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Six
“Is everyone ready towork?” I asked my kids on Saturday morning. I was met with bleary eyes and moans. “You know there are energy drinks in the machine? I wouldn’tadviseyou to drink them, but . . .” A lot of the squad had brought their own. I couldn’t condone caffeine use, but try dealing with a bunch of grumpy teenagers that hadn’t gotten enough sleep. I had to use whatever tools I had at my disposal.
“Oh, and I bought you all donuts.” Dom walked in with two huge boxes of donuts resting on each hand, and I would have kissed him if either of us would have enjoyed it. That got the kids excited, which was nice to see. Donuts were passed out, faces were smeared with frosting, and I even saw a few smiles. I pretended to ignore the cups of coffee that Dom had also brought and passed around. Once they were sufficiently sugared up, I called everyone to order.
“So this morning I want to work on pyramid, and then do a jump clinic after you’re warmed up. Lunch is on me,” more cheers, “and then this afternoon we’ll do two full outs, taping both.”
The Bulldogs weren’t here yet, not due for another hour, and I was relishing having my gym back again.
Since we had nearly a full day, I wanted to get them nice and warm, so Dom led the squad through some yoga and then laps around the gym for some cardio. They were just finishing up when the Bulldogs and Echo trooped in. They all had matching practice outfits on, as usual, and it irritated me. I’d love to have outfits for my squad for every practice, but we didn’t have the budget for extras like that, but maybe I could pitch that to some of my booster parents and see if they’d go for it.
All the girls on Echo’s squad had their hair done in high ponytails and their eye makeup on point.
I'd been an idiot for underestimating her. Of course she was going to fuck with me. When had she done anything else?
It brought me back to the first day we’d met.
I’d been heading into my junior year of cheer and had made varsity on my small-town squad, which wasn’t really that hard to do. We’d finally scraped together the money to head to camp for the first time up north in the woods, and I was stoked to be away from my parents for a whole week, being completely steeped in cheer. I was pretty sure I cared more about my squad than my coach did. She was just a mom they’d roped into supervising us so no one died. Most of her time at camp was spent on her phone, fighting with her husband.
I’d been in awe of all the other squads and thentheywalked in, with Echo as captain, and I’d felt like I was falling down, even though I was standing up. Like everything had been swept out from under me at once.
Sure, I’d had crushes before, but never anything that completely all-consuming and immediate. I usually just fell for my friends, or girls I had known for a while. Never on sight. Never like this.
“Hey, Kiri,” she said, snapping me back into the present moment. She looked different than she had in high school, sure, but even then, she’d been completely mesmerizing, at least to me.
“Good morning, Echo,” I said, gritting my teeth.
“Is it still morning? We’ve been up for hours. We run on weekends at five thirty.” Her lips spread in a grin and she stared into my eyes as she clapped her hands and her squad started setting up without her even having to ask. Maybe she had them all drugged, or blackmailed. It was the only reasonable explanation.
My squad was fighting over donut crumbs and sleeping on the bleachers in mismatched clothes. Great.
I waited until the curtain was up and their music was on to lay into my squad in the lowest voice I could manage and still have all of them hear me.
“Are you doing this to psych them out? Because they definitely think we are a bunch of lazy losers right now.” Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea to let the other team believe. Let them underestimate us. Let her think we were a bunch of slobs. We’d show them up. We could eat donutsandkill it at Nationals.
I only had two goals for my first time at Nationals, since neither of us was going to win: to have my squad hit, and to have them score higher than HHS. If doing a little acting was going to help and get them to be complacent, good.
“Never mind, I’m not going to yell at you. Keep it up. Maybe do a lot of loud complaining and whining.” Echo annoyed me enough that it was time I returned the favor.
“Wait, you want us to complain loudly?” a voice called out.
I made eye contact with Kevin. “Yes, I want you to complain loudly.”
He grinned so wide that you would have thought I’d announced that I was cancelling practice and sending everyone to Disney early. One of the perks of going to Nationals was that we got to take one extra day and visit the happiest place on earth.
They took me seriously and, for the next two hours, there was nothing but whining and moans and groans and fussing. They’d clearly turned it up to eleven. I’d literally told them to do it and even I was annoyed and had to stop myself from telling them to knock it off.
The pyramid work was going well until I saw one side go down and heard the sickening slam of a flyer hitting the ground. MacKynzie. She was sobbing and cradling her hand to her chest. Dom and I shared a look and he got Camille on the phone. She was the on-call athletic trainer as well.
“What hurts, Mack?” I said in what I hoped was a soothing voice.
“My hand, my hand,” she sobbed. I made everyone move back to give her some air as I tried to examine the injured hand. In my head, I begged that it was nothing major, but I didn’t have a lot of hope from seeing how she’d gone down.
“Everyone do your laps, and crunches, and push-upsright now.I don’t want to hear excuses,” I said to the rest of the squad. Most of them looked pretty scared, which was good. They should be scared, this was dangerous, which was why you caught the flyers when they fell.
“Go,now,” I said.
I finally got Mack to show me her hand, and what I saw made my stomach roll. At least two fingers were definitely, visibly, broken. Shit.
