Hot with exertion and adrenaline, I scooped up my extra baton and filed into the empty row of bleachers reserved for us. I sat between Delilah and Addison. Another sophomore strode to the middle of the floor and started her individual routine to a classical piano piece, of all things. I should have watched her. Instead, my mind spun with anger at the boys who had booed me. They were sitting directly behind me, six rows up.
Robert and I had been friends since the beginning of ninth grade. Addison and I sat next to each other in the alto sax section, but I couldn’t shadow her all the time. I wanted to be an engineer someday, whereas she did anything she could to stay out of advanced math. That meant we didn’t have every class together like we had in middle school. I’d fallen in with the art/drama/music geek crowd, where purple-streaked hair and Courtney Love T-shirts were the norm rather than the exception. And I’d fallen for Robert.
But he hadn’t fallen for me. Everybody put up with the pudgy, quiet girl with the dry wit, but nobody fell for her. In ninth grade, Robert had hooked up with eighth graders too young to understand he wasn’t as cool as he thought. Now that we were in tenth grade, he trolled for ninth graders. I had been the girl/friend he talked to about his girlfriends.
I should never have fantasized that he would finally fall in love with me when I lost weight. That was my own stupid fault. But he should not have made fun of me the way we’d both (I’ll admit) made fun of the doll-like girls on other schools’ majorette lines at football games last year.
Delilah’s hand slipped into mine and squeezed, returning my thoughts to the competition, and the fact that eight girls had already taken their two-minute turns. Okay, I did not hold girls’ hands. It smacked of sororities or beauty pageants or both. But I was not going to pull away from this panicking girl. I squeezed back.
Now Addison took my other hand. Without looking at her, I let her hold it. She’d never held my hand before, but she must have felt left out. I stared down at my hands, with Delilah’s dark thighs on one side, Addison’s white ones on the other. My own thighs were fifty percent larger than theirs.
I did not want to be here.
My insecurities were drowned out by Delilah’s heavy breathing. “You’re going to pass out,” I whispered. “You need to calm down and breathe normally.”
“Okay,” she said between deep, abnormal breaths that were not helping at all.
I had to get her mind off her performance. I felt bad about talking through someone else’s routine, but this was an emergency. I said the first thing that popped into my head. “Do you know Robert Cruise?”
She perked up immediately. “Cutie-pie!” she exclaimed. “With the hair, right?” She shook her hair out of her eyes in a terrific imitation of Robert. “Plays trumpet? He’s in history with me. You’re really good friends with him.”
“I thought so,” I said, “but he left me a sympathy card in my locker.”
Her eyes got huge. “Like somebody died? Instead of a good luck card?”
She acted so horrified that I backtracked and defended him. “Yeah. It was supposed to be a joke. We send each other Grandparents Day cards on our birthdays and Halloween cards on Christmas and . . .”
I stopped because her brows went down in a scowl, and she was shaking her head sternly at me. “No. This is different. He does not send you a sympathy card on majorette tryout day. No.”
That’s what I’d thought when I saw the card. But I could hear Robert’s excuse in my head, and I repeated it to Delilah. “Trying out for majorette is out of character for me. He never believed I wanted to do it. I guess the card was his last-ditch attempt to talk me out of something I’ll regret later.”
“I don’t care what it was,” she seethed loudly enough that Addison leaned forward to look at us curiously. “That is un-ac-ceptable!” She sounded just like her dad, whom I’d had for eighth-grade algebra. “This tryout is a big deal. It’s taken a huge amount of work. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be a majorette.”
“True,” I said, because it sounded true, whether it was or not.
“Friends support each other no matter what,” Delilah said firmly. “Oh God.”
I looked up to see what she’d gasped at. The twirler in front of us was finishing her routine by chasing both her batons across the floor. Now it was Delilah’s turn. Dropping Addison’s hand, I hugged Delilah hard. Over the applause, I shouted, “You’ll do great!” and meant it.
Delilah groaned. Her eyes flitted around like she was making sure she had space to faint on the floor.
I took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Don’t think about all these people. Keep your eyes on me. I’ll send you good thoughts.”
“Okay.” Delilah strutted onto the middle of the floor and grinned through the cheers and cat-calls, but sure enough, she watched me. I smiled at her.
“Traitor,” Addison said in my ear.
“I can cheer for more than one friend,” I said without looking at Addison.
“I mean, you didn’t tell me about your third baton. You told me not to use a third baton. And all because you planned to steal my trick.”
“I did not steal the concept of twirling a third baton from you,” I said reasonably. “And I told you not to use a third baton because you would drop it.” Which was true. But I had snuck my third baton in behind her back. I did not have to approve everything with Addison, but I had hidden this from her, which was not what a good friend would do.
She scooted away from me on the bench, toward the girl on the other side of her, putting as much space between us as she could—one symbolic centimeter.
I tried not to think about it. I watched Delilah. She executed a perfect toss-up with a two-turn, then an illusion, kicking up one leg and twirling the baton beneath her, spinning her body as she went. I cheered for her, and whenever she glanced my way, I let her see in my face how great she was doing. I really liked Delilah—she was one of the few genuinely nice human beings I’d ever met—and I wanted her to do well. Also, focusing on her routine kept my mind off me. And Addison. And Robert.
Delilah struck a pose with her batons crossed above her head, signaling her finish. The gym exploded with applause. I jumped up, eager to make it to the center of the gym before I decided to run out the door instead.
“Break a leg,” Addison said.
I turned. She scowled up at me without a hint of goodwill in her face. I was pretty sure she wasn’t really wishing me good luck, and she wouldn’t have minded if I’d broken a leg for real.
I high-stepped majorette-style to the center of the gym. Then I carefully placed my third baton to one side on the floor and put my hands holding the other batons on my hips. As I waited for my music to start, I stared at the back wall, feeling I did not have a genuine friend in this entire crowd of twelve hundred.
“Shake it, Gemma!” came a shout of five or six voices. The rest of the crowd giggled and looked to see who had yelled. They might not be able to tell, but I could. Robert and the trumpets around him bent their heads, hiding their faces.
If I’d had any lingering doubts about whether I should be furious with Robert, they were gone now.
My music started, thankfully. And for once in my life, I felt like I had total control. I’d picked a song with a booming disco beat that I knew the crowd would love. To keep their attention, I twirled one baton while I tossed the other incredibly high and turned three times beneath it. I had snuck into the gym and practiced to make sure my Converses wouldn’t get hung up with too much traction on the slick floor. Before I could panic, the heavy baton smacked into my outstretched hand.
The crowd roared.
I concentrated on my routine, determined to make it through. I had choreographed the song with my body in mind. I did some toss-ups with double and triple turns, my flashy specialty. But my back was to the audience for only a split second each turn. Other than that, I never turned my back on the crowd. The trumpets had already told me to shake it, but nobody was going to shout “wide load” during my number.
I hadn’t included any illusions, either, a staple of advanced routines. Delilah had impressed the crowd with one. She had a cute figure. But I refused to expose the insides of my thighs. This was why, though my baton teacher had told me I was her best student, I had never competed. I had never performed at all, except for the mandatory dance recitals at the end of the year. I kept my thighs to myself.
Carefully placing a second baton on the floor so it wouldn’t roll away, I flipped the other on my elbows and spun it on the back of my neck. It wasn’t hard once you got the hang of it, but it looked impressive. Only one junior with a lot of baton experience had this in her routine. The crowd noise now was an impressed “Oooooh.”
I swept up my batons. It was time for my grand finale: juggling all three of them. This was a trick for a feature twirler, an expert who performed an independent routine on the football field. A regular majorette didn’t need a move like this in her arsenal. Majorette routines for the halftime show were dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. If the whole line couldn’t do a trick, none of the twirlers would do it.
But I would. As my song drew to a close, I gave the last baton some extra oomph, caught the one I already had in the air, spun around twice, and caught the last baton. I’d tossed it so high that it reached terminal velocity on the way down and clobbered my hand as it connected with my palm. I did not wince. I grinned until my cheeks ached, and I put my hands on my hips.
Then I prepared to transfer all three batons to one sweaty palm so I could use the other hand to shoot the whole gym the bird. Ms. Zuccala would surely suspend me. Addison wouldn’t speak to me for a week because she would be embarrassed I was her friend. Robert and the music crowd would shun me because they would know the gesture was meant for them. But to tell them publicly how I felt about the way they’d treated me, it would be worth it.
Before I could shift my batons, the entire audience jumped up with a yell so loud, I felt the force of it in my chest.
Except for Addison, who was bent over in the bleachers, getting up her nerve. I was sorry she had to follow me. I could still shoot the gym the bird, removing myself from the competition. I had dropped a baton on purpose at our dance recital in sixth grade because Addison had dropped hers twice. I hadn’t wanted her to hate me afterward for showing her up.
But removing myself from the contest out of fear of how my best friend would treat me, or out of spite—those were things I would do if I still thought I didn’t have a chance of winning.
And now I thought I did.
I gripped my batons tightly and high-stepped back to the bleachers. I passed Addison as she marched on. She did not give me a high five.
A few hours later, at the end of the day, Ms. Zuccala came over the loudspeaker and called the majorette candidates into her office—probably so the Losers didn’t swoon in public, fall into their Bunsen burners in chemistry lab, and sue the school for pain and suffering. Personally, I would have preferred to stay en classe de français. Nobody there had ever spoken to me except in French as directed by the teacher, asking me to bring them a citron pressé. But today at least five people leaned across the aisle to tell me I’d done a great job in tryouts. I enjoyed being the center of friendly attention for the first time in my life, and I dreaded what would happen next. Addison was in English then. I did not want to face her.
When I dragged myself into Ms. Zuccala’s crowded office, Addison didn’t rush over to me and hug me. She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and deliberately turned her back, laughing with the popular juniors like she was working the room. Delilah talked with someone else. I didn’t really know the other girls. Several of them looked at my hair—I was still wearing the tiara—then down at my shoes, and took one step backward. Since I was cornered by a huge glass trophy case, I pretended to be interested in the awards inside: the state football championship last year, the wrestling championship from a few years before, and lots and lots of trophies the majorette line had won at band contests.
“May I have your attention, please,” Ms. Zuccala called. The giggling and shrieking quieted. Ms. Zuccala spoke to us and into the microphone, which broadcast across the school. We could hear her voice and her echo on the loudspeaker from the waiting room.
She consulted a slip of paper for several end-of-the-school-day announcements. Finally she winked at the room and said, “The moment we’ve all been waiting for. The members of the new majorette line are, in alphabetical order: Delilah Allen.”
Everyone around Delilah smothered her in a group hug. Several girls squealed and shushed themselves, because whatever we said could be heard over the intercom. I imagined those squeals would be funny to hear if you were sitting in band. It was the sort of thing Robert and I would have rolled our eyes at together.
But I finally understood the emotion behind those squeals. I was thrilled for Delilah. When I’d heard her name, I’d let out the tiniest squeal myself. At least some good had come out of this warped experience. She’d wanted so badly to make the line. Now if she could figure out how not to faint on the football field during the halftime show next fall, she would be golden.
Ms. Zuccala called two juniors’ names, and they jumped up and down together. Then, “Addison Johnson.”
Addison put both hands to her mouth. That was all I saw before she was obscured by girls hugging her. I was happy she’d made the squad. Really happy. If I kept telling myself this, maybe I would feel it.
No . . . I was a terrible person, because all I felt was dread. She had made the majorette line, and I hadn’t. She would lord it over me. She would hang out with the other majorettes from now on. I would go crawling back to Robert and admit that he’d been right. Majorette tryouts were a popularity contest. They had nothing to do with talent, since Addison had made it.