I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader (31 page)

This boy could not possibly be any more perfect. For the first time ever, I felt like I really might be falling in love. This had to be what it felt like.

And then he stopped and there was nothing but silence. A breeze rustled the palms above our heads.

“Well?” he said hopefully. “What do you think?”

At that moment I stopped wondering about whether we were ever going to kiss. I leaned forward, knocking our knees together, and kissed him myself, right on the lips.

For a split second he didn’t move. He didn’t respond in any way. And for a split second I thought I was going to have to kill myself right there.

But then, he slid the guitar away and cupped my face in his hands. It was such a sweet and tender thing to do, it sent everything inside of me racing. He was kissing me back! Daniel was kissing me back!

When we finally broke apart, I was all flushed and my eyelids felt so heavy, they didn’t want to open. Daniel’s were droopy too, and he looked a little dazed. Like he didn’t understand what was happening. But then he broke into a slow, wide grin.

“A girl who makes the first move,” he said. “I like it.”

I giggled and tried to stop my hands from shaking. I couldn’t believe I’d just done that.

“But I get to make the second,” he said.

Then, before I knew what was happening, Daniel had pulled me into his lap and was kissing me like I’d never been kissed before.

It was another movie moment. But this one lasted a good forty-five minutes. All PG-rated, of course.

We took a big yellow bus to the competition. A big yellow bus with a caravan of about thirty cars behind it. Parents, students, teachers—all with their cars covered in blue and yellow paint or trailing blue and yellow balloons and streamers—followed us from the Sand Dune High parking lot all the way to Clearwater High, where the competition was being held. I had never seen anything like it.

“This is insane,” I said, looking out the window as we made a turn so I could see the trail of cars, my parents’ and Gabe’s included.

“People take their cheerleading very seriously around here,” Whitney shouted.

She had to shout to be heard. The bus was
loud.
Sixteen hyped-up cheerleaders and their coach laughing, gabbing, pretending they weren’t scared to death? That translates into deafening. You’d think that after spending half the night gossiping, baking cookies and dancing together in Chandra’s living room, we would be totally out of steam, but we weren’t. I was more hyped-up than I’d ever been. All morning, I had felt first-day-of-school jitters compounded about twenty times. And also I really had to pee, like, every second. Somehow, shouting and laughing at the top of my lungs made it all feel better. I supposed everyone else was working the same remedy.

I reached into my bag and toyed with Jordan’s lucky pen. It had arrived via UPS that morning and I had cried when I opened the package. It was the pen Derek Jeter had signed a baseball with for her two summers ago at Yankee Stadium, and it had been her lucky charm ever since. (Jordan worshipped Derek in a seriously unhealthy way. Like a borderline-stalker way.) So basically it was a big deal that she had let it out of her sight—that she had dared trust it to the United Parcel Service. I wished she was there in person, but having the Derek Jeter pen meant a lot.

We arrived at Clearwater, a one-story structure with a huge
WELCOME CHEERLEADERS
banner draped across the front door, and clambered out of the bus. A crowd of girls in yellow-and-black warm-up suits, their hair crimped and slicked back into ponytails, rushed inside ahead of us. The second we were through the door, we were assaulted by the spirit cheer from all directions.

“We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how ’bout you!?”

My whole squad instantly took the cheer up without even blinking. Thank God I was toward the back. I was too dumbstruck to process anything that quickly.

“We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how ’bout you!?”

The entire Sand Dune squad, minus me, pointed at the crimped bumblebee girls. Once they did their round, everyone applauded and we were able to move on.

The school lobby was awash with color. A squad of girls in black and green huddled in the corner while their captain gave instructions, her tone intense. As we passed by a hallway, I saw a couple of girls practicing a stunt and nearly taking the climber’s head off because the ceiling was too low. Something slammed into my shoulder as a pack of red-and-white girls jogged by me and crowded into the bathroom. No
one bothered to apologize, but I didn’t blame them. There was too much adrenaline bounding around to think straight.

“How many teams are in this thing, anyway?” I asked, pressing my damp palms into my skirt.

“Twelve in our division. Plus Clearwater will probably do an exhibition performance,” Coach Holmes said.

“The hosting team doesn’t compete,” Phoebe explained.

“Twelve?” I said, my throat going dry. “Isn’t that kind of a lot?”

“Don’t think about that now,” Tara said, grabbing my arm. “We have more important issues to deal with.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like your hair,” Chandra told me.

I knew this was coming. Everyone else on the squad had their blonde tresses pulled back in French braids and tied off with the same blue, yellow and white bow. Everyone except Whitney, who had managed to secure her choppy ‘do back with what looked like a year’s supply of hairspray and more bobby pins than I knew existed on Earth. Uniformity definitely mattered.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Tara said, pulling me into a corner with Chandra and Whitney.

“Let’s do what, exactly?” I asked as Chandra crouched to the ground and yanked open a duffel bag. “Please tell me you don’t have Herbal Essences Amazon Gold in there.”

“I wish,” Tara said.

“Don’t move and this will be painless,” Whitney told me.

She lied. First they emptied about half a can of aerosol spray into my hair (good-bye, ozone layer!). My forehead took such a dousing I knew I’d be unclogging my pores until the end of time. Then Whitney smoothed my hair back behind my ears and started shoving bobby pins in along the base of my skull.

“Um . . . ow!” I said.

“Be a woman,” Tara said testily.

Chandra clenched one of the SDH bows in her teeth and examined the back of my head. “She’s got a little length back here,” she said, pulling at my hair so hard, my head snapped back. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ten minutes of prodding, yanking and griping later, and I had a My Little Pony–sized ponytail sticking out the back of my head, secured with the approved SDH cheerleader ribbon. My scalp burned and my temples throbbed. Everything felt so tight, I was sure my eyes were pulled into slits.

Tara, Whitney and Chandra stepped back to check their work.

“Not bad,” Whitney said with a nod.

“She looks the same from the front,” Chandra said. “Well . . . almost.”

“You know,” Tara said, scrutinizing me. “You really should think about dyeing your hair.”

Whitney cracked up laughing and pulled Tara away, protesting. “What? It’s just a suggestion!”

“This place is insane!” Mindy said, appearing through the crowd with Sage and Autumn in tow. “I’ve never seen so much eyeliner in my life.”

“What did they do to you?” Sage asked, snorting a laugh.

“They tried to make me one of you,” I said.

“Valiant effort,” Sage replied.

I wasn’t sure if that was a dig, but I let it slide. Our truce was delicate enough as it was and now was not the time to test its strength. I would not be responsible for another pyramid takedown.

“Oh, Goddess,” Autumn said. “Look who’s here.”

My heart thumped hard. The West Wind High cheerleaders, in all their green-and-white glory, filed through the
front doors. Their hair was curled up into high ponytails atop their heads and they were all wearing green glitter eye shadow that made them look like Halloween witches. They didn’t even wait for the spirit cheer to hit them. They fired the first shot.

“We got spirit, yes we do! We got spirit, how ’bout you!?”

I was so glad they didn’t point at us. Our squad was all over the place just then and the four of us trying to answer would have been pathetic. The girls in red and white answered the cheer, and then the West Wind squad moved through the lobby, right toward us. My pulse pounded in my ears. It was like I was ready for a rumble.

They almost walked right by, but then a particularly tall, powerful-looking girl saw us huddled there and paused.

“Hey! Look who it is!” she said with a smile. “I hope you have the timing of your routine down right. Wouldn’t want the clock to run out on ya.”

Her squad laughed and a couple of them slapped hands.

“Look! It’s the AA girl,” another West Winder chimed in, looking at Sage with glee. “Did you bring your flask?”

I felt my face burn in sympathy for Sage. I was about to say something when Sage stepped up between me and Mindy and crossed her arms over her chest. Her face was all attitude.

“Well, at least
I
have to be
drunk
to suck,” she said with a little tilt of her head.

A burst of a laugh escaped from my lips. A couple of our rivals’ mouths dropped open, but no one said a word. It was classic. So
that
was what Mindy was talking about. Sage on your side
was
good!

“Come on, ladies,” Sage said.

We all followed her toward the gym where the rest of the
squad was gathering, leaving the West Wind High Dolphins behind to stew over their lack of a comeback.

“This school is totally substandard,” a black-and-gold cheerleader said to her squad as we all gathered outside the gym to wait our turn. “They don’t even have a staging area.”

“This competition should’ve never been allowed to happen here,” someone replied.

I looked at Phoebe. “Um, what’s a staging area?” I asked.

“Like an extra gym or something where we would all wait to go on,” Phoebe said. “You don’t usually have to stand in a lobby like this.”

“We have a practice gym, but it’s kind of condemned at the moment?” a girl in dark blue and white said to us. “
Some
other school thought it would be fun to let off about fifty stink bombs in there.” She rolled her eyes in the direction of the black-and-gold cheerleaders.

“Prank war?” I said, catching on.

“Oh, yeah,” one of her friends replied.

“Trust me, we feel your pain,” I said.

Spectators were still streaming in through the front door, and I looked past the girl’s shoulder, stunned. I was not really seeing Bethany Goow right then, was I?

“Bethany!” I shouted, louder than was strictly necessary.

She took one look at me and her face clenched like she was sucking one of those Listerine Strips.

“What’d they do to you?” she asked, turning me around to see my pathetic pony.

“Forget that. What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“Well, if I’m gonna be a good friend, I figured I had to at least
try
to understand this cult of yours,” she said. Then she leaned in and lowered her voice. “Besides, the better I know
their tactics, the easier it’ll be for me to extricate you when things get dicey.”

I laughed and hugged her. “Thanks for coming.”

“No prob,” she said, actually blushing a bit. “Somebody has to heckle the other squads, right?” She smiled and walked into the gym, looking the West Wind cheerleaders up and down as she went. “What’re you guys supposed to be, leprechauns?”

I was still laughing when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find Daniel standing there with a smile. But before I could say anything, Sage flew in out of nowhere.

“Danny! I’m
so
glad you came!” she said, hugging him. “I wasn’t even sure I could go on without you here.”

Daniel looked at me over her shoulder and raised his eyebrows. “Yeah,” he said when Sage released him. “Break a leg.”

He knocked her on the arm, then leaned down and gave me a lingering kiss on the lips. My knees almost went out from under me. What was I going to do out there without my knees?

“Remember the lessons of the pogo ball,” he said quietly.