Tiffany asked me every day for a week. She asked at homeroom and at lunch and once in the hall with her head stuck out of the girls’ washroom door.
“Tryouts are Monday. You’re doing it. You’re tiny. Cassidy needs a flyer. Sadie’s the only flyer and she says she’s going to die.”
“I don’t know how to do any of it.”
“Nobody does. That’s what tryouts are for. Ms. Dufresne says no experience necessary. It’s on the poster. In pink.”
On MSN that night I told Nathan. dekker #7 says:
tiffany wants me to try out for cheer nate says:
do it dekker #7 says:
i cant nate says:
why not dekker #7 says:
i dont know. i never did anything like that nate says:
you never did anything like that as me. youre not me nate says:
also ur body can do a back walkover. i did one at the lethbridge sportsplex in grade 7 on a dare. it works dekker #7 says:
what is a back walkover nate says:
lol. go to tryouts
On Monday the fifteenth, the TV in the kitchen at breakfast said a bank in New York had gone under in the night. A big one. A man in a suit stood outside a building with people carrying boxes out of it behind him. Tracy watched it with her coffee halfway to her mouth.
“Is that bad?” I said.
“It’s New York,” she said. Then she put the coffee down without drinking it. “Do you have your gym stuff? Today’s the day. Do you have runners? Do you have the elastics? Take two. Take three.”
* * *
The girls’ locker room at Bow Crest was in the basement, past the boys’ one, down a hall that smelled like a swimming pool even though there wasn’t one.
I’d been in the boys’ one a hundred times. I’d changed in the corner by the shower in about ten seconds flat, every gym class for two years, with my back to the room. I knew exactly which bench was by the door in there.
The door to the girls’ had a sign that said GIRLS in metal letters, with the R loose and hanging a little crooked. I stood in front of it with my gym bag. A girl I didn’t know came down the hall behind me and said “Sorry.” She went around me, pushed the door open and went in. It swung back. I caught it before it closed and went in after her.
It was loud. It was full. There were girls on every bench, getting changed for tryouts, talking all at once. Somebody had a radio going on top of the lockers. Somebody was spraying something that smelled like fake strawberries. I looked at the floor. The floor was grey with darker grey flecks in it, and I looked at the flecks and found a spot on a bench at the very end, by the wall, and put my bag down on it.
“Are you Paige?”
I looked up. A tall girl with a white-blond ponytail was standing over me with her hands on her hips. She had a whistle around her neck. She was in Grade 9 and looked like she’d been in charge of something since she was born.
“Yes,” I said.
“Tiffany said. You’re the small one.” She looked at me the way you’d look at a ladder you were about to climb. “Good. You’re flying.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You will by Thursday.” She turned around. “Tiff. Give her an elastic. She’s got her hair in a thing.”
Tiffany came over the bench at me with three elastics on her wrist and pulled one off and handed it to me without stopping talking to the girl behind her. Then she went back to the girl behind her.
That was all. That was the whole thing. Nobody looked at me twice. I put my hair up with Tiffany’s elastic and tied my runners on the bench at the end by the wall. There were girls on both sides of me tying theirs. Somebody’s radio was playing, and there was the strawberry smell, and the noise.
I was one of them. I sat there for a second longer than I needed to and let it be true.
“You coming?” said the girl next to me. It was Sadie, from science, with her ponytail. She’d waited.
“Yes,” I said.
* * *
Ms. Dufresne ran tryouts the way she ran science. She had a clipboard, her mug and her glasses on her head. She said everything twice, once loud and once to the person she meant.
“Hydrate! Twenty-two of you. I need fourteen. That’s not me being mean, that’s the size of the mat. Cassidy runs warm-up. Go.”
Cassidy ran warm-up like a drill sergeant. Jumping jacks, lunges, the splits as far as you could get. I went further down than I’d ever gone at anything. Cassidy went past and pushed my shoulder down another inch with one hand, said “Breathe,” and kept going.
We learned a cheer. Eight counts. Bow Crest, Bow Crest, BLUE and GOLD. The arms went with the words. I kept being half a count behind, and Tiffany, beside me, kept saying “Clap on five,” under her breath, until I clapped on five.
Then stunts.
“Flyers,” Ms. Dufresne said. “Sadie, show her.”
Sadie showed me. She didn’t talk much doing it, either. Two girls stood facing each other and made a step with their hands. A third stood behind with her hands ready. Sadie put her hands on the bases’ shoulders and stepped in, and they lifted, and she went up. She stood on their hands at the height of their shoulders with her arms out and her back straight and her face calm, looking at the far wall of the gym where the basketball hoop was, like she was waiting for a bus.
Then they dipped and tossed, and she came down into their arms like she’d been dropped into a chair.
“Okay.”
“You won’t fall,” Sadie said. “They catch you. That’s the deal.”
They put me on Cassidy and a girl called Kendall, with Tiffany as back spot. I put my hands on their shoulders. My hands were shaking. I stepped into the step of their hands with my right foot, then my left.
“Up,” said Cassidy.
I went up.
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to be scared. One second I was on the gym floor, and the next I was up there, at the height of their shoulders, with their hands under my feet, and the whole gym laid out below me like a map. The bleachers. The clock. Ms. Dufresne with her clipboard. The basketball hoop on the far wall.
I looked at the hoop. I locked my knees. I put my arms out.
I wasn’t scared. I was something else. I was up.
“Good,” said Cassidy, from under my right foot. “Hold. Hold. Hold. Okay, cradle. Down.”
They dipped, and threw, and I came down backwards, and three sets of arms were there, exactly where they’d said they’d be. Under my back. Under my knees. Tiffany’s arms around my shoulders, from behind.
They put me on my feet.
“Again,” said Cassidy.
We did it six more times. On the fifth one I wobbled. Kendall said “Whoa.” The back spot’s hands came up and held my ankles, and I stayed. On the sixth I didn’t wobble.
“Fine,” said Cassidy, which from her was a lot.
* * *
The names went up on the gym door on Wednesday at lunch.
There were fourteen, in Ms. Dufresne’s square printing on a sheet of looseleaf with a pom-pom drawn at the top. Tiffany found my name before I did. She screamed. She grabbed me around the neck from behind and screamed in my ear, and three people in the hall turned around, and Mr. Thibodeau came out of the office with his zoo mug to see who’d been hurt.
DEKKER, P. Fifth from the bottom.
I stood in front of it. I read it again. It said my name.
That night at supper I told Tracy, and she dropped the serving spoon into the potatoes.
“My daughter,” she said. “My daughter the cheerleader.” She came around the table and hugged me, potatoes and all, with my face in her sweater. “Oh my God. Oh, Paigey. I always wanted. I mean, I never thought. You never wanted to do anything like this. You never let me put you in anything with a skirt.”
“It’s okay,” I said into the sweater.
“You’ll need shoes,” she said, letting go. “The white ones. With the thing. I saw them at Sport Chek. And a bow. Do they do bows? I bet they do bows.”
She was thrilled for the wrong reasons. She’d been waiting fourteen years for a kid who’d want a skirt and a bow, and she thought she’d finally got her kid to want them. She thought I’d come around.
And she was thrilled for the right ones. She was thrilled that I was. She could see it on me. She didn’t have to know why.
* * *
We practised Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and Saturday mornings. By the end of September I could do a prep and a cradle and a half-turn on the way down, and the Bow Crest cheer from start to finish without being behind on five. Cassidy yelled at me less than at anybody. Tiffany said that was a compliment. Kendall said she was saving it up.
Sadie and I flew side by side in the routine. We went up at the same count and came down at the same count, a metre apart, looking at the same far wall. We hardly talked. We didn’t have to. We had the count.
The first Saturday, I fell.
We were doing an extension, which is a prep except the bases push you all the way up, arms straight, so you’re standing on their hands over their heads. I’d done it twice that morning. On the third time Cassidy said “Up,” and I went, and at the top I looked down.
I don’t know why. I knew not to. Sadie had told me on the first day. But I was up there, higher than I’d ever been on anything, and I wanted to see how high, and I looked.
The gym floor went away from me like the bottom of a pool.
My knee went. I went sideways. Somebody yelled. Then I wasn’t on anything, and there were hands, a lot of them, all at once. Tiffany had my shoulders. Kendall had my legs. Cassidy had let go of my foot and somehow got an arm under my back, and the four of us went down onto the mat in a pile.
Nobody was hurt. Kendall had my runner in her eye. Cassidy got up first and stood over me.
“Where were you looking?”
“Down.”
“Don’t,” Cassidy said. She held out a hand and pulled me up by it. “Again.”
I went to the washroom first. I sat in the end stall with the door locked and my hands over my face and shook. It wasn’t the falling. It was the hands. Four girls I’d known for two weeks had caught me without even having to think about it, and I’d never in my life had anybody catch me at all.
Somebody knocked on the stall door, two quick taps.
“It’s Sadie.”
“I’m okay.”
“I know,” Sadie said through the door. “I just came to say. Look at the wall.”
“I know.”
“Everybody looks down once,” she said. “I looked down in Grade 7 and broke Cassidy’s nose.”
I took my hands off my face.
“She was fine,” said Sadie. “It’s a little crooked now. Don’t tell her I told you.”
I went back out. I went up again, and looked at the hoop on the far wall, and stayed.
* * *
Murray phoned on the Sunday, at ten, like always. I told him I’d made the cheer team.
“Cheer,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You. Cheer. The pom-poms and the... kiddo, you used to throw popcorn at the cheerleaders at Hurricanes games.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Huh,” said Murray. I could hear him trying to fit it into something. He was a nice man and he was trying. “Well. Huh. Okay. Deanna did cheer, back in high school, in Taber. She’ll be tickled.” He laughed, a bit uncertainly. “I’ll have to come up and see you. When’s your first thing?”
“October.”
“I’ll try,” he said, and we both knew he wouldn’t, and that it was okay.
* * *
On the last Friday in September, Tiffany had a sleepover.
* * *
Tiffany’s house was in Arbour Lake, near the lake, with a basement that had a TV the size of a car and a carpet you could sleep on. Her mom made spring rolls and then hid upstairs and let us have the whole basement, and her little brother came down the stairs four times to look at us until Tiffany threw a pillow at him.
There were six of us. Tiffany, Sadie, me, Kendall, and a girl called Jocelyn who did the bottom of every pyramid and never complained. Cassidy said sleepovers were for babies. Then she came anyway, with a pillow and a bag of Doritos.
We watched Mean Girls and then The Devil Wears Prada, and talked over both of them. We painted our toenails in a row on the carpet, with the bottles passed down the line, and Tiffany did mine. I was going too slowly. Cassidy fell asleep halfway through the second movie with a Dorito in her hand, and Tiffany took a picture with her mom’s camera.
“Are you going out with Nathan Reimer?” said Kendall, around midnight, out of nowhere, with her face lit up by the TV.
Everybody looked at me.
“No,” I said.
“You eat lunch with him.”
“He’s my friend.”
“He looks at you,” Tiffany said. “In the hall. Like this.” She did a face, a big serious face with her eyebrows together, and everybody laughed. “Like you’re a math problem.”
“Ew,” I said.
“You said that really fast.”
“Because it’s ew,” I said. “It’s so ew. You don’t even know.”
They all screamed and threw pillows at me, and I let them, and I laughed into the carpet. It was true. They didn’t even know.
* * *
They were all asleep by two. The TV was on with the sound off, a man selling knives. Somebody was snoring. It was Cassidy.
I lay in my sleeping bag on the carpet with my eyes open.
I didn’t sleep at other people’s houses. I hadn’t much, before, except at Manny’s, where we stayed up till four playing his brother’s games. Now I didn’t sleep anywhere without the alarm by my head. I hadn’t brought it. Nobody brings an alarm clock to a sleepover. I’d told Tracy I’d be fine. I’d told myself I’d stay up.
I lay there and kept my eyes open and watched the man sell knives.
“You’re awake,” somebody whispered.
It was Sadie, in the sleeping bag beside mine. She was lying on her side, facing me.
“Yeah.”
“Me too. I can’t sleep at sleepovers.”
“Me neither.”
We lay there. The man on TV cut a tomato in half.
“I’m scared of falling,” Sadie whispered. “When we fly. Every time. I’ve been flying since Grade 7 and I’m scared every single time.”
“You don’t look scared.”
“I look at the wall,” she said. “That’s all it is. You just look at the wall.”
I didn’t tell her what I was scared of. I couldn’t. But I lay there next to somebody who was awake too, at two in the morning, both of us looking at the ceiling of Tiffany’s basement, and after a while she reached over and put her hand flat on the top of my sleeping bag, on my arm, and left it there.
“Wake me up if you fall asleep and I don’t,” she said. It didn’t make any sense. Then she fell asleep.
I stayed awake till it got light. I didn’t mind.
* * *
The first football game was on the first Thursday of October, after school, on the Bow Crest field. Bow Crest against a junior high from the southwest with green jerseys and a bus.
We cheered from the sideline in our blue and gold, with our new white shoes and the bows Tracy had been right about. The bleachers had about sixty people in them, mostly parents with travel mugs. Tracy was there in the third row, in her work clothes. She’d left early again. Gordon and Donna were there too, two rows behind her, Gordon standing up with his hands around his mouth. I saw them and looked at the field.
Nathan was number thirty-four.
He played running back on offence and linebacker on defence, which Tiffany said nobody did, and he was on the field almost the whole game. I knew him every time, even with the helmet. I knew him by the walk. I’d never in my life walked like that, and I knew it anyway.
In the second quarter he took a handoff and went through the middle of the line like it wasn’t there. Two green jerseys came off him. He didn’t stop until he was in the end zone. The bleachers stood up. Gordon was yelling something I could hear from the sideline, THAT’S MY BOY, with his whole body, the way he did everything.
We did the touchdown cheer. I went up on Cassidy and Kendall’s hands with my arms out and looked at the far goalposts.
When I came down, Nathan was walking back to the bench with his helmet in his hand. He stopped at the sideline. He looked over at the cheer squad, at me, and his face was doing something it had never done when it was mine. It looked like it had won something.
I waved. Once. With my left hand.
He lifted his left hand back, the one with the hook, about as high as his shoulder. Then Coach Ferreira yelled “Reimer!” and he put his helmet on and ran.