Oh, look at Melissa. She has boogers in her eyes! Not true. Look, everyone, there’s a rat that lives in the back of Melissa’s hair! Partially true. Oh, Melissa, what an exceptionally fat ass you have! Totally true at the time. Then there was the song they made up to go along with my ample adipose tissue. Fatty fatty boom-boom! Do you have enough room? For… a sardine sandwich! For… an extra large snake and snail pizza! They were quite creative in the cuisine they dreamed I could digest. That game alone would get us all the way home with neither of them being winded from the effort.
Melissa, did you puke and forget to wash the vomit off your face? ’Cuz you ugly! They spouted that last one off like a cheer. After all, cheer was their shared destiny, and ironically, now it’s mine.
One day, Kelly wasn’t there, and Francine carried on as if it were business as usual. Francine had been an asshole to me ever since first grade, so this behavior didn’t exactly shock me. When Kelly came back the following day and asked Francine if she held up the tradition without her, I foolishly volunteered that she had. In some weird way, I wanted to kiss Kelly’s ass and let her know that indeed her lackey had put me down while she was busy whittling away a fever.
And now, here we are on the same cheer team, and she acts as if she’s never seen me before. I’d like to think I wouldn’t let her get away with that bullshit now, but I’m still prone to sticking my head back in my shell rather than enduring a confrontation. Thankfully, Francine transferred to St. Lucas, and Kelly no longer remembers my name, let alone what taunt to pair with it.
Nevertheless, I hate when the spotlight is on me, good or bad. As much as I’d like to be a part of the popular crowd, the only friends I really need are Jennifer, Heather—and Amy and Peter, even if they are proving to be a live visual of sex ed. Aside from people, I just need my Walkman and my books. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on from the young adult section at the library and have since moved on to Stephen King and Jackie Collins. I’ve checked out Judy Blume’s Forever so many times the librarian has a permanent frown on her face when she sees me because she knows deep down I am a dirty, dirty girl—admittedly so.
Trina waves as she takes off. “Remember to stretch out before you do the splits! Pulling your hamstrings hurts like a motherfucker!”
“Got it!” A surge of giddiness fills my chest. As glad as I am to have expanded my social circle, I’m pretty stoked to have someone as cool as Trina shouting anything to me in the parking lot. As stupid as it sounds, it makes me feel accepted, ridiculously important, as if the school’s entire football program hinged on the balance of my hamstring-protected splits.
I skip further into the parking lot looking for Jen and her squared-off Samurai, which sits three feet taller than the girly mobiles that have infested Glen like a white rabbit rash. I have some serious cash in my wallet in the event I want to add to my steadily growing pile of back-to-school clothes, and I’m ready to hit the mall hard. I did have to put up with the Beaver Brigade for a few hours straight. I think that alone calls for a Contempo run. Heather loves 5-7-9 and Merry-Go-Round, so we’ll probably hit those, too. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Slam—his real name is John, but he’s a punk rocker that apparently is really good at slam dancing, thus the nickname—works at Crown Bookstore, so we always stop in there to say hi and peruse the latest paperback selections. Slam is pretty cute, despite the foot-long Mohawk, and drives a Trans Am to cement his cool status.
Kelly, Michelle, and Stacey all race out of the lot, one right after another, in their matching Cabriolets, and a spear of jealousy pumps through me. All three of them blare their radios on the same station, and “Cruel Summer” warbles through the air in triplicate.
I’ll never get a car—not a cool car like that at least. As much as I like to tear apart the Rabbit Racers, I’d give my left boob to be one of them. Technically, I’m close enough to walk to Glen if you’re okay with your child hiking three and a half miles to school, but since it’s all uphill I just walk to Jen’s house, and she gives me a ride the rest of the way.
A car speeds into the lot, narrowly missing me by a foot, and I jump out of its way. The heat from the tires sears over my bare legs like a threat.
“Crap!” My heart pumps so fast. My ears drum with adrenaline just knowing I was inches away from ending my cheer career before it ever began.
It’s Kelly with her blonde ponytail whipping around her face like a scarf—one that’s apparently blinding her at the moment. God, I know I’m not really invisible. She needs to watch where the heck she’s going. Where the hell did she get her license anyway? A Cracker Jack box?
“Don’t forget to call me!” she shouts in my direction so disturbingly loud that I freeze for a moment. Kelly waves, looking right at me before taking off like a white bullet back onto the street.
Was she talking to me? My heart thumps with a secret pride, and I hate myself for it. I don’t want to “call” Kelly, the killer of my childhood, under any circumstances. But, we are cheerleaders now. It’s a well-known fact that the entire cheer squad operates as a sisterhood.
I knew the second I made the team that I had hiked up a rung on the social ladder. I’m a bit relieved that I can finally set my high school career off in the right direction. Maybe cheer is the great equalizer, and now Kelly will be totally cool? People change. I suppose Kelly can be one of them.
God, what if by homecoming I’m indoctrinated into the Beaver Brigade by sheer proxy of wearing those Nikes with the royal blue stripe? I mean, that would be kind of awesome, wouldn’t it? It would suck to go on in the same cycle of meaningless days drenched in bland weekends that dominated my freshman and sophomore years. If Kelly and her Beaver buddies accept me, for sure things will be different this year. Finally, my life is about to kick-start in the right direction. All of those fantasies of what I thought, what I knew high school could be like are on their way. I can feel it.
Something warms behind me, and I glance back in the event another member of the Beaver Brigade happens to be standing there ready and waiting to demand we socialize via seven digits—and I freeze solid.
It’s not the Beaver Brigade—it’s a bumper.
I’m standing directly behind a dark gray pickup—Toyota, brand fucking new. The engine revs before the taillights bleed their color over me.
A viral panic climbs up my throat so thick and powerful it dissolves all hope of a scream. Just as I try to will my paralyzed limbs to move, it comes at me in one quick jerking motion, and the next thing I know, I’m taking a bite out of the dirt lot. Tastes like shit and ashes, Mr. Sardona, in the event you were wondering. And in an ironic display of arabesque and grotesque storytelling, I might just purple prose myself to death yet.
A riot of screams breaks out around me as the truck lurches forward and comes to an abrupt stop.
“Jesus!” A sharp fireball of pain rips up my left leg and straight into my skull. I’m not so much shouting the Almighty’s name as an expletive as I am begging for mercy. “Help.” It comes out weak and warbled as a mob of worried faces quickly dots themselves overhead, stealing the blue of the sky with their shocked faces. I claw at the ground, trying to get my bearings as a pair of Reeboks bounce in front of me. Hairy legs pivot back and forth in a panic, and for one delusionary moment I wonder if a basketball game suddenly broke out.
The next thing I know, Joel Miller himself locks eyes with me—his face seemingly upside down, still abnormally gorgeous for a mere mortal.
A sharp roll of nausea burns through my stomach, wrapping its way around my back as if I’ve sprung some disgusting intestinal leak that will soon be known to the masses that have gathered.
A hard moan comes from me as the urge to barf ratchets up.
Holy shit. Do not throw up in front of Joel Fucking Miller.
Another hard groan comes from me, and the crowd recoils in unison.
“You!” Joel points at a girl in glasses, her finger darting to the bridge of her nose out of habit. “Find
a payphone and call 911! You!” He points to another girl whose braces hit the sun just right and blind me. I would gift that girl my entire Wacky Packages card collection—dated, yet still highly coveted—all of my Scratch and Sniff stickers left over from elementary school that still smell amazing—especially popcorn and pickle. Also, I’d gladly throw in my Twin Stars diary—slightly used with matching mini pencils—to make this pain go away by way of taking the nearest baseball bat and knocking me unconscious. “Get Coach Riley and find some ice!”
I bite down on my lip, uncertain if it’s to stave off the blinding white-hot pain or the fact that Joel Effing Miller just barked out orders in the exact way Mr. Stegmiester taught us in health class last year. It was incredibly distracting to have Joel seated six rows behind me for an entire semester. I squirmed during the lecture on nocturnal emissions, knowing Joel could see my entire body light up like a brilliant red Christmas tree.
“Shit!” His face rearranges from stealth hero mode to a million worried wrinkles. “Are you okay? Of course, she’s not okay.” He grips the hair at his temples, and I’m momentarily amused at the idea of Joel talking to himself. “What hurts?”
“My foot.” It’s my leg, but the word foot flew out before I could catch it.
“Let me check it out.” He bounds over to the other end of my body and begins gently working off my shoe.
Oh God! I hike up on my elbows as a riot of pain explodes through me.
“No! No! That’s okay!” He can touch anything but those bona fide stink bombs! “I’m fine, really!”
“You’ll feel better once your shoes are off.” He plucks my sneaker free, and both he and I moan in misery. Me, because my leg is convinced he just twisted it like a bread tie, and him, most likely because he doesn’t quite care for vinegar.
A mob of faces continues to crop up as the crowd thickens twenty deep. In the distance, the dire wail of an ambulance rips through the air. The sky starts to spin in a blue and white kaleidoscope as my stomach boils in its own acids.
“How’s this?” Joel holds up my sweaty foot and attempts to give it a massage.
Blinding pain. Vomit rises to my throat.
Just shit.
A gray fog fills in my vision, and I just go with it as the world mercifully claps to darkness.
Joel
I killed her. I killed a cheerleader.
“Shit!” I gently tap the side of her face, hoping she’ll open her eyes, moan, anything. Her body lies twisted, her ponytail disheveled to the side. Her face is calm, the face of a sleeping angel—the face of a dead person, and now I’m just a hair away from freaking the fuck out.
I try my best to straighten her legs, and a loud, penetrating burp emits from her as her head rolls casually to the side, and a trail of brown liquid leaks from her mouth.
“Out of the way!” Coach comes over and helps her sit up while she pukes convulsively all over the ground. She looks dazed, pale and ashen as paper, and her eyes have trouble focusing.
She’s alive. Thank God. I’m so fucking relieved. I’ve never been so happy to see someone upchuck their breakfast. The firemen are the first on the scene, followed by the roar of an ambulance, and I take a breath for the first time in minutes. A swift breeze cools me, and it’s only then I notice I’m drenched with sweat.
Russell comes up. His black hair glows blue in the sun.
“What the hell happened?” His face is wrinkled with worry. Russell is a year younger and has been my next-door neighbor forever. He’s like a brother to me, and ironically, we look alike so people assume we’re related. The only other time I’ve seen Russ this frantic is when his dog went missing for a week.
“I thought I killed her.” I get up and stagger on my feet. “Look, I have to talk to my parents. Can you swing by the house and see if my mom’s home? Tell her I’m headed to the hospital. She can meet me there.”
He pulls me back. The look on his face says no way. “They’ve got this, man. She’ll be okay. Just go home. I’m sure you’ll have a police report to fill out and insurance to deal with. Besides, her family is going to want to strangle you. Let things cool off.”
“Dude, I’m not leaving her. I hit her with my truck. She came out of nowhere. I didn’t even see her.” I cringe at how easily the lie slipped from my lips. For the most part, it’s true. “Look, I can’t fucking think straight right now.” I rake my fingers through my hair and wish I could let out a roar. Hundreds of faces stare blankly at me, some of them sympathetic—all of them shocked.
The EMTs load the poor girl up onto a gurney and push her into the mouth of the open van. I hop into the back of the ambulance without asking permission.
“You the boyfriend?” a woman running the girl’s vitals asks without looking up at me.
“What happens if I say no?”
“We got this, hon. Just go ahead and meet us at the emergency room. You’ll do a lot of waiting, not a lot of helping.” She wipes down the girl’s face with a cloth, and the cheerleader, whose life I almost ended, blinks back to life.
A fireman pokes his head in the back, grimy, sweaty from layers of thick rubbery clothes on this triple digit day. “You’re clear to go.”
“You heard him, hon.” The female EMT continues to tend to her patient. I’m simply a gnat she’s trying to swat out the door.
The girl takes a breath and blows it out slowly through her lips. She looks up and offers a sheepish smile. The faintest color blushes her cheeks. Not to sound egotistical, but I’m used to eliciting that reaction in the female population. It’s nothing of my doing. It’s just a simple hormonal reaction on their part. Most of them don’t even know me. But this girl, that rosy glow lighting up her face—it looks like life. She looks like an angel, and I couldn’t be happier to see her cheeks fill with color.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. There’s something in her eyes, something tragically sad layered just beneath the physical pain, and it breaks my heart on another level.
“You have nothing to be sorry about. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
The EMT holds up a hand. “All right!” she barks. “Hug it out later. Hop out. We need to move!”
“I’m the boyfriend.” I nod a bit too hard and long, glancing at the girl, hoping she’ll play along. “I need to be here.” I reach down and pick up her hand, threading our fingers together—the palm of her hand just as sweaty and hot as mine. I don’t even know this poor girl’s name, and now I’m lying about being in a relationship with her.
Kelly won’t be impressed, but right now, Kelly isn’t my priority.
“All right, Romeo. You win.” The EMT shuts the doors, and we haul ass out of there.
* * *
“Her name is Melissa Malinowski!” I shout into the pay phone. I ended up helping her fill out a few forms on the ride over. It was an odd introduction. She seems sweet, and I wish to God we had met under any other circumstance. “They took her to the back. I’m going to head in and sit with her until her family gets here.”
“You hit a girl?” Mom’s voice shrills into my ear. “Oh my shit!” My stomach clenches. I knew it was bad, but when my mother decides to let a cuss word fly, I know it’s worse than I thought. “I’m headed down to El Segundo to get your father. You can’t tell someone news like this over the phone, Joel. Is she going to make it?” Her voice hikes with the question.
“Yes. God, yes.” In truth, I’m not sure. She was puking. She did black out. They’re prepping her for a CAT scan to check for injuries. For all I know, I could have torn her up on the inside, and she could be bleeding out right now. “I’ll be at San Ramos Memorial for a while. My truck is at school.” My mother starts in on a mini tirade, and I pull the receiver away from my ear for a moment. “Russell can help. Give him the spare key. Frankie can give him a ride. Just don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
I hang up and take a breath, still gripping onto the phone as if it were holding me up. There’s one more call I need to make. I push in a quarter and
dial Kelly’s private line. I know for a fact she’s not home. I’m not sure when she’ll get the message, but I know she’ll be pissed if I don’t touch base. It rings three times and goes straight to her answering machine, and I wait for the beep.
“Hey, it’s me. I’m at the hospital.” I suck in a quick breath between my teeth. “I backed into a cheerleader.” My eyes squeeze shut because those are words I never thought would come out of my mouth. “I think she’s going to be fine, but I’m going to hang out just in case. Sorry about missing lunch. Talk to you later.”
It feels like a relief getting that over with. As much as I wasn’t looking forward to telling my mother about backing over someone, I dreaded dealing with Kelly and our missed lunch date just as much. She’s been riding my ass hard all summer. All she cares about is how we look to people. If I don’t hold her hand, ply her with gifts and kisses, she’s afraid her friends will think we’re on the outs. And if I, God forbid, miss one of our heavily scheduled, very public outings, she flies into a tizzy, reminding me of how hard she works to make us the perfect it couple of Glen Heights High. In truth, I’m not feeling so perfect lately—and for damn sure, I’m not feeling like a couple.
I head to the back of the ER and peer behind a few curtains until I find the one they’ve slid Melissa behind—or at the moment her stuff. Her hot pink purse sits unattended, and the cheer uniform they cut off her waist sits morbidly in a heap on the floor. She’s gone for her scan, so I wait twenty minutes just vegging out until the curtain finally opens, and they wheel her back in.
“You’re here.” She gives a little wave as the orderly lands her bed into position. Her face brightens at the sight of me as she sheds a genuine smile. Her eyes widen as if this were the best day of her life, and it makes me feel ten times worse than before. I get it. She’s dazzled. And at the same time, I don’t get it. I’ve always had that effect on girls—the bright eyes, the super-happy-to-see-me smile, but I wish I didn’t garner such an outrageous response. It makes me feel as if I’m something I’m not. I’m not some movie star, not some rock star. I throw a ball around on the field and happen to have a face most girls don’t mind looking at, nothing more, nothing else. It’s genetics. Believe me, if I had anything to do with it, I might have opted for something far less dazzling.