The Secret Language of Girls (13 page)

There weren’t any bleachers at the soccer field, so all the parents who came to watch the game had to bring their own chairs or else stand up. Marylin’s mom was sitting on a long, folded-out beach chair next to the drama club’s bake sale table. She was dressed in a business suit and had a laptop computer on her knees. Marylin wished her mom had dressed in sweats and tennis shoes like all the other mothers. It was hard for her to concentrate on cheerleading with her mom sticking out like a sore thumb.

“Go, Mavericks!” Ashley Greer yelled, and then all the cheerleaders were yelling, “We’re number one!” and “We’re the best!” Marylin yelled out, “Go, team!” as loud as she could and jumped up and down.

“Go, Wes!” a voice called from behind her. Marylin turned around to see a boy leaning against a bike, one fist raised in the air. He had dark-brown hair, and eyes that were so blue, Marylin could see that they were blue from ten feet away.

“That’s Wes Porter’s brother,” Mazie Calloway said in a loud whisper to Marylin. “He’s only got one leg.”

“I see two legs,” Marylin said. “How could he ride a bike with only one leg?”

Mazie shook her head, as though she couldn’t believe how dumb Marylin was. “One of his legs is fake. He had cancer last year, when he was in, like, seventh grade.”

The boy didn’t look like the sort of person
who’d had cancer to Marylin. He looked like her cousin Shelton, who was always building forts in his backyard and then tearing them down. You had to be pretty healthy to destroy things the way her cousin Shelton did.

“Are you sure he had cancer?” she asked Mazie.

Mazie nodded. “Positive.”

“Team Appreciation Cheer!” Jessica Donovan called out. Jessica was an eighth grader who was the captain of the cheerleaders. Marylin got in line with the other girls and faced the crowd. She put on her best cheerleader smile. She tried not to notice that Wes Porter’s brother was smiling back at her. Too much interpersonal contact with team supporters was not professional, according to Ms. Lyttle, the cheerleading coach.

During half-time Marylin’s mom brought her a juice box. “You’re working hard out here,” she said. “You need your vitamins.”

“Hey, Mrs. McIntosh,” Mazie said. “So how do we look? Better than the team, that’s for sure.”

The team was behind four to nothing. Marylin hoped it wasn’t the cheerleaders’ fault. During the first half they had accidentally done a basketball cheer during an important penalty shot. Wes Porter’s brother had yelled out, “Hey, wrong sport!” and a bunch of people in the crowd had laughed.

“You all look wonderful,” Marylin’s mom assured Mazie. “Maybe the team will have a better second half.”

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Wes Porter’s brother stood behind Marylin’s mom. He was holding a dirt-crusted glove. “Did you drop this?”

Marylin’s mom peered at the glove. “No, that looks like it’s been out here awhile. But it’s nice of you to ask,” she said, smiling at the boy.

“Okay,” the boy said, sounding disappointed. He looked at Marylin. “You didn’t
drop this glove, did you?” he asked. Marylin shook her head no.

The boy shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said, and then he let the glove fall to the ground. Marylin watched as he walked back over to his bike. You would never know he had only one leg, Marylin thought. He walked exactly like a two-legged person.

The team lost five to one. By the end of the game the cheerleaders’ jumps barely lifted them off the ground. Marylin’s voice sounded like someone had rubbed sandpaper over the top of it. She sort of liked it that way, though. It made her sound older.

“My mom will take us to the party tonight,” Caitlin Moore told Marylin as they were packing up their cheerleading gear. “Be ready at seven thirty, okay?”

Marylin nodded. She waved at the other cheerleaders as they walked off toward the parking lot. Marylin’s mom was standing on
the field talking to the school principal, Ms. Carter-Juarez. Looking around to make sure no one was paying attention, Marylin picked up the glove that Wes Porter’s brother had let drop to the ground and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

I think I have one just like it at home,
she had been prepared to say if anyone caught her. But no one did, so she didn’t have to make up an excuse for taking something just because Wes Porter’s brother had touched it.

“So who’s going to be at this party?” Marylin’s mom asked that night ten minutes before Marylin was supposed to leave. “Anybody I should know about? Any cute boys?”

“Mom!” Marylin pretended she was shocked her mother would ask such a thing.

Marylin’s mom plopped down on the edge of Marylin’s bed. “What? Can’t I be curious about the cute boys in your class?”

Petey came to the doorway. “You’re too old for cute boys, Mom,” he said. “You have to stick to Dad.”

“Thanks a lot!” Marylin’s mom said, throwing a pillow at Petey. “Just my luck.”

Marylin ignored her mom’s last remark. In her opinion, if her mom could find a few nicer things to say about her dad, maybe they wouldn’t fight so much and her dad wouldn’t always been gone on business trips. Maybe Marylin could grow up in a happy home.

But she kept her opinion to herself, since she wasn’t in the mood to discuss her parents’ relationship. Instead she looked in the mirror for the ten millionth time. She thought her hair might look really stupid. All the other cheerleaders had great hair. They had award-winning hair. Marylin’s hair was just okay, as far as she was concerned. For a minute she considered dying it, and then she remembered what she’d been meaning to tell her
mom ever since she got home from the game.

“Flannery cut off all of her hair and dyed it red!” Marylin exclaimed. “She looks like she just got back from outer space. She’s so weird now!”

“You’re kidding,” Marylin’s mom said. “I can’t believe Penny would let her do something like that.”

“I don’t think she asked her mom if she could. I think she just went ahead and did it.”

Marilyn pulled at her bangs, wondering if braids would look good. Braids were out of the question for Flannery now, that was for sure. She barely had enough hair to run a comb through. She wondered if Flannery missed wearing braids. That’s what she had worn for the cheerleading tryouts.

“I guess I’ll try out after all,” Flannery had told Marylin, way back when practically the entire middle school had been buzzing about who had a chance to make the cheerleading
squad and who didn’t. Only people like Kate acted like they didn’t care.

“What about your ankles?” Marylin had asked. “Didn’t your doctor say you couldn’t try out because of your ankles?”

Flannery shrugged. “He said they were better. He was more worried what it would do to a natural cheerleader like me not to be on the squad. Really, it’s like breathing. Someone like me needs to cheer to survive. I realized that after coaching you all that time. I only hope I don’t bump you off the squad.”

When Marylin walked into the gym for tryouts, she saw the members of last year’s cheerleading squad congregated by a table at the far end of the basketball court. Marylin noted that they all had long necks, like swans in warm-up clothes. They chatted amiably among themselves and raised knowing eyebrows at one another as they surveyed the nervous group of girls flittering around the edges
of the gym, chirping like nervous sparrows.

Finally the tallest cheerleader stood up and blew a whistle. Everyone quieted. “When I call out your name, please come front and center and show us your routine. Remember, be loud, be proud, and smile!”

The cheerleaders behind her whooped and applauded, and a few of the girls in the crowd did too. Marylin thought maybe she should jump up and down, but she didn’t want to draw too much attention to herself, in case the panel of cheerleaders thought she was show-offy. Although, if you thought about it, cheerleaders were sort of supposed to be show-offy. By the time Marylin had decided maybe she’d clap just a little bit, everyone else had stopped, so she just stood there quietly.

The first few girls who tried out were awful. Marylin knew she shouldn’t be happy that some people couldn’t do a cartwheel to save their lives, but she couldn’t help herself. Then
Ashley Greer was called. You could just tell she was a natural cheerleader, the way she bounced on the balls of her feet and smiled so hard it made Marylin’s face hurt to look at her. “Ready, okay!” Ashley yelled, and then she went into her routine. The cheerleaders behind the table began scratching rapid notes on their clipboards. Ashley was in, you could just tell.

When Marylin’s name was called, she ran to the center of the court, thinking,
Bounce! Bounce! Bounce!
And then, to her horror, she yelled “Bounce!” at the top of her lungs and everyone giggled. “Bounce!” she yelled again, hoping it would seem like she’d done it on purpose the first time.

“Bounce, everyone! Get on your feet!” Marylin bounced a few times herself when she hit front and center, and suddenly it was as if she’d bounced herself into another person. All the jittery nervousness that had filled her like helium a few moments before magically
became superpowered cheerleading energy surging through her arms and legs. “Ready, okay!” she shouted, not caring that she was copying Ashley. It just sounded like the professional, cheerleading sort of thing to say.

As she clapped and stomped her way through her routine, Marylin noticed the cheerleaders behind the table scribbling on their clipboards. Her smile brightened by several hundred watts. She was in, she could just feel it.

She was in, that was, if Flannery didn’t push her off the squad. Marylin leaned back against the gym wall as Flannery tromped out to the center of the court. Flannery nodded at the panel of judges, then put her hands on her hips. “Let’s go!” she called.

But Flannery didn’t go. Marylin wasn’t an expert or anything, but she’d seen enough cheerleaders in action to know that you had to have a special quality to cheer. You had to
look like you were light as air and strong as steel at the same time. You needed to look like a boy could lift your entire body up on his little finger, and as if you could do a triple flip off his fingertips.

Flannery looked like she needed a nap. There was just something about the way she stomped across the floor. It was more like a really old person who was mad about something shuffling down the hallway to tell you about it. She didn’t lift her arms up high enough. And halfway through her routine, she started scowling instead of smiling.

“You did great!” Marylin lied when Flannery had finished, and Flannery nodded, a confident grin on her face. “I aced it!” she said. “I’m just a natural, I guess!”

When Flannery got cut after the first round of tryouts, she wasn’t exactly gracious about it. “I guess I didn’t bribe the right people,” she said so that all the cheerleaders at the judges’ table
could hear her. Marylin found herself slowly edging away from her, so that nobody would put the two of them together in their minds.

The next week Flannery had started hanging out with Bebe Hurst and Trish Simon, two well-known eighth grade cigarette smokers. Marylin had felt sort of bad about it, but she was so busy learning cheers and smiling all the time, well, there hadn’t been a whole lot she could do, except give Flannery friendly waves in the hallway. Of course, it was Marylin’s job now to give everyone friendly waves in the hallway, but she tried to make her waves to Flannery especially cheerful.

“I guess it’s a good thing for Flannery that hair grows out,” Marylin’s mom said. “So is she going to be at this party tonight?”

Marylin shook her head. “I think it’s just going to be sixth grade cheerleaders and soccer players.” And maybe Wes Porter’s brother, she hoped, since the party was at Wes Porter’s
house. She’d been thinking about him all afternoon. She kept forgetting he had only one leg.

“When was your first real kiss with Dad?” Marylin asked her mom now, trying to remember exactly what Wes Porter’s brother looked like. “Did it just happen, or is it something you planned?”

“What a question!” her mom said, laughing. “I guess it just happened. We were at a costume party. He was dressed up like Elmer Fudd.”

“What did your friends think about him?”

Marylin’s mom considered this for a second. “I don’t remember. I’m sure it didn’t matter. When you think you’ve found the right person, you don’t care much what other people think.”

Marylin knew she shouldn’t care what other people thought, but she did. That was one of the main drawbacks of being a cheerleader. It was practically her job to care what other people thought.

Marylin’s mom came over to the mirror and began brushing Marylin’s hair. “Do you want me to French braid it?” she asked.

Marylin started to giggle. “French braid” made her think of “French kiss.” She wondered exactly what kind of kissing would go on at this party tonight. She’d never been kissed, not romantically anyway. When Marylin daydreamed about kissing, usually it was with Robbie Ballard, although he was a little more mature in her daydreams than he was in real life. Marylin had strong feelings that kissing should be serious. To make her daydreams come out right, she had to put out of her mind how often Robbie Ballard used the word
booger
on a daily basis.