That did it.
No more coulda, woulda, wish-I’d-said.
Before she had time to move, I reached up and yanked the folder out of her hands.
“Rosalie Hunter! You are a bully and a fake. Since the first day I met you, you’ve done nothing but boss me around. . . .”
“I didn’t boss you around. I told you what to do because you needed somebody to.”
“No!” I yelled. “What I needed then is the same thing I need now. A friend, Rosalie. Not a boss. Not a conscience. Not somebody who is constantly up in my face analyzing what I say and what I do and belittling me and making me feel bad if my views are different from hers.”
“Kayla, I can’t believe after all we’ve put into this, you’re backing out. How can you do this to SPEAK?”
Her shift threw me for a second. I said, “Rosalie, aren’t you listening to me? I’m talking about me and you—not about SPEAK and the Lady Lions. If me and you are cool, if we’re really there for each other, it shouldn’t matter what clubs we’re in or what activities the other one does!”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” Rosalie spat. “‘Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount,’ Clare Boothe Luce.”
“Oh, please, are we going to play the quote game? How about this: ‘Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving,’ Erma Bombeck.”
She plowed on. “You know what your problem is, Kayla? Your problem is that you’re weak. You’re just too weak. I should have known that if you got a taste of their fake acceptance and false popularity, you might not be able to handle it. ‘The conflict is one thing I’ve been waiting for.’ Clara Barton.”
“Weak! Well, Rosalie Renée Hunter, your problem is that you’re a fraud. You go around preaching about women needing to look a certain way and act a certain way; need to embrace their wooliness and all that. But I know that you secretly relax your hair!”
She gasped! “Not all the time.”
“And I know you and your mother secretly pluck your eyebrows. Let’s face it, Rosalie, you’re always ready to send somebody else out looking like a caterpillar is sleeping on her face, but all the while, you’re a hair-relaxing mother plucker! And if you want to trade insults and quotes, how about what Leontyne Price had to say? ‘You must learn to say no when something is not right for you.’ So, Rosalie, to you and your never-ending schemes, I’m saying N-O!”
A knock on the door snapped both of us out of our rage fogs. “Kayla, Rosalie, the women are leaving. Want to come and say goodbye?” Emma asked.
Rosalie turned to me, then Emma. She said, “Let Kayla handle it. She’s in charge of SPEAK now. I don’t want anything to do with it—or her!”
She tried to brush past, but I grabbed her arm. My heart was thumping. “So you’re going to run off again. Is that it?” Emma shut the door. Rosalie turned and glared at me, yanking her arm free.
She shook her head. “Your grandmother would be so disappointed in you.”
Then she tried to push past again, but I blocked her. “What did you just say to me?” My breath was coming in short pants.
Rosalie stepped back, cocked her head to one side. “JoJo was a real woman. She understood what it meant to give up the silly and the frilly to be authentic. To be real. But look at you, Kayla. Thinking you can bring your go-go dancing friends into a group of serious women and everyone will sing a happy song. You’re a joke.”
“And you’re a coward.”
“What am I afraid of if I’m such a coward, Kayla? Huh? What am I afraid of?? You’re the one trying to hide behind that ridiculous makeover. Hoping you can wear eyeliner and lip gloss and maybe people will forget what a little mouse you are underneath.”
I stepped closer. Close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin. “You’re a coward because the only way you know how to get what you want is to kick and pick and punch and push.”
Then Rosalie started shouting, rattling off quote after quote: “Take your pick: ‘You can’t test courage cautiously,’ Annie Dillard. ‘Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself,’ Gloria Steinem. ‘If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it.’ Harriet Beecher Stowe. Remember when you cared about women of substance? Remember when choosing the words of women of consequence meant something about the kind of woman you wanted to be? Remember?”
“Remember this? ‘A woman must look inside to find herself. When she spends too much time looking outside, hanging onto the words of others, she does not become authentic, she becomes deluded.’”
Rosalie frowned. “I’ve never heard that quote before. Who said that?”
“Me. Kayla Alicia Dean.”
Her mouth gaped open. Then I added, “And just so you know, despite being an accomplished pianist and the most powerful woman in politics globally, your girl, Dr. Condi Rice, I read she has a thing for shoes. Nice shoes. Just like me.”
And for once, before she could give me the hand or flounce her little angry behind off, stage right, I beat her to the punch. I threw my shoulder into the door and moved toward the conference room.
I didn’t look back.
BETWEEN A ROCK. . .
Facing a future without a best friend is a hard place to be.
You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
—Harriet Woods
I sat up with a start. Drums were pounding in my head. One glance at the clock told me I would be late for practice if I didn’t hit the ground running.
But when I turned, I let out a scream.
Amira was sitting at the foot of my bed. Again.
“Amira?” I squeaked.
“Is it true?”
I let out a loud “aaaaaaaaargh!” I mean, really!
“What, Amira?” I was already climbing out of the tangle of sheets and stumbling toward the bathroom.
“You and Rosalie are on the outs? Like, for good?” She leaned against the doorjamb.
I was brushing my teeth furiously with one hand, throwing cold water in my face with the other. “She . . .” I didn’t know how to say it. What to say. How to explain it. I couldn’t explain it to myself. Since that big, ugly scene on Saturday, I’d hoped some magical thing would happen and just make it all go away.
Nothing happened.
Nothing except me getting more and more overwhelmed. Almost immediately after the meeting, my cell phone started blowing up. Calls coming from everywhere. Lourdes wanting to touch base for the radio station. Then the woman from Channel 8. And so on.
Now here it was, three days later, and almost the whole world knew that in less than two weeks the Lady Lions were expected to perform at “Kick the Crown.”
Except, of course, the Lady Lions. Who knew nothing because I’d been too much of a chicken to ask.
“She’s just jealous,” Amira was saying as I side-stepped her and grabbed a yellow jersey knit top trimmed in gray. Where were the matching shorts?
“She’s not jealous,” I said. Seriously, where did I put the shorts?
“Kayla, don’t be a schmuck.”
I found the shorts. Flopped onto the foot of my unmade bed and put them on. “Don’t call me a schmuck.”
“I didn’t, I’m just saying, don’t be so quick to act like one. She’s jealous. And of course, she’s terrified.”
I’d dashed back to the bathroom mirror. I was attempting to spray some of the product Tangie picked out to keep a sheen in my fluffy ponytail. Amira snatched the bottle and spritzed-spritzed-spritzed her way around my bushy head. I turned just in time to get a snoot-full of spray.
“Amira!” I coughed and gagged.
“So why’d you turn like that?” God, please! Tell me what I’ve done. I’ll fix it. I’ll make it right. Just please, stop Amira before she gases me to death with a lethal blast of hair product.
“She’s not terrified. Terrified of what?” I said. We both headed for the door, then down the stairs. Amira stay
ed close, but she didn’t say anything until we were in the kitchen.
“You were her best minion, Kayla. Face it. Without you looking up to her, kissing her shabby butt all the time, she’s just another girl in need of a moustache trim.”
“Amira!” I gritted. I wanted orange juice. Orange juice and maybe one of my parents to wander in and offer me a ride to practice.
She shrugged, palms up, and was gone. And I was left thirsty and needing a bus.
Battle Fatigue:
Kayla Wrestles With a Weary Spirit
We’d begun practicing with the marching band in the mornings. Then we’d break for lunch and work out more in the afternoons. I thought gymnastics had worked me over. Now gymnastics seemed like a piece of cake next to this.
And let me just say, if practice with Roman and the other dancers had been tough, practice on the band field with the marching band, band majors, majorettes, and flag corps produced the kind of terror that could have inspired Edgar Allan Poe.
We were being berated by a five-foot, four-inch dictator, sweating beneath a four-foot tall hat, bellowing instructions through a megaphone while simultaneously bleating with a whistle as though whistle bleats were curse words.
Tommy Minors had been left in charge while Elgin, the real band major, was away at a conference. Tommy had “stand-in” fever and was giddy with power.
“. . . Bleat! You! You back there! Dancer!” He glared down the barrel of his megaphone site as though eyeing a combat target. We all froze, all of us Lady Lions. Jackie Sanders, co-captain with Rachel Glad, looked like she was about to have some sort of meltdown.
With her hands on her hips, Jackie began to charge out of formation.
Nena tried to stop her. Fear scented the humid air. It looked like the afternoon thunderstorms that came daily this time of year were going to arrive early today.
“GET BACK INTO FORMATION!” Tommy Minors the midget was screaming!
Jackie, in an explosion of speed and, I would later learn, premenstrual rage, burst up the field. She was also the anchor leg on the school’s four-by-four relay team.
Large tuba players along the back line who hadn’t been paying attention and had continued to wonk out strains of “Whomp! There It Is” fell silent.
Jackie raced past brass and percussion players, past flag carriers and baton twirlers. She charged—like an angry lion—until she reached the larger-than-life stand on which Tommy Minors was perched.
“Bleat! Bleat! Bleat!” Tommy’s whistle screamed, but Jackie didn’t stop. She started to shake the stand.
“Somebody stop her! She is insane!” Tommy said. He looked like he’d swallowed his whistle.
“Bleat! Bleat! Bleat!” his whistle screamed again from some unseen place.
And sure enough. The stand toppled.
“. . . ble . . .”
Mid-bleat, Tommy hit the ground.
My heart did a double eight-count.
Now Jackie was on top of him, and she had the megaphone, or as we had come to call it, “Tommy’s weapon of mass disruption.” She aimed at his face.
“LISTEN TO ME, YOU TOTAL TURD!”
Another belch of hot gusting air pushed across the field, and then we were hit with the first freckles of rain. Thin, sheer drops. The air was so hot and thick that the rain dried almost on contact.
A surge. We were moving against the exhaling winds, pushing closer to Jackie, no doubt so that we could testify at her assault trial.
Jackie kept the megaphone and yelled into it: “You are not the drum major. You are not fit to lead this band. If you try and humiliate me or my dance team one more time, I will come to your house and beat your . . .”
Woosh!
In an instant, a thick, slanting, wind-driven wall of rain replaced the near-invisible droplets. Band members scattered, clutching instruments, high-stepping for the band building. Me and Nena pulled Jackie off the tiny band dictator. Tommy Minors, in a surprising act of restraint and good sense, remained on his back, his face pointing toward the sky, unblinking.
We were breathless inside the band room. Several band members hooted and hollered. “Yo, dawg, she took him down!”
Our revolutionary zeal thanks to Jackie’s initiative was short-lived. Miss Lavender came in while the band members were reenacting “the take-down.” Miss Lavender had seen most of it. And she was not happy.
“Maybe we don’t deserve to have a dance team,” she was saying. My back ached from pressing against the concrete wall. I was wet and I couldn’t catch my breath I was so dizzy with fear.
I had to tell them today. I had to tell them about SPEAK and “Kick the Crown.” I had to take the chance that the Lady Lions would embrace the concept of girl empowerment.
But a squiggly worm of doubt twisted around my intestines. What if they didn’t embrace it? What if they thought I was some sort of social pariah, a loser who had to make her own club just to get friends?
Would they be wrong?
“. . . Reputation is the most important thing we have. Too many groups out here want to see us fail. A fight on the band field with the band major? What were you all thinking?”
“He’s not the band major!” Jackie said defiantly.
Miss Lavender’s eyes narrowed into black slits. I glanced at Jackie. I admired how she’d taken action earlier. Maybe tackling the viewing stand and knocking the munchkin to the ground wasn’t the right thing to do. But she got her message across. She’d been fearless. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” Rosa Parks once said. Okay, I wasn’t in a battle for civil rights, but I was tired of keeping all of my Kaylas separate. It was time for my dancing world to know there was more to me.
Before Miss Lavender could lash into Jackie again, I said, “I have an idea.”
At first, no one looked in my direction. Then it was as if the spell binding Miss Lavender’s intense glare to Jackie’s had been broken. “What did you say?” Miss Lavender asked. The supernatural arch of her thin brows hiked to her scalp line.
Then I sucked in a mouthful of air and just let it out.
“What if the Lady Lions could show they were community-minded while being strong role models for women?” I asked.
Miss Lavender smirked and said something like, “Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to get you guys to consider?”
So I just launched into the whole thing about SPEAK being a new club starting at RPA. I told them that our “Kick the Crown” program was two Saturdays away and stood to get a lot of advance and day-of publicity. I told her how “Kick the Crown” would be focusing on the needs and advancement of middle school girls through literacy by offering support, games, prizes, and with luck, building a sense of self-esteem.
And guess what?
She was SO for it.
They all were.
“So,” I went on before I lost my nerve. “I’d been wondering, do you think we, um, the Lady Lions, could perform at ‘Kick the Crown’ and maybe let the TV news people come and shoot our practice to preview the event? If we got that kind of advance publicity it would be huge!”
The answer was a big, fat “Yes!” Everybody seemed so excited and genuinely enthusiastic, I wondered why I’d been so hesitant.
Of course, when Nena dropped me off at home, I knew why I’d been afraid.
Rosalie.
The squiggly worm of doubt was back. Okay, so we hadn’t spoken or seen each other since Saturday. At first, I’d been like, whatever. But now, looking at the looming deadline and seeing how much had to be done, I wondered if I could pull it off??
And I wondered if I wanted to pull it off without Rosalie?
Did I really want to face a future with SPEAK if I wasn’t speaking to my best friend?
Ugh!
DESTINY’S TRAIL
Independent lady must be a survivor!
You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
We were on a water break. I was hot and sweaty. And
sleepy. I’d stayed up late, late, late coordinating plans for “Kick the Crown.”
I took a big slurp from the fountain and let the cool water bubble over my hot mouth. I was about to dip my face under the water’s arc when Tangie yelled, “K, I think your phone’s ringing.” I rushed over to my bag, took out my phone. A text message. It read:
U R tragic dis/pointment. Roz deserves better friend . . .
The message was from Jade.
Great. Just great.
I limped along behind my fellow dancers. Since they’d agreed to perform at “Kick the Crown,” we’d been working extra. So after we finished working out on the field with the band, we took a break, then met at the gym. I smelled like livestock, honest to goodness, I really did. No amount of eyeliner or lip gloss could makeover the molten mess I’d become in the past three hours. So naturally I was overjoyed to find Roger Lee Brown leaning over the bleachers waving down to me.
He said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hey.”
You know, one of the things I loved about us was how well we communicated. I’d only seen him a few times this week. Too busy. He was smiling; I was staring up at him, my hand was shielding my eyes. He was a chocolaty blur.
Please, god, I prayed, let him just wave and stay up there.
He waved, then jumped over the side wall, landing a foot in front of me.
“So what’s up?” he said.
I shrugged. “It’s hot,” I said.
He stepped closer. “Maybe that’s you making it hot.”
My mouth dropped open. He stepped closer.
Grass smells mixed with his warm scent. I looked up at him, then . . . my phone rang.
Text message received. It read:
U sold me out! U R a joke.
The Kayla Chronicles Page 11
