I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader (20 page)

“The prank war was
your
idea!” I practically shouted, drawing a bit of a crowd to our argument. “How can you be mad at me for
that
?”

“Please,” she said, throwing up a hand. “If you don’t know, then it’s not even worth it.”

I felt as if she’d actually used that hand to punch me in the stomach. Where did she get off talking to me like that? Like I was supposed to
know
why the prank war made her so mad? I thought she was psyched about it.

“Have fun at your party,” she shouted as she walked away.

“It’s not my party!” I shouted back, all the frustration of the day going into that one exclamation.

As much as I racked my brain, I couldn’t think of a single reason for Bethany to be pissed about the prank war other than the fact that she was jealous—jealous of the time I was spending with the squad. But it was an extracurricular. Those took up time. Bethany spent five hours a night working on her website. She of all people should understand what it means to make a commitment.

“Hey,” Mindy said, approaching me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go to practice. I feel like I could do about ten million push-ups right about now.”

As we headed off for the locker room, I started to wonder if I had been wrong about Bethany all along. Maybe she wasn’t as cool as I’d thought she was. Maybe she was just selfish and snobby.

Maybe it was time for me to move on.

“I can’t believe I kicked Felice in the face,” I said, my body aching as Mindy and I retreated to the locker room after an exhausting practice. “I’m never going to get all these stunts.”

“Yes you will,” Mindy said. “You’re doing great. You’ve learned a liberty, a scorpion and a double-base extension in less than two weeks. That’s crazy.”

“Now, if I could just learn to dismount without maiming my teammates,” I joked.

We sat down on a bench to try on the new cheerleading kicks Coach Holmes had ordered for us. My body was bruised, battered and way angry at me, but I couldn’t wait to get into those shoes. Somehow just having them made the whole thing seem official.

“They’re so white,” Mindy said, standing in front of the full-length mirror. “They make my feet look like a couple of cruise ships.”

“They’re not that bad,” I said with a laugh.

I was about to get up and check my own reflection when we heard the door swing open. Mindy and I caught each other’s eyes as Tara’s voice filled the locker room. I had thought everyone had already gone home.

“Come on, Phoebe, you have to go,” Tara said. “It’s gonna be fun. Remember fun?”

“Yes, I remember fun,” Phoebe’s morose voice replied. “I’m just not in the mood for a party right now.”

Mindy tiptoed over to me and perched on the bench. We both sat there in rigid silence. Should we make noise and let them know we were there, or eavesdrop like we were already doing? I was too petrified to move, so apparently we were going with option B.

“Pheebs, is there anything we can do?” Whitney’s voice chimed in. “If you just want to talk, we could go over to Dolly’s, have some ice cream.”

“Nah. I think I’m just gonna go home,” Phoebe said.

Her voice broke on the word “home.” I looked at Mindy. I couldn’t take this anymore. So what if she’d told me to stay
away from her—repeatedly? She sounded so heartbroken, I had to try to help.

I stood up, bit back my fear of the senior triumvirate and walked around the corner. They were sitting in a huddle on the low bench, and they all looked startled when they saw me there. Phoebe was as pale as a cloud and her eyes were rimmed with red.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” Whitney was the only one who answered.

“I was just . . . over there and I heard you guys talking, and . . .” I swallowed hard and steeled myself. “Phoebe, I’m really sorry about everything, and if there’s ever anything I can do—”

Suddenly Phoebe burst into tears and ran for the bathroom section of the locker room. I heard a stall door slam and convulsing sobs ricocheted off the tile walls. It was beyond awful. Had anyone ever hated me as much as Phoebe Cook did right then?

“Nice one, brain trust,” Tara said, getting up and following after her friend.

Whitney gave me a sympathetic look before joining them. I grabbed my stuff and headed out the back door with a quick good-bye to Mindy. It was about time for me and my social ineptitude to call it a day.

When I walked into my ever-deteriorating house fifteen minutes later, the first thing I heard was a laugh. A girl’s laugh. A familiarly cloying girl’s laugh.

Sitting in the living room with Gabe, Tucker and Joe was none other than Sage Barnard. She was sipping a soda, twirling her hair around her finger and inching her bare knees closer and closer to my brother’s thigh.

Can you say überslut?

Suddenly every positive my brain had recorded about the upcoming party was forgotten. I forgot about how many people had spoken to me that day who had never acknowledged my existence before. I forgot about the chatter-happy cheerleaders. I forgot about Daniel’s sentence of perfection. I had had a bad day topped off by a horrendous afternoon and two minutes of concentrated misery in the locker room.

I had to take it out on someone. And at that moment, Gabe-rot was the nearest thing I had to a scapegoat.

“Gabe?” I said, dropping my bags on the floor behind the couch. “Can I talk to you? Alone?”

Gabe and Sage looked over their shoulders at me.

“Baby sis! Take a load off! We’re just about to start the
Godfather
marathon,” Gabe said.

“No, thanks. I really need to talk to you,” I said, pointedly ignoring Sage’s presence. “In the kitchen?”

Gabe laughed. “We’re all friends here, dude. Whatever you got to say to me, you can say in front of my buds.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, riding my wave of righteous indignation. I walked around to the front of the couch and lifted my chin. “It’s about the party. Thanks to someone’s serious lack of subtlety, this thing has turned into an open house.”

Gabe blinked. “So?”

“So? You swore—no parties,” I said. “Mom and Dad are going to freak.”

Now they all laughed. Sage was sitting in my living room, laughing at me.

“Mom and Dad are not going to freak, because Mom and Dad are not going to find out,” Gabe said.

“Please! They
always
find out,” I said. “Can’t we just tone it down a little? Invite a few close friends or something? Does it have to be the party of the century?”

There was a moment of prolonged silence. Gabe looked
around at Tucker and Joe and nodded slowly, as if he were mulling it over. For a split second I believed that I had gotten through to him.

Then he cracked up laughing again and the rest of them joined in. “I’m sorry, I just can’t keep a straight face,” he said. He stood up, cupped my face in his hands and tilted his head condescendingly. “Poor little baby,” he said, patting my cheek. “Why don’t you go up to your room and I’ll come read you a bedtime story in a couple of hours?”

This sent Tucker, Joe and Sage into hysterics. I felt like I was about to burst into tears. My brother had embarrassed me a million times in the past, but how could he humiliate me in front of his friends like that? In front of Sage!

I grabbed my stuff, ran upstairs and slammed my door. Gabe-rot was so going to pay for this. I had no idea how, but I was going to make him pay.

The party was like a scene from a movie. More because I was sitting in the corner, munching on popcorn and watching it happen, than because it was so wild. Bethany hadn’t returned my calls, so I was hanging with Mindy. We had taken refuge in the little alcove near the stairs for most of the night, watching as more and more people I didn’t know poured in through every available door. The noise level hovered somewhere around the decibel of Times Square, Millennium Eve.

Sage and Gabe were sitting on one end of the couch. Sage’s hands were on his chest, her head kept touching his shoulder and Gabe was smiling like heaven had plunked an angel right in his lap.

Barf.

Daniel wasn’t there yet, so he hadn’t been subjected to this disgusting display. I wasn’t sure whether to hope he’d show and see what a bitch Sage was, or whether to hope he
wouldn’t
show and therefore not get his heart broken.

It’s tough having a conscience.

“I cannot believe her,” I said, looking away before the image of Sage twisting one of Gabe’s curls around her finger was burned on my brain forever.

“I know. Why doesn’t she just break up with Daniel already?” Mindy said.

“Does she
want
to break up with Daniel?” I asked, intrigued.

“Who knows? She kept me on the phone for hours the other night, debating it,” Mindy said. “’Oh, Gabe is
sooo
hot. But Daniel and I have been together
forever.
We have something
sooo
deep,’” Mindy said, fluttering her eyelashes and tilting her head back dramatically. “I was like, ‘Spare me! Get a life!’”

“You
said
that?” I asked.

“No! Not really,” she replied.

“Well, why not? If that’s how you feel. . . .”

“I can’t even imagine saying that out loud to her,” Mindy said, staring down at the empty soda cup in her hand. She smiled. “You probably think I’m a total loser, right?”

“No!” I said. “Not at all. Sometimes I wish I was
better
at stopping myself before I said things. It can be a good thing, trust me.”

“Yeah, well, not all the time,” Mindy said. “Don’t get me wrong, Sage and I have been friends since kindergarten and she’s always been there for me,” she said. “There are just some things about her I can’t stand.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said.
Like everything
, I added silently. “I can’t imagine her being there for anyone but herself.”

“Believe me, Sage is a good person to have on your side when you need her,” Mindy said. “All that energy she puts into being a bitch? Imagine what it’s like when she’s using it to defend you.”

“Why would you need defending?” I asked.

Mindy looked down into her soda and shrugged. “Everyone needs defending at some point, right? Sage was really nice to have around during my awkward phase.”

“Oh, yeah. I had one of those,” I said, nodding. “Up until
about a year ago, my nose was way too big for my face and I had a mouth full of metal.”

“Really?” Mindy said, studying me. “For me it was scoliosis and a unibrow.”

“Wow,” I said. Mindy laughed. She was so beautiful, I couldn’t imagine her having an awkward phase, but I guess no one is ever perfectly happy with how they look.

“All right! Let’s go! Girl-on-girl Twister!” Tucker shouted. He stepped onto the chair-and-a-half, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Come one, come all!”

Ugh! Was he kidding?

“Kitchen?” I said to Mindy, blanching.

“Kitchen.”

We got up and scurried for the relative safety of the kitchen table. The keg and a huge bowl of Skull Punch (I don’t know why Gabe’s friends called it that) sat on the island in the center of the room. A few people hovered around while a guy with blond curls worked the tap and another, more meaty type sloppily served punch into cups. I stepped into the room, but when I went to lift my foot again, it hesitated a second before peeling off the floor.