I find a seat in the middle somewhere, far enough up that I have a decent view of the shiny wooden gym floor, of the championship-sports banners that flutter along the tall, cinder block walls. Most of the school is here now, the sounds of their laughter and conversations building and swelling, filling the room. Teachers flit about, maintaining order, smiling politely at the students.
My mouth goes dry when I see Ben walking up the bleachers. He’s so busy picking his way around the crowded stands that he doesn’t see me, so I hunch over and kind of lean on my elbow, one hand over the side of my face, my hair sweeping forward and masking me. My breathing gets a little shallow as he gets closer.
I don’t know what to say anymore, and I can’t handle another conversation that resolves nothing.
Unfortunately, I’m only quasi-lucky. He sits down behind me. I don’t think he has realized it’s me in front of him so I stay still, praying that this is the sort of assembly conducted with the lights turned down low, although that seems pretty out of the question given that this is a pre-homecoming pep rally.
Across the gym, the athletes are assembling onto a smaller set of bleachers. The maroon-and-gold jerseys on the broad-shouldered football players quickly fill one end of the stands. The less-obtrusive swim team and girls’ basketball teams make up the other half.
Finally, the principal, a tall gray-haired man who looks completely overdressed in a slate-gray pair of slacks, white button-up, and somber tie, walks to the center of the gym, holding a cordless microphone.
He asks the gym to quiet down, his monotonous voice amplified by the speakers mounted in the corners of the gym, and then moves to stand off to the side of the bleachers just as a long, low base beat rumbles through the gym. The students around me recognize their cue and begin stomping on the wooden bleachers, until the entire room is one echo of rumbling, grumbling bass.
Reluctantly, I follow along, stomping my feet, feeling the bass rumble through me. I feel dorky, but I keep it up anyway, determined to step outside my norm.
The sounds of a synthesized guitar and keyboard—some kind of generic top-forty pop song—blast through the speakers, and the cheerleaders bound through the double doors at the opposite end of the gym. The girls in front throw in a few cartwheels as the rest of the squad fans out around them, waving their metallic gold pom-poms.
I’m watching, totally overdosing on how saccharine they are and repressing the need to grimace, when a particular face comes into focus.
And then I can’t see anything else.
Nicole. She’s grinning so wide that I have to wonder how many Crest Whitestrips she went through to get a smile that sparkly.
I whirl around to look at Ben. “She’s a
cheerleader
?”
But Ben looks just as shocked as I do. He glances down at me for a second—he obviously had no idea how close to me he sat—and then back at Nicole again. His mouth is slack, his entire body is still, motionless. He’s not even blinking.
I turn to look at her again.
She really is a freakin’ cheerleader. My best friend, Nicole, the cheerleader. That twilight zone portal I stepped into in the bathroom with Janae has expanded to swallow the whole school. She even looks like them: Her slim waist and long legs look great in the maroon-and-gold uniform.
“Did you even know she was trying out?” Ben asks, leaning forward and shouting into my ear to be heard over the song.
I shake my head. My ponytail must brush his cheek.
“It all makes so much sense now,” he says, his voice a little lower.
“What makes sense?” I ask, still watching Nicole. I’m mesmerized by the girl on the floor, the one exuding happiness and confidence. It’s like watching someone with Nicole’s body and an entirely different personality.
“Why she dumped me.”
“What do you mean
?
” I ask.
The music behind us dies down as the cheerleaders start into some kind of yay-team-style shouting match, jumping up and down and waving enthusiastically. Nicole is kicking so high it’s a wonder her whole leg doesn’t dislocate at the hip and go flying into the crowd.
He kind of snorts. “Well I mean, I’m . . . me,” he gestures to his worn-out jeans, his sneakers, his spiked-out blond hair, “and she’s . . . that.”
I glance over at the cheerleaders again. Nicole is still jumping up and down, clapping her pom-poms together as her ribbon-clad ponytail bounces. It’s hard to believe it’s her. Last year she was hiding from everyone, embarrassed by her acne. Now she seems to have highlighted her hair, put on makeup . . . . And she’s standing there, the most confident girl in the room.
Even as it hurts, I feel a little proud of her.
“I can’t believe she didn’t tell us,” I say.
Ben nods.
I turn back to watch Nicole again. It’s hard to look at anything else, the sight of her down there is
that
unbelievable.
The cheerleaders pick up a bunch of boards with letters, spelling out
Enumclaw
, and they step forward one at a time to get the crowd to spell it out with them. Nicole has the
M
, and when she steps forward, her cute little pleated skirt flutters around her perfectly tanned legs.
When it’s over, they cheer and bounce over to the front of the athletes’ bleachers, where they line up along the ground, sitting in identical positions, as if they’ve practiced even that.
I glance back at Ben. “She was always busy after school, wasn’t she? Like that day I ran into you at the mall?”
He nods.
“It was practice. And tryouts were the last two weeks of August. She wasn’t ditching me for you; it was cheerleading.”
He shrugs.
I laugh, though it’s only half in amusement and half because I want to whack myself with a clue stick.
This whole time, it wasn’t Ben stealing her away at all, but cheerleading. I can’t believe she did this and didn’t even tell me—or him—about it.
I don’t know whether to be infuriated or relieved, so instead I just keep laughing, rubbing my face, trying to hide my giggles from the quieting gym. I’m delirious, confused, lost.
I don’t even know what happens for the rest of the assembly, because all I can see is Nicole, seated among the other cheerleaders, whispering and giggling. From across the gym, I can still see that she’s glowing, happy, more alive than I’ve seen her in months. She leans in to hear something another cheerleader said, nodding.
I wonder what kind of secrets she’s telling, secrets she obviously won’t ever share with me.
They’re her friends now.
And I am not.
Why didn’t she tell me? Why would she go out for the squad and then join it and not even say a word? It’s not something that’s kept a secret . . . they wear their gear to school on game days. They’re in the yearbook.
Did she even care at all what I would say? Did it bother her, keeping this secret, or could she care less?
Because by the looks of her big pearly-white smile, I’m betting on the latter.
35
AFTER THE CHEERS
from the pep rally have died down and most kids have headed home, I sit on the hood of Nicole’s car for what feels like forever. And I don’t even know why. I don’t know if I want to tell her off or beg forgiveness. All I know is that I want answers.
The days of October have officially melted into fall, and there’s a brisk feeling in the air. I should have worn a jacket today. Something other than my usual jeans and hoodie. Even my toes inside my red Converse are getting a little tingly and cold. But it’s not like I started this day planning to sit on the cold hood of Nicole’s red Cavalier.
The cheerleaders must be having some super-secret meeting to discuss the dry cleaning of their spandex underwear or maybe they want to color coordinate the ribbon in their ponytails. I don’t know what cheerleaders talk about any more than I know who my best friend is.
Nicole finally walks out of the gym doors, a black duffel bag slung over her uniformed shoulder. A big maroon
E
is emblazoned across the little V-necked, long-sleeved sweater. Her white pleated skirt sort of bobs and flutters as she walks, and her crisp white socks match her white-and-maroon sneakers. Her legs look tan, tan enough that I think she went to the salon with the rest of the squad.
She’s halfway to her car before she notices me, and her step falters. Then she picks up a brisk walk again and makes it to the car before I’ve figured out what exactly I was going to say. All that time sitting on the hood of her car, and I still don’t know.
“I have to go to dinner with all the other girls,” she says, walking straight to the driver’s-side door.
I don’t get off the hood. I just swing my legs around so I face her, and my feet are dangling down by the tire.
I feel like we’re the poster children for “Popular” and “Unpopular.” We couldn’t look more different if we tried. Her ponytail is perfect, perky, with long blonde curls. Mine is lower, boring, my straight brown hair just kind of hanging there. I have no makeup on. She looks like hers was professionally applied.
“How could you not tell me?” I guess I’m going with angry, because my words come out as a cross between furious and bitter. “How could you just ditch me for them and not even tell me? I’ve been walking around school for weeks and I bet everyone knew but me!”
She looks down at her hands, twists her keys between her fingers. She chews on her bottom lip and glances up at me through her lashes, then back down at her hands.
She looks nervous and shy, like the Nicole I know. It chips away at my anger.
“I didn’t think in a million years I’d make it.”
When she looks up at me, she’s herself again, quiet, pained, my best friend. It melts the ice that was freezing around me, making me hate her, or at least the stranger she’d become.
I cross my arms, try to grasp at some of the anger. Because anger is easier than hurt. “You still could have told me you were trying out.”
She laughs, a short, sardonic laugh. “And what would you have said, Kayla?”
I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t say the words. I know what I would have said.
“Exactly. Do you even know how hard it can be to talk to you sometimes? You make fun of everything. Of everyone. If I had told you I wanted to be . . .
this
,” she says, pointing to her uniform, “can you honestly say you would have been supportive?”
There’s no point in speaking. I won’t be able to convince her otherwise because I can’t deny the truth. I would have laughed. I would have reminded her of how insipid and vapid the cheerleaders are. I would have told her they would never accept her, would never let her on the squad.
And I would have been wrong.
“I just thought I’d try out and get cut, and then I could know I’d tried and feel okay about it and you’d never know the difference. But then I made it, and then I realized you’d be mad if I didn’t tell you about trying out . . . and I kept telling myself I’d tell you the next day, and then the next day, and it just snowballed. The longer I waited, the harder it was to tell you.”
She’s twisting the keys so hard in her hands I think the whole key chain might break. “I don’t know, I’m still standing here waiting for you to start making fun of me for this.”
And then she looks up at me, and I see that she’s genuine, and a slice of pure guilt and sorrow slips through me and takes with it the last of my anger.
Because she really does believe that; she really is waiting for me to start laughing at her.
And it hurts. I don’t know if it’s because my best friend thinks I’d laugh at her or if it’s because two weeks ago, I very well might have.
Before Ann, before the pony, before everything got turned upside down, I really might have done that. Just laughed at her, told her it was all so stupid.
But somehow everything has changed. Somehow I’m not that person anymore.
But Nicole doesn’t know that. I guess there’s a lot I haven’t told her, either.
She closes her eyes for a second and takes in a deep, calming breath. “It’s not that I’m a different person, Kayla. It’s that I’ve always wanted this. We both did, in junior high. Remember how we almost crashed Janae’s slumber party but lost the nerve? Remember how we used to write down everything they wore in that Look Book we made and then spent the whole weekend at my house replicating their outfits?”
The memories seem to crash into me all at once, and suddenly I know exactly how she feels, exactly how badly she wants this.
Because I wanted it once too. But I buried it, forced myself to forget when it seemed too painful to dream of it anymore. I gave up on everything because it just seemed easier that way.
She shakes her head, and her ponytail bobs. “But it never worked. We were too different, always on the outside looking in. And then somewhere in the last year or two, you decided that you wanted to be everything they weren’t. You didn’t even notice that
I
still wanted to be everything they were.
“Before this summer . . . it was impossible. But it’s not anymore. And I don’t want to be the shy one in your shadow forever. I’m pretty now. I can be the person I want to be. And maybe that’s shallow, but I’m tired of sitting next to you and making fun of everything I secretly want.”
I swallow the boulder in my throat. “Nicole, I . . . God, I never meant to be that kind of friend.”
She just shrugs one shoulder and keeps twisting her keys. “I know that. But you are. You just assume I’ll always go along with everything you want, and when I brought up things—like sitting with Breanna at lunch—it never even occurred to you that I was serious, that I really wanted to sit over there. You were too busy mocking her IQ.”
I swallow, hating how right she is about all this. Hating that it means she’s spent days, weeks, months agonizing over it all, and I’ve never even noticed. I stuck myself in this box and then expected Nicole to climb right on in with me. “I know. . . . I know. And you’re right. About everything.”