Tracy did my hair at six in the morning on the day of provincials, at the kitchen table, with the overhead light on and the radio off and a can of hairspray the size of a fire extinguisher.
“High,” she said. “Ms. Dufresne said high, with the bow at the top. Hold still.”
I held still. She brushed it all up from my neck, the way she’d shown me in July. She twisted it and pinned it and put the bow on, the big yellow one, and sprayed it until I couldn’t breathe. Then she stood back and looked at me.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, look at you.”
She took a picture with my camera. She took about twenty.
At the school, on the bus, Tiffany took one look at it and said “No,” and took all the pins out and did it again in the back seat while the bus went down Crowchild. She did it faster and higher and with more pins. She said Tracy’s was good for a mom.
“Don’t tell her,” I said.
“I’d never,” said Tiffany, with a bobby pin in her teeth.
* * *
The night before, Nathan had phoned at nine. Tracy was in the bath. I took the cordless into my closet and shut the door and sat on the floor under the hoodie rail, empty now, and the calendar.
“Easter,” he said.
“What?”
“Easter weekend,” he said. “Gordon and Donna on the Saturday. Your mom on the Sunday. Everybody’s home. Nobody’s working. Brett’s home.”
I looked at the calendar. The Xs went to the twentieth of March. Easter was three weeks away. It had a little cross printed in the corner of the square.
“That’s soon,” I said.
“It’s not soon. It’s seven weeks before June first.” He breathed. “If we do it then, there’s time. For whatever happens after. For the forms. For your mom to sign them. For anything.”
“What if they don’t believe us?”
“Then they don’t. And we’ve still got the papers. And we’ve still got June.” He was quiet. “And we’ve still got each other. That’s the part that doesn’t change.”
I sat in the closet in the dark with the phone.
“Okay,” I said. “Easter.”
“Go to sleep. You’ve got a pyramid tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“Look at the wall,” he said, and hung up before I could say anything back.
* * *
The Big Four Building was on the Stampede grounds, the big long one by the Saddledome. In July it had been full of cows and trade booths. Now it was full of mats, and bleachers, and girls.
There were hundreds of them, teams from all over Alberta, from Edmonton and Red Deer and Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat. They wore every colour you could think of: red and black, green and white, purple, teal. Some of them had bows the size of dinner plates. The air smelled like hairspray and the popcorn machine in the corner. The noise came off the concrete floor and the high ceiling and hit you from every side at once. Every few minutes a team on the competition mat would finish, and the whole building would scream.
We were in the junior high division. We went on at twenty to twelve. Until then we had a warm-up room, a classroom with the desks pushed back against the walls and a strip of mat down the middle.
Cassidy stood in the middle of it with her hands on her hips.
“Okay,” she said. “Listen.”
We listened. Fourteen of us in blue and gold, in a classroom under the Big Four Building, with the noise coming through the walls.
“We’re not going to win,” Cassidy said.
Kendall said “Cass.”
“We’re not. Aspen Heights is going to win. They’ve won four years in a row. They have a gym with a sprung floor and a coach who used to be on the national team.” She looked at us one at a time. “I don’t care. I don’t care about Aspen Heights. I care about the pyramid.”
Nobody moved.
“Bow Crest has never done a pyramid,” Cassidy said. “Not once. Ms. Dufresne says the Bow Crest pyramid has historically been a pile. Today it’s not a pile. Today it’s a pyramid. We do the pyramid. We hold it. We bring it down clean, and I don’t care if we come in last.” She was looking at me and Sadie. “Flyers. Look at the wall. Don’t you dare look down.”
“We won’t,” said Sadie.
“Smile like you mean it,” said Cassidy.
“We will.”
“Okay.” Cassidy nodded. Her chin was doing something. “Okay. I love you idiots, okay? Hands in.”
We put our hands in. Fourteen hands in a pile in the middle of the classroom.
“Bears,” said Cassidy. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“BEARS,” said everybody, and the door opened, and a woman with a clipboard said “Bow Crest? You’re on deck.”
* * *
On deck was a row of folding chairs behind a curtain beside the competition mat. You could hear the team before you, finishing, and the building screaming for them. Then the announcer.
“Ladies and gentlemen, from Calgary... the Bow Crest Bears!”
We ran out.
The mat was blue. It was so much bigger than the one in our gym. The bleachers went up on three sides, high, full of people, and the lights were in my eyes, and for a second I couldn’t see anything.
Then I could.
They were in the fourth row, in the middle, right behind the judges’ table. Nathan was there in his Bears football jacket, with his hands on his knees, and Manny was beside him with his hood down for once, looking at the mat. In the row behind them sat Tracy in her red scarf, and Donna in her good coat, and Gordon, who was standing up already with his hands cupped around his mouth.
And at the very top of the bleachers, by himself, in the back row against the wall, with his arms crossed, was Brett.
Nobody had asked Brett. I hadn’t known he was coming.
We took our places. I stood on my mark at the back, behind Cassidy and Kendall. I put my hands on my hips. I looked at the far wall of the Big Four Building, where there was a banner that said ALBERTA CHEERLEADING PROVINCIALS 2009 and a clock.
The music started.
* * *
The routine was two minutes and thirty seconds. I’d done it about four hundred times. I’d done it in the gym and in the hall at home and in my head in bed at night. I knew every count of it the way you know the words to a song you hate.
Five, six, seven, eight.
The opening. Arms up, arms down, a clap on five. Fourteen of us moving together, so it looked like one thing instead of fourteen. I could feel the mat under my shoes, springy, not like our gym. I could feel Tiffany on one side of me and Jocelyn on the other.
One, two, three, four.
Then came tumbling, and I wasn’t a tumbler. Ms. Dufresne had given me a back walkover, one, in the corner, while the real tumblers did their passes down the middle. In January I couldn’t do it. In February I’d done it on the mat in our gym with Ms. Dufresne’s hand on my back. In March I’d done it on my own. Ur body can do a back walkover, Nathan had typed in September. It works.
I went back. My hands found the mat. My feet came over. I stood up.
It worked.
Five, six, seven, eight.
After the jumps came the cheer section, where we turned to the crowd and yelled Bow Crest, Bow Crest, BLUE and GOLD. I could hear Gordon over the whole building yelling it back, a second behind everybody, the way he sang O Canada at hockey.
Then stunts.
Cassidy and Kendall’s hands under my feet. Tiffany behind me. Up. I went up into a prep, at the height of their shoulders. Then the extension, all the way up, their arms straight over their heads, with me standing on their hands, higher than anything.
There were the lights and the noise and the far wall.
I looked at the clock on the far wall. I didn’t look down. I put my arms out. I smiled like I meant it.
Hold. Hold. Hold.
Then the cradle, and down, into three sets of arms.
Five, six, seven, eight.
The pyramid.
* * *
It went up in three counts of eight. First the bases locked together at the elbows in a row. Then Sadie and I went up on our bases’ hands to the two peaks. Then came the arms: me reaching over to Sadie, Sadie reaching over to me, our hands linking at the very top of the pyramid over everybody’s heads, the highest point in the whole of Bow Crest history.
I went up on Cassidy and Kendall. Sadie went up on Jocelyn and Tiffany. I reached for her.
Her hand wasn’t there.
She was wobbling. I saw it at the edge of my eye, out past my arm, in her left foot. Jocelyn’s grip had slipped, just a little, just enough. Sadie was tipping out and away, toward the edge, with her arm out the other way for balance, and her hand wasn’t where my hand was.
I didn’t look at her. I didn’t look down. I kept my eyes on the clock on the far wall, the way she’d told me, you just look at the wall, and I reached further. Further than we’d practised. I leaned out off Cassidy’s hands, out over nothing, as far as I could go.
Cassidy felt me lean. I felt her feel it. Under my right foot, her hand moved, a little, and held.
My fingers found Sadie’s.
I held on and pulled, not hard, just enough to bring her back in, the way the hands had brought me back in that Saturday in September when I looked down and fell. Her foot came back onto Jocelyn’s hand. She straightened.
We were up. We were both up, at the top, holding hands, over everybody’s heads.
I looked at the clock. Sadie looked at the clock. We smiled like we meant it.
Hold. Hold. Hold.
The building was screaming. I couldn’t hear the music anymore. I couldn’t hear anything but the screaming, and Cassidy under my foot saying hold, hold, hold, through her teeth.
Down.
We came down. Cradle. Three sets of arms each, all at once, all exactly where they said they’d be. Clean.
Then the last eight counts, arms up, and the final pose.
The music stopped.
* * *
I don’t remember running off the mat. I remember the curtain, and then the folding chairs. Then all fourteen of us were in a pile on the concrete floor behind the curtain, screaming. Tiffany was crying. Kendall was crying. Cassidy stood over us all with her face going, saying “That was a pyramid. That was a pyramid. Did you see that?” over and over, until Ms. Dufresne came through the curtain. Her mug was empty, and her glasses were on crooked, and she put her arms around as many of us as she could reach.
Sadie was beside me on the floor. She was holding my hand. She hadn’t let go of it since the top.
“You didn’t look,” she said.
“You told me not to.”
“I looked,” Sadie said. “When I started to go. I looked at you.” She was crying. She was laughing. “You were looking at the wall.”
* * *
We came third.
Aspen Heights won, like Cassidy said. A team from Red Deer came second. When the announcer said in third place, from Calgary, Cassidy stood up before he’d said the name. She knew. Then he said it, the Bow Crest Bears, and she put both her hands over her face and sat down again and cried like she’d been hit.
We went up to get the trophy. It was small and gold, with a cheerleader on top. Cassidy held it. Then she handed it to me.
“Hold it,” she said. “I can’t, my hands are shaking.”
I held it. I stood on the podium in the Big Four Building with fourteen girls in blue and gold, holding a trophy with my left hand, the hook curled around the base of it, and looked up at the fourth row.
Gordon was standing on his seat. Somebody behind him was telling him to sit down. He wasn’t sitting down. He had his arms up over his head, and he was yelling something, and I couldn’t hear it over everybody else, but I knew it anyway. I’d heard it at every hockey game Brett ever played.
Donna was beside him with her hands together under her chin.
Nathan was standing. He wasn’t yelling. He had his hands in his jacket pockets, and he was looking at me, and his face was doing the thing it had done at the end zone in October. Like it had won something.
Manny was standing beside him. He was clapping. He was looking at me too, very steadily, and he wasn’t frowning anymore.
At the very top of the bleachers, Brett had uncrossed his arms.
And Tracy.
Tracy was standing in the fifth row in her red scarf with my camera in both hands, not taking a picture. She had it up in front of her, and she’d forgotten to press the button. She was just looking at me over the top of it.
I’d seen that face before. I’d seen it at the kitchen table, the first week home, when I asked for new clothes. I’d seen it on the edge of the bathtub in July. I’d seen it in the hospital in June, the first morning, when I squeezed her hand.
It was the face of somebody watching the thing she’d waited for her whole life, and seeing exactly what it would cost to lose it.
* * *
In the car on the way home it was dark. Tracy drove up Crowchild with both hands on the wheel. The trophy was at school with Ms. Dufresne. I had my bow in my lap. My hair was still up, all of Tiffany’s pins, so stiff with spray it felt like a helmet.
Tracy was quiet for a long time. Past the university. Past the hospital on its hill, the coloured blocks lit up in the dark.
“I’m applying everywhere in Calgary,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Everywhere,” she said. “Every job. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s half. I don’t care if it’s a third. I’ll do payroll. I’ll do reception. I’ll do nights at the Co-op if I have to. I’ll take anything in this city.” She was looking at the road. “I’m not taking you away from that. I watched you up there. I’m not taking you away from that.”
“Okay,” I said.
It was all I could say. I said it quietly. Then I turned and looked out my window at Crowchild Trail going by in the dark, at the houses and the lights and the snow on the edges of the road, so she wouldn’t see my face.
I cried at the road. All the way to Royal Oak. Very quietly, with my forehead on the glass, the way I’d done on the train in July, while Tracy drove with both hands and didn’t say anything else, and didn’t need to.
When we got home there was a message on the machine. It was Murray, from Lethbridge, saying he was sorry he couldn’t make it, kiddo, the dealership, but he’d heard from your mom that you were great, and he was real proud, and he’d see me soon.
Tracy played it twice. Then she saved it.