Michaela scanned the requirements. The grammar used “he” and “him” throughout, but according to her College Writing professor, that was a prevalent sexist construction that often was meant to represent both genders. Nowhere in the rules did it specifically state that the mascot had to be male, and even if it had, she doubted that would be legal.
She looked the coach squarely in the eye. “I’m not here for a friend. I’m here for myself. I want to be the next Tartan Crusader.”
“But you’re a girl,” exclaimed one of the four men.
Michaela feigned puzzlement. “A woman, actually, but yes, I know.”
“The Tartan Crusader is a man,” said another, as if he were speaking to someone not very bright.
“He was this year.” Michaela smiled and sat down with the other new candidates. “Maybe next year he’ll be a she.”
The coached sighed wearily. “Will you excuse me?” she said to the four men. She motioned for Michaela to come with her, so Michaela stood and followed her a few feet away.
“Look, I know you’re disappointed about not making the cheerleading squad,” the coach said, keeping her voice low. “I understand that. Come back next year and give it another shot.”
“Are you saying I can’t try out for Tartan Crusader because I’m a woman?” Michaela’s voice became louder with each word. Everyone in the gym was paying attention.
The coach held up her hands. “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“I think I would be an excellent Tartan Crusader. For tryouts they have to do the Crusader Cheer, a tumbling run, and an original stunt routine, right?”
The coach winced and nodded as if the admission pained her.
“I can do all that.”
“The mascot’s stunts are different than the cheerleaders’,” the coach called after her as she went to take her place among the other candidates.
“I have a week,” said Michaela. “I’ll learn them.”
That first workout did not go well. The men refused to work with her, and they brushed off her offers to help them with their tumbling. They couldn’t prevent her from watching as the male cheerleaders taught stunts to the mascot candidates, though. Unlike the cheerleading partner stunts she already knew, these tricks were performed in groups of three, the mascot and two male cheerleaders. At tryouts each mascot candidate would be paired randomly with two male cheerleaders, but for most of the workouts, the mascot candidates took turns filling the different roles. When it was clear that the men wouldn’t let her join in, she looked to the coach for assistance, but each time the coach claimed to be busy helping someone else. Undaunted, Michaela memorized every word of the instructions that passed between the men.
Saturday morning she rose early and drove home to her parents’ house, stopping first at the campus bookstore to buy two large wool blankets in Crusader Tartan. Her mother had her sewing machine and patterns spread out on the dining room table when she arrived. Michaela told her what she had in mind for her costume and her mother contributed a few ideas of her own. They worked throughout the weekend, washing the blankets and finding coordinating fabric, experimenting with various designs, fitting the garment, making every last detail perfect. When Michaela returned to her dorm on Sunday evening, she brought with her a Tartan Crusader costume better, she was certain, than had ever been seen.
On Monday afternoon, a few curious students came to the gym to watch the workout. The next day there were twice as many onlookers, including a reporter from the Tartan Times. Michaela was accustomed to audiences and didn’t mind this one, but the other candidates seemed annoyed by all the attention she was receiving. She made no progress in convincing them to let her practice stunts with them, so she was relieved when the male cheerleaders arrived. When she spotted Number Fifty-eight among them, she felt a surge of hope and searched her memory for his name—Joel. She cornered him when he went to the drinking fountain and pleaded with him to help her. Eventually he weakened, but he pointed out that without a second cheerleader, they couldn’t practice anyway.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she begged, and hurried off to find Logan, the senior cheerleader who had particularly enjoyed her first explosive tumbling run during tryout practices. It took some doing, but she appealed to his sense of honor, their shared loyalty to St. Andrew’s—and the fact that he would be graduating in May and wouldn’t have to tolerate any potential backlash very long. Eventually she persuaded him to help her.
Her confidence grew once she learned the stunts. At home, she adapted her cheerleading stunt routine to the requirements for Tartan Crusader. She had survived one tryout; she could endure this one. And this time there was no Hell Dance.
When she went to campus Wednesday morning, the stares and whispers were difficult to ignore. When she took her usual seat in Comparative Imperialisms, several students around her stood up and moved a few seats away. As she crossed the campus on her way to lunch, two guys jostled her and knocked her books to the ground. Her heart pounded as she bent down to retrieve them, but she kept her face expressionless. At the entrance to the cafeteria, she picked up a copy of the Tartan Times so that she could duck behind it as she ate. After paying for her salad and vitamin water, she found a seat at an empty table and unfolded the paper.
And she almost choked on her cauliflower.
In large bold print, the headline announced, DISGRUNTLED CHEERLEADER WANNABE DEFIES BELOVED TRADITION.
“Oh, no, no, no.” Heart pounding, Michaela raced through the article, in which several students and a few members of the alumni association had denounced her blatant disregard for tradition. The university administration said they were powerless to prevent her from indulging herself. The coach was quoted as saying she was at a loss to explain Michaela’s actions and that she honestly didn’t expect such immature behavior from a college student. On the other hand, the Campus Womyn’s Association and several members of the faculty had rallied behind her. As for Michaela herself, she was unavailable for comment before the issue went to press.
“Unavailable?” Michaela exclaimed. “You didn’t even try.”
Suddenly she realized that the cafeteria was unnaturally quiet. She glanced up, and it seemed everyone in the room was watching her.
She shoved the newspaper aside, grabbed her tray, flung her lunch into the trash bin, and stormed out of the cafeteria.
Before her next class, her French professor met her at the door and took her aside. “I understand you have tryouts on Friday,” Madame Fortescue said, ignoring the other students, who were straining to overhear. “If you need an extension on your paper or on any of your assignments, please let me know.”
At first Michaela was too astonished to respond. “Merci beaucoup, Madame,” she managed to say. “Cela pourrait me soulager. I’d appreciate the extra time. This tryout is important to me.”
Madame Fortescue looked moved almost to tears. “On est tous avec toi.”
Bemused, Michaela nodded and took her seat.
Thursday brought more of the same. Everywhere she went, Michaela was the object of both ridicule and unexpected support. The campus chapter of the American Association of University Women took out a full-page ad in the Tartan Times wishing her good luck, but the letters-to-the-editor column was filled with students clamoring for her expulsion. Her Educational Methods professor abandoned his syllabus and tried to lead a discussion on Title IX, but the class deteriorated into a shouting match between those who thought that Michaela was a heretic, those who thought she was a heroine, and those who thought she’d look better in a kilt than any previous Tartan Crusader in school history so she ought to be given the role on those grounds alone.
On Friday Michaela was tempted to skip her classes and hide out at home, but she forced herself to go to class. It was all too much—the other candidates hated her, Madame Fortescue worshipped her, and everyone
thought she was some kind of radical when all she wanted to do was wear a cute uniform on the sidelines, cheer for the team, and acquire invaluable experience to list on her résumé.
After her last class, she felt so overwhelmed that she took a less traveled, indirect route back to her dorm. There, alone, she dressed for tryouts and admired the uniform she and her mother had made—the pleated skirt in red, black, and white Crusader Tartan, the short black jacket with brass clasps in a Celtic knot-work pattern, and the tartan half cape draped across one shoulder and fastened with a brass pin bearing the university seal. She looked awesome. Definitely very good. Maybe good enough to win over the judges and even the other mascot candidates.
At registration she realized that this was unlikely. The competitive camaraderie of cheerleading tryouts was absent, replaced by a hostility so strong it should have been visible, hovering like coal smoke in the air. Unsettled but refusing to show it, she took her number and joined the rest of the candidates in the main gym.
The noise when she entered almost sent her reeling. The room was packed, filled with twice as many onlookers than at cheerleading tryouts only a week earlier. There was a television crew in the corner and students waving signs of approval and condemnation filled the seats. As if by some prearranged signal, rolls of toilet paper were hurled down from several areas of the bleachers, unrolling into white fluttering streamers as they fell.
The candidate behind her in line muttered something disparaging. She couldn’t make out all the words, but from the snorts of laughter it evoked, she knew she didn’t want to know.
The first two rounds went by in a blur. Repeatedly the coach had to order the crowd to quiet down, but they erupted into cheers and catcalls whenever Michaela took or left the floor. She performed the Crusader Cheer better than at cheerleading tryouts, and the first round was done. Her turn for her tumbling run came, and when she finished her string of twenty-two back handsprings and a back tuck, the noise was deafening. In a daze she watched the others take their turns. She was halfway through. Only the stunts and the original routines were left, and then she could go home to her dorm, away from the screams and the shouts and the frantic waving of signs and the glaring lights from the television cameras and the dread that something awful was about to happen. It was almost over.
“It’s not over yet,” a voice behind her muttered, as if reading her thoughts.
It was time for stunts. Michaela watched as one by one the other candidates performed a shoulder press and a basket toss. Then her turn came, and her heart sank. She had prayed and hoped and wished that she would be grouped with Joel and Logan, but two other cheerleaders met her on the mat, their expressions unfriendly.
She smiled and said something. Later she couldn’t remember her exact words, but it was flattering and sweet and yet somehow they remained unmoved. They assumed the stance for the shoulder press and waited for her to give the signal. A third cheerleader, the required spotter, joined them on the mat.
Michaela summoned her courage and took her position. “One, two, down, up,” she called, and they lifted her smoothly into the air and high above their heads, each foot planted firmly in the hands of one of the two cheerleaders. She raised her arms in a V and smiled.
Then, suddenly, the firm pressure beneath her feet inexplicably vanished. The men took the smallest of steps away from each other, and she was falling into empty air, with no one there to break her fall. She tried to control her landing as if she were dismounting from a cheerleading pyramid, but the height was too great and her descent too unexpected.
She hit the mat, hard, and crumpled to the ground. A shooting pain fired up her right ankle and she felt the strangest tearing sensation around her anklebone.
She heard the crowd cry out. She glimpsed Emma fighting the through the audience, climbing down from the bleachers, trying to get to her. And yet it all seemed as frozen and silent as a photograph, a picture taken at the moment she knew that it was over, that she’d been cheated once again, that it wasn’t fair, and that there was nothing she could do about it.
She knew better than to try to stand.
Later, at the hospital, Emma held her hand and tried to comfort her when the doctor showed her the X-rays and explained that her fibula was broken, the ligaments torn. Shortly after her parents arrived, she learned that even after her injury healed, she might need surgery to repair delicate structures in her ankle.
“If I need surgery,” Michaela asked carefully, as if choosing the correct words would shape the diagnosis, “when would it be?”
“Not until autumn, so you won’t have to wear a cast during the hottest months of summer and miss out on all those sunny days at the pool.”
He meant to be encouraging, but Michaela’s heart plummeted. “If I have surgery in the fall, how long until I’ll be able to do gymnastics again?”
The answer brought tears to her eyes. Eight weeks in a cast, then two months with no physical activity more strenuous than walking, swimming, or biking.
If Michaela had to have surgery, she would not be able to try out for cheerleading next year—and that would be her last opportunity.
Afterward, as she sat in the lobby in a wheelchair waiting for her father to return from the parking garage with the car, she said, “I think this is the worst day of my life.”
“I think it’s theirs too,” said her mother quietly.
Startled out of her sulk, Michaela peered curiously at her mother, then followed her line of sight across the room, where a man and a woman sat near a child in a wheelchair like Michaela’s, except that four brightly colored Mylar balloons with HAPPY BIRTHDAY! printed upon them were tied to the armrests. The chair’s tiny occupant was a little girl about eight years old, thin and bald and hooked up to an IV. As Michaela watched, a nurse approached with a clipboard, greeted the parents like old friends and the girl like a favorite niece, and proceeded to check them in.
“Thanks, Mom,” said Michaela glumly. “Perspective obtained.”
Her mother smiled sympathetically, stroked her hair, and kissed her on the cheek.
Michaela endured the rest of the semester on a campus full of people who seemed all too satisfied when they spotted her hobbling across the quad on crutches. Summer break brought a blessed escape from the glares and smirks and obnoxious remarks, but instead of heading off to the Poconos, where, pre-injury, she had landed a job as a counselor at a gymnastics camp, she went home. She spent the first week of her vacation moping, the second moping and looking for work, and the next few weeks helping her mother in the garden. In June the cast came off, and Michaela gladly accepted a job at a tutoring center, working with kids who were struggling through summer school to avoid being held back a year. She figured it would look good on her résumé when she started applying for student teaching positions, and although it wasn’t coaching, she found that she enjoyed it much more than she had expected.
As August approached, Michaela considered transferring to another college. Her parents told her they would support her no matter what she decided, but she knew they wanted her to return to St. Andrew’s College with her head held high. She didn’t want to disappoint them, nor did she want to let Emma down. They had arranged to be roommates, and if Michaela withdrew from the dorm, Emma would get stuck with some random freshman instead. She toyed with the idea of cutting her hair short and dying it red, hoping that without the crutches and the bouncy blond curls, she would be all but unrecognizable to anyone who didn’t know her well. Ultimately, she decided to go back rather than let anyone think they had chased her away in shame. She refused to give anyone the satisfaction of thinking she regretted trying out for the Tartan Crusader. In hindsight, she knew she never would have been chosen, even if she had been far and away the best candidate. But she wasn’t sorry she had tried. Her only regret was that she had not made a safer landing when the guys dropped her.
September found her back on the St. Andrew’s College campus, taking classes in her major and attending physical therapy once a week at the same hospital where she had been treated after her fall. Occasionally, on her way out, she would take the long way past the atrium garden near the children’s cancer ward. She often wondered what had become of the little girl she had seen the night of the mascot tryouts. Michaela hoped she had been completely cured and was at that moment playing in her backyard with her parents, and maybe a little sister and a puppy. She hoped never to spot that little girl among the other pale, fragile children working on craft projects with hospital volunteers or reading books or playing computer games in the cancer ward. Sometimes she stopped to watch them in the common room, transfixed by a radiant smile or a burst of joyful laughter. How could she gripe and complain about her stupid ankle when children half her age suffering from far more serious ailments could find reasons to laugh?
One day when she passed by the wall of windows, she noticed a pair of women wearing quilted jackets distributing gifts of brightly colored quilts to an eager group of children, some in wheelchairs, most hooked up to those ubiquitous IV poles. The children embraced their quilts, and snuggled them, and wrapped stuffed animals in their soft folds, and wore them as superhero capes, and altogether behaved as if the quilts were the most wonderful presents they had ever received and the two ladies some magical combination of rock stars and Santa Claus. She lingered, smiling as she observed the happy scene, touched by the new hope and thankfulness she saw in the parents’ eyes. When the quilters departed, Michaela caught up to them and asked if they worked for the hospital. They explained that they volunteered for Project Linus, and they made quilts for children at the hospital and many other places.
As soon as she returned to the dorm, Michaela Googled Project Linus, found their website, and made a quick but thorough study of their mission. Every St. Andrew’s student was obliged to complete a community service project before graduation, and Michaela’s weekly glimpse of the children at the hospital and her memory of the little girl who had celebrated her birthday by checking into the cancer ward made her want to do something to make their hospital stays a little more bearable.
The Giving Quilt Page 19
