I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader

by Kieran Scott

  “Hey,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m running away from home.”

  Ooooookay. I noticed her one hand was clutching a duffel bag with a pillow shoved through the handles while the other clung to her backpack. Apparently she wasn’t kidding. But that didn’t explain what she was doing on my doorstep. I thought she wanted nothing to do with me.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, her voice about to crack.

  “Um . . . sure,” I said, stepping aside. She walked in and looked around, taking in every detail of her former home. My heart went out to her. Why would she come here, of all places? A house that would undoubtedly bring back a million memories.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just, I couldn’t go to Whitney’s or Tara’s,” Phoebe said, as if reading my mind. “They’re driving me crazy. And you said if you could do anything . . .”

  God, she looked really tired. “Here. Let me take your bag,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she gave up the duffel.

  I was unsure of what I was supposed to do. “Can I . . . get you anything?”

  Phoebe smiled slightly and I was pretty sure it was the first time I’d ever seen her do it. “Could I just . . . lie down for a while?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “The living room’s kind of a mess. But we could go to my room.”

  The instant I said it, I regretted it. My room had been her room not so long ago. In her clearly fragile state, walking in there might just push her over the edge. But it was too late. Phoebe was already headed upstairs. She walked right to my room and stepped through the door. I placed her bag down on the floor and pulled her pillow out for her.

  “Do you really hate the pink?” she asked.

  “I . . . uh . . . pink’s not really my color,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. Then she started to cry.

  “We could go to my parents’ room,” I said quickly. I hated seeing people cry.

  “Why are you being nice to me?” she asked, sitting down on my bedspread. She covered her face with both hands.

  ’Cause you’re a blubbering mass of neuroticness? my brain answered.

  But she did have a point. Just that morning she had told me to mind my own business, and now I was welcoming her into my house and offering her whatever she wanted. But how could I not? She looked so wan and sick and sad.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, handing her the pillow. “Just lay down. You’ll feel better if you sleep.”

  “I haven’t slept in days,” she said, holding her pillow to her.

  I sat down on the edge of my desk chair and bit my bottom lip. “Do you . . . I mean . . . if you want to talk—”

  “Did you ever just think your entire family was completely insane?” Phoebe blurted, yanking a tissue out of the box on my bedside table.

  “All the time,” I replied.

  She let out a short laugh and wiped her face dry, then stared down at the crumpled tissue in her fingers. Suddenly I had this vision of Phoebe as a little girl, sitting in this very same room, crying over some grade-school injustice. Maybe she had been a bitch ever since I met her, but she was just another person, really. A person with major problems at the moment.

  “Swear to God you’ll never tell anybody?” she said, looking up at me.

  “I swear,” I replied.

  “No one knows the whole story. Not even Tara,” she said.

  “I promise. I have practically no friends to speak of, so who would I tell?” I said.

  Phoebe half smiled at the truth of this statement and I pulled my knees up under my chin, ready to be the good listener. I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued to potentially be the only person who knew Phoebe’s sordid story, but that wasn’t my motivation. The girl needed a friend and it seemed like, for whatever reason, hers weren’t doing the job just then. I wasn’t about to turn her away.

  “Okay, so, my dad is, like, this compulsive gambler,” Phoebe said, playing with the tissue. “He was in Gamblers Anonymous for a while, but he stopped going about a year ago and I thought that meant he was, you know, like, cured.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So about three months ago, him and my mom have this huge blowout fight and they’re saying we’re going to lose the house and all this stuff,” she continued. “So I come downstairs and ask them what’s going on and it turns out my dad’s taken out a second mortgage and some other loan on the house, and he’s defaulted on all of them.”

  “Omigod,” I said, the air rushing out of me.

  “He was betting all our money on dog races!” Phoebe said, laughing bitterly. “Dog races!”

  “I didn’t even know they actually had dog races,” I said.

  “I know!” Phoebe replied. “And this was going on for ages. Like, while he was in GA,” she continued. “So these people come and they take all our stuff. Like, repo guys or whatever, and my mom has to get two jobs and I’ve been working at the Burger King downtown, which makes me smell like onions all the time, and we had to move in with my aunt Gladys, and my father . . . my father has been going to the track instead of his GA meetings, so my mom just kicked him out.”

  “Phoebe, I’m so sorry,” I said. Part of me wanted to get up and hug her, but I held back. We weren’t exactly there in our relationship. In fact, we were only about five minutes into our relationship.

  “So, still think your family is totally insane?” Phoebe asked.

  “Not so much,” I said lightly.

  She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue and I could tell she was trying to keep from bawling again. I rolled my chair over to the tissue box, pulled out a couple and handed them to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, sniffling. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch to you when you first moved here. I just . . . I’m so mad.” She took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched her fists. “But I know I shouldn’t be mad at you.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I totally understand.”

  And I did. I did now.

  “I think I’m just gonna lay down,” she said, putting her pillow on top of mine. She stretched out and turned on her side, tucking her arm under the pillow, the same way I always did before I went to sleep.

  “Okay. I’ll just go study downstairs,” I said.

  I picked up my stuff and shut out the desk light. The sun was just starting to go down and I was glad. It gave the room that comforting, gray feeling. Like bedtime back when I was little.

  “Annisa?” she said as I started out the door.

  I paused, my heart thumping for some reason. “Yeah?”

  Phoebe smiled and yawned. “Thanks for not slamming the door in my face.”

  I smiled back. “No problem.”

  A few hours later, the doorbell broke the silence so suddenly, it almost knocked me out of my chair. I raced to the front door to keep it from ringing again and waking Phoebe. Gabe and his buddies had been out all day and I’d taken the phone off the hook so nothing could disturb her snooze fest and my studying. I’d been at it so long, I got a head rush as I slid to the door once again.

  This time I found Tara, Bobby, Christopher and Mindy standing there, all wearing head-to-toe black. Bobby and Christopher had even smudged their faces with black paint, commando style. I didn’t like the look of this.

  “We’ve been trying to call you for an hour,” Tara said, barely looking at me. “We’re going to West Wind.”

  “For what?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

  “That game was a total setup,” Bobby replied. “We’re going over there to show them who the real winners are.”

  “Let’s go,” Christopher Healy said, turning away.

  Mindy shot me a helpless look. For the first time I noticed at least a half dozen cars idling in and around my driveway, each packed with people.

  “I think you guys are going to have to do this one without me,” I said. From the look on Mindy’s face, this wasn’t anything I wanted to get involved in. Besides, I couldn’t leave Phoebe upstairs alone.

  Tara reeled on
me. I could tell she’d been waiting for just such an opening. “Why don’t you put your actions where your mouth is?” she said snottily. (Eloquent she’s not.) “Weren’t you the one going on about the team this morning?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Well, we’re all doing this. As a team. Either you’re in or you’re out,” Tara said.

  “You really think restarting an illegal prank war is going to solve all our problems?” I blurted.

  Christopher scoffed and raised his hand to wave me away. “Forget her. Let’s go.”

  “No way,” Bobby Goow said unexpectedly. “She started this whole thing. She’s gonna help us finish it.”

  Everybody turned and stared me down. I felt my face heating up as I clutched the doorknob. I could just do what I knew was right and back out. I could close the door in their faces and go down as the loser wuss of the century. Or I could go along and hope for the best. Be a team player.

  I stared into Tara Timothy’s defiant eyes and noticed the triumphant spark there. She expected me to stay behind. She expected me to wuss out. And that was the only thing I needed to know to do the dumbest thing ever.

  “Fine. I’m in,” I said. “Give me two seconds.”

  It’s all in good fun. West Wind deserves it after today, I told myself as I jogged back upstairs and changed as quietly as possible. It’s amazing the things I can convince myself to do when my competitive side kicks in. I scribbled Phoebe a note and left.

  “What are we doing?” I whispered to Mindy on our way to Bobby’s truck.

  “They won’t tell me,” she whispered back. “They won’t tell any of the underclassmen.”

  “That can’t be good,” I said.

  “Hey, T! Where’s Phoebe?” Whitney called out the passenger side of a gold TrailBlazer.

  “Who knows?” Tara said in a fed-up voice. She might as well have said, “Who cares?”

  “She’s here,” I said, mostly to shove Tara’s face in it. You don’t know where your best friend is, but I do. Petty, of course, but my ego needed to fight back over being mocked out of the safety of my house and into this escapade.

  “What?” Tara snapped, pausing beside the truck.

  “She’s sleeping. Up in my room,” I said.

  “What is she doing here?” Tara asked.

  “Well, let’s go get her,” Bobby said.

  I ran over and got in front of Bobby, stopping his forward progress. He was ten times my size, but I wasn’t about to back down. Not on this.

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  “Whatever, midget,” he said, trying to step past me.

  I sidestepped in front of him. “She’s not coming with us,” I said firmly.

  Bobby’s face grew irate and I wondered if he’d ever shoved a girl. Or a midget.

  “Bobby! Forget it!” Tara said. Her expression had completely shifted. She looked concerned and confused. Maybe even a little bit hurt. “Let’s just go.”

  Bobby shot me one last threatening sneer, then gave up on me and got behind the wheel. I guess Tara had realized that if Phoebe was crashing at my house, something must be seriously wrong. When I got into the truck next to Mindy, I saw Tara shoot me a curious look in the rearview mirror, but I pretended not to notice.

  I wasn’t going to be the one to explain what was going on with her so-called best friend. That was something she needed to find out for herself.

  Mindy and I stood off to the side in the West Wind parking lot as the other kids piled out of the trucks and started to unpack brown bags from one of the trunks. Some clouds had rolled in since the sun went down, and the sky was pitch-black. No moon, no stars. I shivered even though there wasn’t much of a chill in the air. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but there.

  “Cold?” Mindy asked.

  “No. Just freaked,” I said.

  “I know! Me too!” she whispered.

  My heart caught when I saw Daniel walking toward us, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his dark blue jeans.

  “Hey, Jersey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I replied. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “Not a clue,” Daniel admitted.

  Sage was helping one of the guys with a bag when the bottom fell right out of it. There was a huge metallic clatter as several cans of spray paint dropped to the asphalt and rolled off in every direction.

  “Is that spray paint?” Mindy said.

  “Oh, God. It’s an E! True Hollywood Story moment,” I said, swallowing hard.

  “What?” Daniel asked.

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “My friend Jordan? Whenever she finds herself in an ethical dilemma, she thinks of whether or not it’s something she’d want to have dug up for her E! True Hollywood Story.”

  “Ah,” Daniel said. “Interesting. So this would be a no.”

  “Basically.”

  We all watched, our eyes wide, as the seniors walked right over to the side wall of the gym and let loose with the paint. They didn’t even hesitate. The second the acrid scent hit my nostrils, I started to back away. Painting the field was one thing—grass grew back. And streamers and balloons could be easily cleaned up. But this was actual vandalism.

  “That’s it. I’m outta here,” I said.

  “Me too,” Mindy said.

  “I’m with you guys. This is insane,” Daniel added.

  We said nothing to the others and started to walk off. West Wind High was a good twenty-minute drive from the center of Sand Dune, but I didn’t care. I’d walk all night if I had to to get away from these maniacs. They didn’t even seem to realize what they were doing was wrong.

  “Hey! Where are you guys going?” Tara Timothy intercepted us at the edge of the driveway.

  “Home,” I said. “Somehow I think it’s better than jail.”

  “Fine, whatever,” she said. “I should’ve known you couldn’t handle it.” She turned to the rest of the crowd who were laughing and running around in the darkness with their cans of paint. “The sophomores are bailing!” she shouted.

  A bunch of them jeered and booed and waved their hands at us. My face burned, but I no longer cared about being embarrassed or not being a team player. I wasn’t about to become a vandal to impress these people. I had to draw the line somewhere.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Daniel, Mindy and I stepped onto the sidewalk. At that very instant the whoop of a police siren split the night and a red light flashed. Three cop cars zoomed into the West Wind High driveway and screeched to a stop. Everyone scattered, but Daniel, Mindy and I were frozen in place by a flashlight that was directed right at our faces.

  “Let’s see your hands,” the cop behind the flashlight said.

  I squinted against the glare and raised my palms. Definitely a movie moment you don’t want to have.

  “Nobody move,” someone said through a megaphone. “You’re all under arrest.”

  “I’m in a jail cell! A jail cell! I can’t be in a jail cell!” Mindy babbled, pacing back and forth in front of me and Daniel.

  “Mindy, just try to calm down,” I said in a soothing voice. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “No! No, it’s not!” Mindy shouted, her eyes wide. “My father is going to kill me! He’s going to send me to boarding school. I’m never going to see civilization again!”

  “Oh, would you just shut up?” Lumberjack Bob said from across the cell. He’d been banging his head back against the whitewashed wall for about an hour.

  “You shut up!” Mindy shouted, surprising us all. She reeled on him and got right in his face. “This is all your fault! It’s your fault I’m in a jail cell!”

  Damn. Go on with your bad self, I thought. Mindy yelling at Bobby was like the island of Bermuda launching an assault on Washington. It just wasn’t done.

  “She has a point,” Tara said. Her arms and legs were crossed tightly and it was the first time she’d spoken since we got there.

  “Oh, so this is m
y fault?” Bobby said, turning on her.

  “It was your stupid idea!” Tara shouted.

  “I didn’t see you arguing against it!”

  “Yes, I did! I said we should wait! I said it would be too obvious if we did it today!”

  “You guys! The cops can hear you!” Felice whisper-shouted, her eyes darting toward the front of the cell. “They can use anything we say against us!”

  “Hey! We were all there! We’re all at fault!” Whitney said, ignoring her.

  “Nuh-uh!” Sage protested. “You guys didn’t tell the rest of us what we were there for! We were involuntary accomplices. We shouldn’t even be here!”

  “Give me a break, Sage, I know you were listening on the steps,” Whitney said, leaning back. “You knew exactly what we were doing.”

  “I was not!” Sage said, her mouth dropping open indignantly.

  “Please, you so were,” Daniel scoffed. “You sit on those stairs and listen in on Whitney twenty-four/seven.”

  Sage turned purple. “How could you . . . you know that’s a secret!”

  “Not anymore,” Whitney said with a laugh.

  “Oh, so what—now that we’re broken up, we get to tell everyone all our secrets?” Sage said, sauntering over to us. “What if I told everyone about your cheesy-ass songwriting hobby?”

  “My songs aren’t cheesy,” Daniel said flatly.

  “Oh, please,” Sage said, looking down her nose at him. “‘Thorns of Love’? How is that not cheesy?”

  Makes sense if he was with you when he wrote it, I thought.

  A couple of the guys laughed and Daniel reddened.

  “Tryin’ to be the next Justin Timberlake, yo?” Bobby asked.

  “It’s not idiot pop songs,” Daniel said. “It’s music. No lyrics.”

  “Yeah, music with lame titles,” Sage said.

  Daniel pressed his hands into the bench at his sides and looked Sage right in the eye. I could feel his tension.

  “Are you sure you want to keep going down this road?” he asked pointedly. “’Cause I really don’t think you do.”

  Everyone in the cell held their breath. It was obvious that Daniel had something even worse on Sage than her cheesy-songs dig, and we were all pretty much salivating to know what it was. Sage and Daniel had a stare-off for what felt like an hour before she finally turned away, flounced over to the bench across from us and sat down.