2
Freshman Fall
In Boston I went to an all girls Catholic school where the most well-liked girls played 6th grade basketball and there was no such thing as a cheerleading squad. But when I moved to St. Louis, because virtually all movies about high school portray cheerleaders as popular and pretty – the ideal embodiment of all that the quintessential high school girl wants to be – and because I was, at that point, still very naïve, I convinced Rudy to try out for football cheerleading our freshman year. We were bad – too inflexible to be good at toe touches and too weak to be good bases for stunting – but somehow, when the final lists were posted, we found we had made the JV squad along with two other freshman girls and a handful of sophomores and juniors. Initially, I was ecstatic (and so was my mother, a former college cheerleader with the old uniforms hanging in the back of her closet to prove it), and the feeling lasted for days – until our first official practice.
Cheerleading, it turned out, was not all I had hoped it would be. We had practice for an hour and a half every day after school and because the volleyball team used the gymnasium for their own practice, we were forced into the floor-to-ceiling windowed lobby between the locker rooms and the gym. Intermittently throughout practice boys would walk by, gawking at us while we jumped and shouted. Often (only if it was a group of boys, never one boy on his own) they would yell things or whistle and Rudy and I would turn our heads and get distracted by their handsome smiles or their boyish hair flipping and Kendell, the Varsity cheerleading captain, would scold us for our inattention.
Kendell was a senior and she was short and muscular and pretty, with blonde hair that kinked naturally into tight spiral curls (and when she ironed it straight, it was nearly three inches longer than normal and she looked like a completely different person). And Kendell was, for lack of a better word, an enormous, intimidating bitch. Both JV and Varsity practiced together and Kendell spent the entire hour and a half berating the underclassmen on the squad – singling us out to do jumps, making us recite all of the words to the school fight song, at top volume, often in pairs or all alone – and being especially cruel when boys from the football team would walk past on their way to the football field. Once she made Natalie, a quiet junior who despite trying out every year was still on the JV squad, hold the splits until she cried and two other girls had to usher her into the bathroom so she could regain her composure. It seemed like Rudy was the only girl on the squad who wasn’t completely terrified of Kendell, and because of this, Kendell hated her. By association I could tell that she hated me too (though not with the same passion – a watered down, residual form of hate). What she didn’t know – what none of the other girls on the cheerleading squad, who all thought I was as fearless and stubborn as Rudy knew – was that in reality, defying Kendell petrified me. When she called out my name, my heart would lurch in my chest, though I willed it to stop. When Kendell’s back was turned, as she was teaching us the moves to a dance or taking a drink from her water bottle during a break, Rudy would catch my attention and make faces at me, mocking Kendell’s drill sergeant gestures. Sometimes the other girls would see her and laugh. I always smiled back at Rudy when she did her impressions though I lived in silent, paralyzing fear that one day Kendell would turn around and catch us.
Aside from suffering under Kendell’s dictator-like captainship, cheerleading was hard. I wasn’t good at remembering the dance steps, my arms shook when I was basing a stunt and practices made me tired and cranky, yet unsatisfied, unlike how I felt after a long, tiring run. The best part of cheerleading, perhaps its only saving grace, was that we got to ride the football boys’ bus to all of the away football games with the junior and senior boys. Rudy and I always shared a seat, and we always ran to the front of the line to board the bus so that we could sit as close to the back as possible (the football team sat at the back of the bus and the cheerleaders in the front with the football coaches). This was yet another thing that seemed to irk Kendell, who sometimes tried to sabotage our efforts by putting us in charge of carrying the heavy bags of pom poms, thus ensuring we would be the last girls on the bus and would have to sit beside the hairy, grim-faced coaches. Rudy endured it like a champion. On those nights we would sit cross-legged in the front seat of the bus, hunched over a piece of paper that Rudy held between us, playing games to predict which guys we might marry and the cities where we would live. But Kendell had a vendetta. One afternoon, cursed by the gods of high school misfortune, I jammed my school locker, inside which sat my cheerleading shoes, and to go to practice without the appropriate shoes was a first-degree offense in Kendell’s book. Rudy and I yanked at the metal handle of my locker, spinning the combination over and over again in frustration. Finally Rudy shoved a pen into the edge of the door and managed to pry it open and we hurried down to the sports lobby while the squad was in the middle of stretching.
“You’re late,” Kendell yelled, and my face burned bright red.
“I’m sorry.” Rudy glanced at my beet red cheeks then shrugged her shoulders. “I couldn’t find my socks.”
I avoided eye contact with Kendell because it actually caused me physical stomach pain, but Rudy stared her dead in the face while Kendell’s lip twitched in fury. The rest of the girls raised their heads from their knees to watch the feud between the fierce captain and the fearless freshman.
“Go run laps,” she said. “Around the entire school. You too, Jillian.” I was, of course, an afterthought.
Five times over the three-month-long football season we were sent to run laps around the campus, first two, then three, then four, but it never fazed Rudy, or me for that matter, at least not once we were out of Kendell’s presence. We would talk while we jogged, cursing Kendell and her “hillbilly Southern accent” (she had moved from Texas the year before she started at Ogden) or the ridiculous, over-sized navy bows she wore in her hair on game days, and when we ran past the football field some of the guys would turn to look at us, and we would smile and wave and speed up a bit as long as they were still watching us, and all of these little things made running seem to me a reward, not a punishment.
Boys were always drawn to Rudy, obviously because she was beautiful, but also, I think, because there was a part of her personality that appealed so strongly to them. She was like them in a way – confident, sporty and honest – and unlike the other beautiful girls at Ogden, Rudy’s allure was uncomplicated. She didn’t need make up or fancy clothes – she was just as remarkable in a t-shirt as she was in a formal gown. I think the most important element was that she knew this, which was something most teenage girls, me included, could not be convinced of regarding their own looks. So it was Rudy, the freshman girl in her jeans and hooded sweatshirts, who attracted sidelong glances from all the boys in the school. They were always coming up to her in the hallway between classes, throwing one bulky arm over her thin shoulders and pulling her into their chests in a way that was both crude and boyishly charming. They would smile at her and shout down the hall when they were too far away to touch her, and they would offer us rides home from school. That whole first year of high school, before either of us could drive, Rudy and I never needed to take the bus or walk (though sometimes we did it anyway, just because we wanted to). To my great surprise, some of the older boys would talk to me as well. They would tease me the same way they teased Rudy, rubbing their open palms on the top of my head to mess up my hair or coming up behind me in the hall and picking me up off my feet when I wasn’t expecting it. I was in awe, in pure delight, just to have so many boys (good looking boys too, as many of the boys at Ogden were) around me. Rudy enjoyed it too. She was always happy at school. Particularly, I learned in late October of that year, in the company of Houston Jones, the junior quarterback for the football team.
It seems weird to describe a boy as beautiful, but that’s the word that always came to my mind when I saw Houston. He was tall, with dark hair and sinewy muscles that popped up when he flexed his biceps or when he threw a
long pass to one of his receivers. He had big, straight, white teeth and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen on a boy. I thought he was doing a disservice to Ogden girls, wasting so much of his time covering up his handsome face with a football helmet, but to each his own, right?
We were at a home football game, standing on the sideline in our short white skirts and tops emblazoned with “Ogden” across the chest in thick, navy letters, and instead of watching the game, I was paying attention to how, because it was already dark out, the lights on the field bounced off of my pom poms, which lay on the ground in front of my feet. For the most part I found football to be utterly boring. But something had happened – apparently, we had scored – and suddenly everyone in the stands was on their feet, stomping the bleachers and clapping their hands and shouting until all the noise combined into one low rumble. I grabbed my poms off of the ground and thrust them into the air in my fists, and I kicked and cheered along with the other nine girls in formation around me. As the noise died down, Rudy leaned toward me.
“What do you think about Houston?”
“Houston Jones?” I was confused. I looked out toward the field, where he was standing with several other players huddled around him, mud and grass clumps streaked across one of his shoulders.
“Do you know any other Houstons?”
I did not. “Like, in general?”
“Sure,” Rudy answered.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”
“He asked me to the Fall Ball yesterday.”
The first thing I felt, before I felt surprised, was deeply hurt that she had waited a full day to tell me. “Seriously? What did you say?”
“I haven’t answered him yet,” Rudy said. “But I think I’m going to say yes. Why not?” She smiled, hopefully.
Before I could answer, one of the girls began a cheer, and Rudy and I both sprung into action as though someone had flipped a switch to activate us, swinging our arms in unison with the other girls.
The Fall Ball was Ogden’s fall semester equivalent to the prom, though it wasn’t quite as formal. It would be held on a Saturday night, two weeks away, and I had not yet been asked. Rudy and I had talked about it, about who we’d like to go with and how we would wear our hair, but it had not seemed imperative that we secure dates yet – not real, live ones anyway. We still had weeks to think about that. Now, with the dance two weeks away and Rudy with not just a date, but one of the most coveted dates in the school, I felt cold panic start to settle against my chest. It remained there and grew throughout the rest of the football game, and when we won and the girls went wild, I waved my arms but was unable to yell, my throat constricted with anxiety.
There’s little to say about how the Fall Ball turned out other than to note I found a date (one of Houston’s friends from the football team), and I was extremely nervous and, as a result, drank too much at the party afterward. As a whole, it was fairly uneventful. The most interesting thing about the Fall Ball was that it created a deeper and more significant layer of loathing between Kendell and Rudy because, apparently, Kendell had a crush on Houston too. This we discovered when we were both left off the guest list for the end-of-the-season cheerleading sleepover at Kendell’s house and Deena, one of the other freshman girls on the squad, called us from the sleepover, put her phone on speaker and we hunched over the other end of the line and listened in as Kendell ranted about Rudy – about how she had only made the squad because her sister had been the coach’s favorite student, how Rudy was so skinny it was almost disgusting, you could almost see her ribs and her shoulder blades poking through her skin, how the boys only talked to her because they thought she was a naive, easy slut and how Houston Jones would break up with her as soon as she slept with him because that was all he was after with her anyway. We didn’t get to hear the entirety of the conversation but we heard enough, and when the phone line went blank we looked up to meet one another’s eyes. Mine were wide and incredulous; hers were narrowed. Thank God, I had thought, football season was over and we were free from cheerleading, free from Kendell’s company.
“What a bitch,” Rudy had said, her voice small and injured.
“I can’t believe she’d say that about you,” I added.
“I’m kind of surprised, too,” she said softly. She flipped her phone shut and slid it across the carpet. “But whatever. It doesn’t matter – she can think what she wants.”
This was true; she wasn’t just saying it. I believed Rudy literally took nothing negative to heart, not that I could see. We were silent for a few seconds, sitting on the carpet in her bedroom, staring at the phone several feet away from us now.
“I have to go home tonight,” I said, finally, looking at my watch. “My mom wants me to play tennis with her early tomorrow morning.”
“Let’s watch a movie before you leave. And ice cream sundaes?”
My stomach growled beneath my sweatshirt. “Oh my God, you read my mind.”
That autumn was also the first time I met Rudy’s sister, Marta, and her brother, Kent. The week of Ogden’s five day Thanksgiving break (private high schools, I discovered after I went off to college, were also blessed with longer breaks than most public schools), Kent came home to visit his parents for the first time in nearly a year. When he’d called in the middle of a Wednesday night dinner to tell them he would be around for the holiday, Mrs. Golden had nearly shrieked into the phone, her face split wide open with an enormous smile, one hand clutching her chest, just like in a movie. Mr. Golden had been less impressed, or at least less theatrical, but the corners of his lips had turned up into a small smile beneath his bushy gray mustache and he had beckoned the phone from his wife at the end of the call and confirmed his son’s flight schedule and arrival time, something that seemed to me a distinctly male way of expressing emotions you felt you could not say in words.
One morning, a week after his phone call, I was in the Goldens’ kitchen, bare foot in lace trimmed pajama shorts and with un-brushed teeth, rummaging through the pantry for some breakfast when I heard the doorknob wiggling, the soft suctioning of the door as it opened, and footsteps on the hardwood floor. I froze with my arm in midair, my hand outstretched to grab a box of Frosted Flakes, and I strained my ears to listen. If it was a burglar, I thought, I could outrun him, and I mentally mapped the fastest route out of the house.
But as the footsteps proceeded toward the kitchen, I did not move. Then Kent popped his head in through the swinging kitchen door.
“Hey, mom.” His face flashed with a big, sentimental smile for half a second before it crumpled into confusion. “You’re not my mother.”
He stepped into the kitchen. He was thinner now than in the photos that hung in the trophy room, and he had a layer of dark stubble covering his chin, but I could recognize him instantly as Rudy’s brother.
“Sorry, no,” I said. “I’m Rudy’s friend. Jillian.”
“Nice to meet you.” He didn’t reach to shake my hand; instead he turned to pull open the refrigerator door and peer inside.
He didn’t say anything more, and I reached again for the cereal, preparing to retreat back upstairs to the safety of Rudy’s room, where she still lay sleeping and where I would probably finish off the half empty box of cereal all by myself and hide the empty box at the bottom of Rudy’s trashcan.
“Hey, don’t leave because of me,” Kent said from inside the fridge as I tried to slip past.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I shrugged one shoulder to further emphasize my nonchalance.
“You’re going to eat that without milk?”
“It’s fine that way.”
“No, it’s not. Nobody likes cereal without milk.” He emerged from the fridge cradling a gallon of milk and a bottle of orange juice in the crook of his elbow. “Here, sit with me. I guess nobody else is around?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Figures.” He rolled his eyes, which were a brilliant shade of green, an even more vibrant version of Rudy’
s. “I tell them I’ll be here this morning and they make plans anyway.”
“Actually,” I said, taking a seat at one of the stools that nestled up to the long kitchen bar. “I don’t think they were expecting you until Wednesday or something.” It was Sunday. I knew the Goldens’ schedule by heart. It was the calendar by which I planned my life, and not only was I more than confident Rudy’s brother had arrived days earlier than planned, but I felt a prick in my chest at his insinuation that his parents were negligent or forgetful or uncaring.
He had picked up the cereal box that I’d placed on the counter and started pouring it into two over-sized bowls, but he looked up when I spoke.
Golden Page 5
