by Brian James
I look for any sign that she’s teasing me. Listening for the slightest crack in her voice or the tiniest start of a laugh. Stare into her eyes to see if they are hiding any kind of contempt for me, but they are clear and open and I know she’s being genuine. She really cares about me and here I am, leaping to conclusions about her dad. “I’m sorry . . . I was . . . ,” but I don’t finish, because I’m not sure anything I say will come out right.
“Whatever, don’t worry about it,” Maggie says, making me feel worse by being so understanding. “Come on, let’s get ready and forget about all this.”
“Yeah, okay,” I agree. I feel so dumb for letting a bunch of ghost stories and bad dreams make me paranoid. Like I didn’t have enough to stress about. In twenty minutes I’m going to be in front of the entire school performing for the first time in my life. That’s the thing that should really be making my stomach toss and turn as we walk into the locker room.
Most of the other girls are already dressed in their uniforms and gossiping when Maggie raises her voice above the chatter to get their attention. The conversations trail off like the breaking apart of an airplane’s exhaust cloud across the sky. Once they’re all staring at us, she reaches over and brushes the hair away from my face, tucking it behind my ear. “Everybody, this is Madison.”
My heart thumps sharply against the inside of my ribs.
A sad, sudden good-bye to Hannah as I’m one step closer to not being me.
Another layer eroded away. But it’s not all as terrible as I thought because it’s also another layer that separates me from my friends vanishing. And I can see it now that they’re all happy. All these girls who terrified me two weeks ago with their intimidating eyes and beautiful features, they are now my friends. Even the few of them who still don’t particularly want me here would stand up for me if it came down to picking sides between me and anyone else. That’s more than I can say for most of the kids at a lot of other schools who claimed to like me a lot.
“Hi,” I say, keeping my hand down by my hip and waving with just my fingers. Waving as Madison for the first time and I think maybe I might grow into it after all.
“Okay, let’s get ready! Showtime in fifteen minutes, girls!” Mrs. Donner’s voice shouts from the doorway leading into the gym. We can hear the marching, charging footsteps of the school filing into the bleachers in the background. I feel my heart start to race, pounding in rhythm with the gathering crowd.
Lockers open and close all around me like a chorus of crashing cars. Meredith comes over and sits on the bench next to me. “Nervous, huh?” she says with her hands calmly folded and resting in the pleats of her skirt.
“A little,” I say sarcastically, holding my thumb and finger an inch apart.
Meredith laughs the easy way she always does and tells me, “Don’t be.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I say and we both laugh. Surprisingly, though, it helps. Being able to laugh kind of pushes the worry aside as I change out of my clothes and into my uniform.
“You look perfect,” she says.
I put my head down and look myself over. I guess I’d been so focused at practice that I didn’t notice before, but the uniform isn’t too tight anymore. Meredith is right, it fits me perfectly. I’m still not as thin as Miranda or Melissa, or anyone else, but if I look closely, I can see the bones of my hips waiting just under the surface to show through like twigs.
Meredith stands up and tilts my head up so that I’m facing her. “Finishing touches,” she says and I close my eyes so that she can apply my makeup. All the girls have painted their strawberry lips with a more violent candy-red lipstick. I pretend to blow a kiss and Meredith smears the color over me. Powders my skin to the same ghostly shade as hers and draws heavy black lines around my eyes.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror when she’s done.
The only way I can tell myself from everyone else is the shade of my hair.
The principal’s voice drones on behind me as I stand facing the kids stacked on the gym bleachers. I’m only half listening as he speaks over the microphone. He sounds like a robot, stiff and monotone as he welcomes the entire school into the gym. His words float up to the rafters to die among the state championship banners that hang there, dusty old accomplishments with faded letters alongside new ones declaring our school’s superiority in vivid bloodred letters.
I take brief glances over my shoulder to look at the football team. They’re seated in the middle of the gym in chairs that have been set up specifically for them. I try to find Greg somewhere among the nearly identical faces. I guess I didn’t notice before how alike they all look. The football players, I mean. I’m only used to seeing them in small groups, or wearing helmets and numbers. Then I can always tell Greg apart from the rest—he’s the one always looking at me. I can’t pick him out in a large group like this, though. Can’t find his smile when I really need him. I need to see him smile at me just once because the nervous sickness in my stomach is starting to swell as the pep rally gets going.
One look from Greg would settle me down. His eyes have a way of calming me, like the sky does, or a lake, or anything else that’s soft and blue. I could use a little of that. I could use some calm as the circus begins to unfold around me.
“Pssst . . . turn around,” Miranda hisses when she spies me looking away from the crowd. “Now!” she demands through clenched teeth.
I snap my head around and face forward.
I’m supposed to keep my eyes on the kids in the bleachers. After we came out of the locker room and performed a quick routine, Mrs. Donner assigned us each to a section. A cheerleader standing at attention every few feet apart, all around the gym, watching the watchers. No one mentioned it to me before, but judging from the reaction of the other girls, it’s obvious that’s our job in the pep rally ceremony.
We’re supposed to make sure everyone pays attention.
We’re supposed to remember those who don’t cheer when they are supposed to. Anyone talking while they’re supposed to be listening. Anyone passing notes or doing homework. Anyone at all who doesn’t watch in fixed silence like statues.
We are the prison guards and it makes most of the girls giddy.
We enforce school spirit and they take it very seriously.
The other kids know it, too. They stare at me with blank looks. Their hands stay quietly in their laps until it’s time for them to applaud. Scheduled applause signaled by Maggie each time she raises her arm as she stands on the podium next to the principal. Afraid not to because they know what happens when they don’t. So do I only after the first time Miranda notices a lethargic spectator and whispers to me.
“Him? See him?” she asks, pointing to a sleepy-eyed freshman with his head resting in his hands when he should be clapping. I point him out, too, as if to ask if that’s the kid she’s talking about. She nods. Her face twisted into the face of an angry dog as she looks over to the teachers standing by each door to make sure no one leaves. Getting their attention, Miranda points at the boy again whose eyes are heavy and hasn’t noticed he’s in trouble.
One of the teachers comes over immediately. A hairy-knuckled gym teacher with the face of an ape. He barrels his way through the bleachers. Students dodging him as he plows through, grabs the sleepy-eyed runt, and drags him down by the collar. The kid’s arms swing to keep his balance with the thump-thump of his sneakers hitting against each step. He tries to speak but it comes out all garbled in fear as the seated kids move aside without a word of protest to let them pass.
My knees begin to shake as the gym teacher pulls the boy outside and disappears in the glare of the sun. And I’m sure I must have missed something. The tired look on the kid’s face must have been a cover-up to hide some more inappropriate act that Miranda saw. “They’d never take him out like that for nothing,” I tell myself again and again.
The principal continues his speech without taking any notice. Introducing the football players. “Our deliverers of
death,” he says in a spitting voice of madness. I figure if I could just see his face, I’d see a hint of humor that I can’t hear. With my back turned, it all sounds like the ravings of a preacher my dad and I saw on the street corner once in Boston. A sermon of hatred that he delivered with a drooling rage. His suit and tie and neatly trimmed hair all transform into the picture of a wild beast with a split tongue and sharp red eyes. That’s the same way I see the principal in my mind as he reads their names one by one, starting with the seniors. I don’t dare look until he gets to the juniors and feel relieved that the principal still looks like the same mild-mannered bore that he always is and that only his voice has changed.
I wait for Greg’s name to be called, peeking sideways out of the corner of my eye and making sure Miranda isn’t watching me. I turn around and see him rising above the other boys sitting around him. There’s something different about him that I don’t recognize. Something more violent. The bones in his skull show through the thin layer of his face. His eyes are sunken and the skin around them looks itchy and irritated like a rash. A manipulated roar erupts from the crowd and Greg shows them a demon face that I’ve never seen.
It freezes my blood and I quickly turn around.
It’s for the show. Pretend toughness and everything. It shouldn’t bother me. It’s part of him being a jock. Part of what I have to learn to deal with. Like the grasshoppers and poor table manners. But with everything else, it’s all just a little much to take in at once as I return to my position. This just isn’t what I expected. None of it. I thought the kids would stare at me in awe, but they only stare at me in fear.
After the introductions, the football coach speaks to the school. He walks around the gym and doesn’t use the microphone. Shouting in a voice bigger than I thought could come out of such a short person. Shorter than the players, but he roars like someone twice as tall. The veins in his forehead stick out and his face turns fiery red as he talks about the opponent. “This isn’t about a game,” he says. “This is about a way of life. Our way of life! And if they think they can come into our town and try to kick that out of us, they got something to learn.”
His players respond like soldiers chanting after a drill sergeant as the coach makes the game sound less like a game with each thing he says. He makes it sound like a war against enemies too menacing to show mercy to. Line after line, he gets more animated, pounding his fists against chairs, tables, and whatever else is in his path. I can feel the floorboards vibrate under my feet after each round of thunderous applause from the bleachers. But it’s like their bodies are going through the motions, stomping their feet and yelling, but I can see in their eyes they don’t feel anything.
Every inch of my skin is begging me to run away, but I fight it. Keep my hands on my hips and my elbows bent like I’m supposed to. Keep searching row after row of vacant faces. And the more the coach yells, the more I feel like I’m trapped in a dream waiting for a tree to shoot up through the floor. Waiting to be tied to the trunk and have my insides chewed out by ravenous razor teeth. And the more I think about it, the more things begin to spin. The banners hanging in the rafters blur into a tornado of letters and the faces in front of me swirl around until I can’t make out one from the next, getting dizzier and beginning to panic that I’m going to faint.
I place the back of my hand on my forehead. My hair is drenched with sweat but my skin is cold to the touch. I take deep breaths and try to pull myself together. On the other side of me, Mandy keeps whispering in my direction and asking if I’m okay. Her voice sounds like the slow leak from a tire and getting distant, but I nod anyway.
“Fine,” I mouth back to her.
The blood flowing through my temples begins to pound with each booming syllable echoing off the high ceilings. The words feel like insects trying to crawl into my ears. Stinging and buzzing. And once they burrow in, I will be as dead as the bodies piled high into the bleachers in front of me. Rewired and reborn and I can’t do anything to stop it.
Squinting my eyes shut doesn’t turn it off.
Neither does pressing my fingers against the side of my head.
“Madison? Are you all right?” I can hear the voice say but it sounds distorted. Sounds like it’s being spoken underwater but getting closer.
I feel a pair of arms wrap around my waist just as the world flashes into white light like stars exploding as I pass out.
Through the windows, everything looks the way it’s supposed to. Everything looks quiet like the world has gone to sleep as the clouds break apart in the first snow of the year. I see the flakes coming down in the sliver of glass that wraps around the walls in the locker room just under the roof. So calm and perfect. A steady rain of large flakes, the kind that are good for building snowmen but are bad for sledding. Clean white snow like the skin of those standing above me as I lie on the bench and blink my eyes.
I try to sit up, but I’m not as ready as I thought. All the blood rushes to my head and someone takes hold of me from behind, lowering me back down. My eyes adjust to the light and things come into focus. I can see Meredith standing next to me, her hands behind her back and leaning slightly to the side as her foot taps slow and steady like the snow falling outside. She looks like a ceramic figure, a toy left out for attention. Morgan is whispering in her ear. Her hands moving as she speaks but there are no words. None that I can hear anyway and it’s like watching television with the sound turned off.
It will come back, though.
Slowly the way seeing does when I blink.
From the looks on the faces towering over me, I’m not so sure I want it to return. I’m sure when I do, the first thing I’ll be told is that I’m off the squad. I must be such an embarrassment to them, fainting in front of the entire school like that. Some impression I made—I bet the bored spectators woke up then. I’m sure they didn’t have to fake their laughter. I doubt Greg will ever talk to me again, either. Not after I ruined the pep rally, bringing it to a sudden end when I crashed to the floor.
“She’s such a waste of time,” the words making their way from Morgan’s mouth and drifting down to me. Maggie is standing next to her now, in front of her, arms crossed and eyes peering at me. “I told you we should’ve just gotten rid of her.” Morgan smirks, proud of the fact she’d known all along that I was worthless.
Maggie tosses her hair over her shoulder and glances at Morgan. Shutting her up with the look she saves to remind us all that we were nothing until the day she first talked to us. That we were no one until she named us. When she turns back to face me, the look grows stronger, like it’s been building inside her, just waiting for me to make a mistake. Waiting to lash out at me for not being as perfect as the rest of her clones.
I want to say I’m sorry, but the words don’t come out of me. They get stuck somewhere inside and I’m afraid to say them. Afraid they’ll only make things worse as Maggie kneels down and places one hand over mine and the other on my forehead so that I can’t lift my head. Trapped like an animal caught in wire jaws. And when she smiles, she’s letting me know that she owns me completely.
“What happened out there, Madison?” she asks like a school nurse does when she thinks you’re faking an illness to get out of class. Commanding me to talk like I’m a pet. Her least favorite pet and she wants me to know it.
“Nothing,” I whisper, feeling ready to cry.
I wish the snow could fall so fast that it covered up the last two weeks and I could start over once it melted. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have starved myself for days and gotten so weak that I started hallucinating and passed out. Maybe I never would have tried out, either. It’s the stress of trying to fit in that’s made me so on edge lately. Made my senses distort reality and imagine things that can’t be true.
Maggie’s fingers begin to move through my hair like the legs of a spider. She makes her voice into a soothing sound the way people do when trying to get an infant to stop squealing. And when I finally feel brave enough to look her in
the eye, it’s comforting to see she’s not angry. “It could happen to anyone,” she says and I see Morgan roll her eyes and put her hands on her hips, disappointed at my being given a second chance to make things right.
I start to tell Maggie that I don’t know what came over me, that I just got overwhelmed and nervous, but Maggie puts her hand in front of my mouth. She tells me it’s okay. “As long as you promise it won’t happen during the game tomorrow,” she says with a laugh that is echoed by the other girls.
“But . . . am I still on the squad?” I ask.
The mood in the locker room changes the instant the words come out.
“No one ever gets thrown off the squad once you’re on,” Meredith explains to me.
“Nothing you did was so bad that it can’t be fixed,” Maggie says. “The pep rally was almost over, anyway. And besides, it’s kind of boring listening to the same stupid speeches every time.”
“Yeah?” I ask. They seemed so serious that I never thought they’d think that way, too. But my perception has been off lately. And I guess I’m not so different from the rest of them because Maggie assures me that they can’t stand listening to the principal and Mr. Johnson, the football coach, any more than I could. To prove it, she curls her hands into fists and begins imitating the coach by grunting and foaming at the mouth in an exaggerated impersonation.
I start to feel better as I begin to laugh. My headache fades and I feel strong enough to sit up. Maybe fainting wasn’t such a big deal after all. I mean, if I think about it, probably no one was laughing at me over it. They’re probably more worried that I’m hurt or something. And anyway, the school day ended ten minutes early because of it. I’m probably a hero to some of them.
“Feeling better?” Maggie asks and I smile. I tell her I can’t believe I did that, but that I’m fine now. “Good,” she says, “because we’ve got something we need to do.”
The other girls move in closer, too excited to keep still. I move my eyes back and forth and bite my lip trying to figure out what Maggie’s hinting about. The sun breaks through the clouds for a brief moment, making a tiny halo appear above her golden hair and it dawns on me even before Maggie says it.
