’t. No way, Mer.”
“Way, Fish. I’m the captain!”
Crystal looked at Meredith as though she were a little bug. Then she lowered her beautiful, ballet-turned leg and said, “You are CO-captain. With me, Brynn. It’s your competition. Your loss. Coach will kick you out. I mean, out for good. You’ll have to start wearing stripper outfits like the Pom Pom girls.”
“It’s not fair! You had all your meets when I just got to sit there!” Merry cried, bursting into tears. “You cheered for basketball when they went to third in state for the first time! Now I get my last chance and you’re just going to crap out on me? Come on. I can land this. Me and Kim and Caitlin and Kellen have done it dozens of times. Dozens. Coach even knows.”
“And she’s fine about it, right?” Crystal asked.
“No, but she knows about it,” Merry said.
She glanced up at Coach Everson, who had taken her place kneeling in front of the stage according to the rules. Coaches were not allowed to speak to the girls for ten minutes before they competed. But Coach was watching the conversation with a sharp eye, as though she knew something was up.
“She knows about it,” Kim repeated, trying to back Merry up, but leery of Coach Everson’s look, which seemed to be boring holes in her back. Kim glanced between Merry and the rest of the group. Alli seemed to be on Merry’s side. So did Caitlin.
But Crystal was like a power queen. You could almost see lightning come out of her fingernails. She looked mad, and Crystal’s mad was like anyone else’s crazy.
Merry dialed down.
“Listen,” Merry said, sensing she was pushing too hard. “I have a better idea. I’ll do a full-split in the air, a toe-touch dismount, from you guys’ shoulders. But we won’t stop there. We’ll do something else. Caitlin, you can do a back-flip from a standstill. Alli, you can! You do two in a row into a split. And I’ll do something else. Let’s go then. Everybody! Competition smiles! Ridgeline spirit! Let’s run the gauntlet.” The girls and Kellen formed a double line, Merry grabbed Alli’s hand and ran through, followed by all the others until they leapt into line. When they reached the end, the whole squad shouted, “Ridgeline Rockets! Dream team!” Meredith, pumped her fist.
As they ran out, Crystal whispered, “You watch it. I mean it. You’ll be in another coma if we get in trouble!” Crystal said. “You won’t be responsible. You’ll be in the newspaper again for most comas in a six-month period. Probably on CNN.”
In the stands, Mallory told her parents, “She’s going to get caught in the basket
and
she’s thinking she’ll do a pike out of it, like off a balance beam. Be prepared.”
Tim and Campbell stood up to stop her; but the first notes of “No More Take Backs” had already begun.
“Don’t flip out,” Mallory said. “If she was going to get big-time hurt, I’d know it.”
“You mean, you’d know it in a weird twin way? Is she going to get little time hurt?” Tim yelled over the noise.
Mally shrugged. She pretended to shake a toy eight-ball in her hands. “My sources say no.” She laughed. “Come on, Dad. I know it because I’m her sister and I can tell when she’s trying to be all goody-goody when she’s really being sneaky. I can tell because I heard them say they’d do it if they weren’t in first after the early rounds. Duh.”
“This isn’t a joke Mallory,” Campbell said, in the voice usually followed by
you’re-grounded
.
But she had to look away then. Down on the floor, the routine was going like silk.
“Step and step,” Merry said quietly. “Kick, kick. One, two, three, jump. One, two, three, down on four, up, five six,“ she gave David her most glistening smile. He smiled, with a hint of a nod. “Hip, Hip, shake it. Hip, hip, shake it, last time,” Meredith went on. “Now down on your knees . . .” The girls next ran forward, and slid to the floor. In a line, they slipped into synchronized forward rolls, next jumping to their feet and performing a few steps of of hip-hop, ending in a high toe-kick. The whole line then dropped to their knees and knelt on all fours. Beginning with Crystal at the far left, each cheerleader used the girl next to her as a chair: With her back balanced on the back of the girl beneath her, Caitlin, Alli, Sunny and the others lay back and did horizontal splits in the air. When they traded places for a second series of splits, each motion sharp and on the beat, it had a stylish silhouette effect Coach liked to call “the Rockettes,”—although most of the girls had never heard of the most famous kick line in America.
Meredith said, “Okay last time. Now ready . . .”
To either side, Sunday and Mimi went up to their two-legged stands, their feet planted on the knees of the sturdier girls. Kellen and Kim hoisted Alli and Crystal to the second tier and they pulled Merry and Caitlin to the top of the pyramid, where all three first stood with both arms and then one leg extended.
The crowd cheered and the prep-school girls tapped their toes impatiently.
“Now, let’s do it!” Merry instructed them.
With a moment of hesitation she hoped wasn’t obvious, Merry dropped from her mount into the basket formed by Kim and Kellen. Then she was standing on Kellen’s and Kim’s sturdy hands. Even she was aghast at the fear factor. She’d never done a full-split toe-touch dismount. But seven years of gymnastics paid off as Kellen and Kim helped Meredith get the height and do the classy dismount. At her side, she saw Alli and Caitlin drop off their top tier, then face away from the crowd.
They did two consecutive back flips into a full split.
But Merry did a front flip, a back flip and landed in a horizontal split, waving at the crowd like a madwoman.
So she hadn’t done the full pike she’d planned in the gym.
They’d have lost points for it anyhow.
By the way the judges were smiling at her, she knew she’d done enough.
All old people, like the coaches, remembered that old Nadia Comenici move from the Romanian gymnastics team of about 1904.
They’d departed from the plan, but that wasn’t a cause for a points deduction.