Scot shrugs. “Those things get passed down.”
Mom looks at me sharply. “Stay away from him. He’s too old for you.”
“Believe me, I know that. By the way, I’m going out for cheerleading.”
My mother finishes turning the chicken. “Nora, call Aaron for supper and come wash your face.” She takes away the mashed potatoes. “Set the table,” she directs.
“Did you hear what she just said?” Scot asks. “About cheerleading?”
My mother looks at me and shakes her head. “She’s not serious. She has nothing but contempt for cheerleaders.”
“No, I’m not kidding,” I insist. “There’s an all-day clinic this Saturday in the gym. It costs twenty bucks.”
“Twenty dollars just to try out? Well, I’d say that eliminates you.”
“Ten for me and ten for Grimshaw.”
“Why does it cost money just to try out? I’ll have to check into that.”
“Ten bucks apiece?” Then Scot smiles at me, too. This is getting weird. “That doesn’t seem so bad,” he says. “I’d cover it.”
six
OUR ROAD TO CHEERLEADING NORMALNESS is supposed to be a carefully scripted event. Rack and Angel put out a fatwa on anyone who dares show up for the special tryout. Despite that, a few girls who don’t know what’s good for them come to the Saturday clinic, in addition to me and Grimshaw. Nanci Lee comes in wearing a warm-up suit with a Scottie terrier appliquéd all over it. She has a blonde pageboy and a row of diamond studs in one ear and a deep artificial tan. She looks around the sparsely populated gym, knows something is up, narrows her eyes at Rack and Angel, who maintain their innocence.
“We told everybody,” they insist to Nanci Lee, which I suppose technically is true. So there is Nanci Lee, with her assistants and her clipboard and all the power in the world, about to be wasted on the two of us. There is a look on her face of pure determination, that we will never be cheerleaders, not if she has anything to do with it. Which is fine with me, I don’t even want to be a cheerleader. Grimshaw, on the other hand, has clearly put the time in and knows every single cheer down cold. Which, if I know Nanci Lee, will make her even more determined to keep us off the squad.
The herd of hopefuls is separated into batches, and we are taught a cheer.
Strawberry shortcake
Huckleberry pie
V-I-C-T-O-R-Y
Are we in it?
No we’re not!
We’re not in it,
’Cause we’re on top!
Baudelaire it ain’t. But this is what Grimshaw wants, so I snap my gum and smile until my face hurts, and the more cheerleading spirit I evince, the more suspicious Nanci Lee gets.
They put us through our paces, and Grimshaw if anything is overqualified—her toes are too pointed, her jumps are too high, her carriage is too … lofty, somehow. When she does anything, everyone stops to watch. She’s very graceful and can do handsprings and aerials, and her jumps hang suspended about six feet in the air for a full minute, with her legs fully extended and her toes perfectly pointed. She has way, way too much technique. But the poor girl never opens her mouth or smiles. When Nanci Lee watches her, she shakes her head, turns aside, and visibly mouths, “No spirit,” to the other two coaches. “This isn’t ballet,” she says. I, on the other hand, clap and shout peppy slogans without any display of rhythm or grace. I am not a bit ironic, either, not even during cheers like “Excellence, Perfection, Teamwork, Success,” which make me feel like spitting on the ground. I go through the motions because I don’t want this fiasco to be blamed on me. Between the two of us, we might make a whole cheerleader, but as individuals, I think we’re safe from being selected for the squad.
At lunch, Rack and Angel stay very busy on their phones, so nobody comes back to the clinic after lunch except for me and Grimshaw. Nanci Lee has a speech prepared. Cheerleading is not just bouncing around with pompoms, she says, hoping you get a shot at being popular. It is a serious, highly competitive sport. If you don’t make it as a freshman, your chances are basically nil. She stops. Nobody says anything. Her assistants stand behind her, looking nervous. You don’t just wake up one day and decide you’re going to be a cheerleader that day, she continues. You train, you condition, you follow the cheerleading code of conduct and sign a contract. She stops again. A silence opens up. There’s only the cheerleaders getting her lecture, plus me and Grimshaw. Nobody says anything, or appears to be taking this too seriously. Nanci Lee throws her clipboard down on the ground and walks out of the gym.
Rack steps forward and picks up the clipboard. “So,” she says. “They’re gonna need sweaters.” She looks at Grimshaw and points at her with the pen. “Size?”
“Medium.”
Rack looks at me. “Medium?” she asks.
“Sure.”
* * *
Upon becoming an official cheerleader, Grimshaw wastes no time in turning us into a dance team. She has better ways of doing everything. She wants to make us more dance-y, less jerky and stompy and stupid and old-fashioned. “It’s not anything new,” she insists. “Other schools started doing it this way a long time ago.” The co-captains are okay with that idea. Who knows, it might even make cheerleading cool again.
Their only obstacle is what to do with me. Every morning, Rack and Angel meet me and Grimshaw in the cemetery before school. We all have the first period free, so depending on the time and the weather, we hang out there for a while, drinking coffee. Grimshaw teaches them how to blow smoke rings, and they teach her cheers. While I do my homework, they discuss my many shortcomings as a cheerleader.
“Maybe she can just stand there,” Rack suggests, “and shake her pompoms.”
“But she can’t keep time,” Angel says. “Or remember the words. She has no sense of rhythm.”
I look up from solving a physics problem on acceleration. “I can lift,” I offer.
No, they decide I should just be injured. If I hurt my knee, my back, or my shoulder, that’ll keep me out of the way. They can pull me in if they need someone at the base of a pyramid.
“It’s cool,” says Grimshaw. “It’s not like we’re competing. We’re just having fun.”
Grimshaw’s eyes glow, her cheeks are pink, she looks like she’s in love, and all she’s talking about is cheerleading.
* * *
In Scot’s eyes, being a cheerleader is the first normal thing I’ve ever done. It’s so normal that it threatens to make the whole family normal. The first time I wear my purple and gold cheerleading sweater home, they act like Jesus Christ just rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.
“Oh!” my mother gasps when I enter the kitchen. “Oh, Serena!” She’s whipping up our weekly family dinner. “Sweetheart! Come and look!”
Scot rips himself away from the Sports Channel and appears in the doorway. “What is it?”
“Just look at Serena!” she warbles.
“Wow,” he says, through a mouthful of chips. “That is really fantastic. It fits nice, too. Purple’s your color.”
My mother cocks her head and looks at me. “Not with silver earrings, though,” she decides. She’s holding a big wooden spoon and flings drops of dressing around the kitchen as she talks. “Go upstairs and get a gold pair off my dresser.” Hypnotized by family approval, I go upstairs and do exactly as I’m told. I find the gold earrings and put them on. The cheerleader in the mirror waves at me. I wave back. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. No Red Army hat. I don’t know what happened to it, but I suspect Grimshaw did something with it. The girl in the mirror tells me people in cheerleading sweaters and gold earrings are usually not communists. I tell her no, Mao said we could still swim among the fish in the sea. She tells me I’m doing this for my friend, so forget about Mao and just deal with it.
At dinner, football dominates the conversation. Aaron plays running back for the junior varsity football team, and in ancient times Scot was Colchis High’s star quarterback. Even now, he makes sure he never misses a gam
e. It used to take me about five minutes to turn these family dinners into a bloodbath, but not now, not in a Colchis Rockets cheerleading sweater with gold earrings. It’s not so bad being neutralized, I find. You do get to eat.
“You’re awfully quiet, Serena,” my mother says when I finish.
“I don’t have too much to say about football,” I tell her, clearing my plate away. “So I’m just listening.”
“Do you understand the game?” she asks.
“No, but it doesn’t matter. Rack says she’ll watch the game and tell us what cheers to do.”
“Why don’t you ask Scot?” Mom suggests.
I’m dubious. “Ask him … what?”
Scot brightens up. “Anything.” He spreads his arms and looks around. “What do you want to know?”
I’d just as soon be upstairs starting my homework, since I now have about seven hours of it every night, but they seem to want me to know about football.
“Well,” I tell him, “we could start with what the point is.”
“First of all,” he says, “you have four downs to advance ten yards in a hundred-yard field. If you don’t get it in four downs, you lose possession of the ball.”
Mom beams at us.
“Advance where?” I ask.
“Down the field,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing.
“Oh.”
“With the ball,” he says.
Aaron gets into it. “The ball, Serena,” he prompts, with his mouth full of food. “The football. It’s that round brown thing that’s pointy on both ends. Both teams want it, only one team can get it. Get it?” He is shouting at me, like I’m deaf.
“Yes…” I say doubtfully.
“Each team is trying to get the football, so they can put it into the other team’s end zone,” Aaron explains. “That’s a touchdown.”
“Right. For six points?”
“You didn’t know that?” Scot asks. “Sit down. Football is complicated. It’s not like other games. It’s about relationships, and opportunities, and … dynamics. Sit down. Right there. Get her a piece of cake,” he directs my mother. “Or she won’t stay.” He snaps his fingers at her. “The cake.”
“I never paid attention to football,” I tell them. “I didn’t go to games, and I always got away with skipping out of pep rallies because Mom hates football.”
“I don’t hate football,” Mom objects, cutting me a gigantic slice of cake. “I just think—”
Scot waves away what she thinks and repeats what he said about downs.
“Scot,” Aaron says, “you can’t start with downs when she doesn’t even know what the basic object of the game is.”
“Sweetheart,” my mom interjects. “It’s almost six thirty. Don’t you think you should—”
“No!” Scot yells. “This is important. If she’s a cheerleader, she’s gotta understand the rules of the game. I can take one night off for that.”
Scot talks about strategies, plays, and the importance of the quarterback. Scot’s ideology is that in football, as in life, you can’t just wait to see what happens, you can’t just wait for the other guy to screw up. “It’s like life,” he says. “If you want to win the game, YOU have to make something happen. It’s on you.” As he describes the arc of the ball during the kickoff, he stands up and knocks his chair over backward. He ends up on one knee, looking heavenward with his arms crossed over his chest, which he says is the position a receiver is to assume who doesn’t want to get mowed down while he waits for the ball to drop.
The less I say, the happier everybody is. That is how a tentative peace descends on the Velasco-Pentz household.
* * *
When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy camps, we harass. When the enemy tires, we attack. That’s what Chairman Mao said, and it’s my strategy for surviving Western Civ.
But Mr. C. attacks first.
The second week of school has hardly begun when he asks me to come in to see him after school. I’m wary, but I show up. He makes me stand there waiting for about five minutes until he’s quite through writing the year’s first column of grades in his grade book.
“Serena.” He caps his pen and stands up. “I’m afraid this year won’t be much of a challenge for you. And I know how deadly boredom can be. I’ve been thinking about your essay. About Mao.” He pauses as though I’m supposed to say something, but when I open my mouth, he doesn’t give me a chance. “So—I’d like to offer you a yearlong independent study. Should you choose to accept, you’ll still have to come to class and do the reading and the homework and participate fully, but instead of the regularly assigned papers and tests, you’ll produce progress reports of your work. I’ve run it by your mother, and she said it sounded fine. What do you think?”
“No, I … I don’t—”
“An independent study is a college-level challenge, requiring self-discipline and initiative. And it has to be local.”
“Local?” I repeat stupidly.
“Of course. You should think of this as three to five times the normal workload.” He gives me a week to come up with a topic and a syllabus. He tells me it’ll be excellent preparation for college, puts on his hat, and walks out of the room while I’m still standing there with my mouth open. He might think he’s outsmarted me, but there’s no way I’m doing anything remotely like that independent study. Aside from French, Western Civ is my only easy class.
I leave the building and stand outside the back door by the faculty parking lot, but there is nobody there. Scot was supposed to pick me up here, but he must have forgotten. You used to be able to see the lit windows of the Arms from here, but now the factory is dark. I can see the neon martini glass shining over the Crossways Tavern, though, by the main entrance to the Arms. I watch the olive blink on and off in the gathering dark before it occurs to me to walk down there and see if I can use someone’s phone.
In the Crossways Tavern, the air has a smoky red glow, due to the red velvet wallpaper and fringed Chinese paper lanterns. A silent baseball game floats in a darkened corner, which a group of men watch. They’re wearing dusty green work clothes, as if they still worked at the Arms. A woman at the end of the bar looks me over. She moves around behind the bar and stops in front of what would appear to be Scot and Nanci Lee, reading the real estate listings together. Nanci Lee’s head is on Scot’s shoulder. They’re sharing earbuds. The Beatles are playing on the jukebox. The woman behind the bar picks up a cigarette that burns in an ashtray. She squints at me, then she squints at Scot. She takes a puff, then lifts her chin in my direction.
“That yours?” she asks.
“Oh, Jesus!” Scot hops off his bar stool, and Nanci Lee snaps to attention, clanking accessories and all.
“Serena!” She extends her hand for me to shake, and then withdraws it just enough for me to be hanging on to her fingernails. She crinkles her eyes at me, to approximate a smile. Scot tosses back the last swallow in his glass. He folds the newspaper, puts it under his arm, and slides a stack of papers off the bar. He turns to Nanci Lee.
“Just go,” she mouths at him.
“Tomorrow,” he tells her. “Later, Louise,” he shouts over his shoulder as he pushes me out the door ahead of him. When we get outside, the Arms looms over us. “Serena,” he calls. When I turn, he tosses me the keys to his BMW. “You drive.” He gets in the passenger seat and puts the newspaper over his face. By the time we get home, he’s actually asleep.
* * *
The next morning, by the time I get to the cemetery, Grimshaw has set up cream and sugar for coffee on the gravestones. I sit on Mr. Sprague and open my math book. Rack and Angel bring a box of donuts.
“Bad news,” announces Rack. “Nanci Lee found out that you guys failed Western Civ.”
Last night was the first heavy frost, and all the weeds are stiff and black and spiked with silver needles of ice. Angel sits next to me on Mr. Sprague. Rack’s brought a blaze orange hunting cushion and settles in cross-legged on th
e ground with her back against a gravestone whose letters have been almost washed away by the weather. It’s cold enough for her to be wearing Junior’s football jacket, which she paid for, although we’re not supposed to tell anyone that. Grimshaw’s sitting cross-legged on the Helmers, slowly eating her daily breakfast of one tub of nonfat blueberry yogurt.
“So?” I look up from my mastery of functions. “So did you. So did Junior.”
“Doesn’t matter,” says Rack.
“Why does it matter that we failed it and not you?”
“We’re not saying we agree,” Angel interjects. “We’re just saying we have a situation is all.”
They explain that Nanci Lee found the policy against kids on academic probation joining teams.
“It specifically says you can’t join a team,” explained Rack. “The implication is that if you’re already playing, you’re fine. It just says you can’t join.”
“She’s already recruiting new girls,” adds Angel. “She’s on a mission.”
I think of Nanci Lee, the way she kind of glittered with malice, even in a dark bar. She probably already had her plan in place for kicking me off the squad. Still, the news of our expulsion doesn’t sound so bad to me. Even though expectations of me are very low, cheerleading still takes up too much of my time. If we’re kicked out, so what? No more standing in the gym memorizing inanity, no more counting claps and stomps, no more getting yelled at for screwing up everyone else’s rhythm. No more purple and gold sweater, no more normal. I could live with that. But I keep my face neutral and betray no emotion.
“What should we do?” Grimshaw asks me with a stricken look on her face. Then I think of my family, my cheerleading sweater casting its golden glow over our dinner table, creating harmonious discussions of football where before there was only strife. And I make the sacrifice.
“There might be a solution,” I answer, “and if there is, it’ll be the principal.”
The Spaces Between Us Page 8
