Wrong. Oh so wrong.
It started out just fine, I guess. True, I had hardly taken ten steps onto the field before I got tangled up in my talons and tripped and did a sort of accidental somersault. (Somerfault?) But somehow, someway, I landed right back on my feet.
TA-DA!
There’s no way I could’ve pulled that off if I’d attempted it on purpose.
Then I danced along with Bridget and Dori and the rest of the CHEER TEAM!!! to the official Pineville Junior High Fight Song.
Go, go, go!
Mighty Seagulls!
Fight, fight, fight!
Mighty Seagulls!
Win, win, win!
Mighty Seagulls!
Now those of you unfamiliar with the rat-with-wings better known as the Jersey Shore seagull might think that this is probably the wimpiest school mascot ever. But the Jersey Shore seagulls brought up on the mean streets of the Seaside Heights boardwalk are not to be messed with. They are tough. They will make a beak-sneak-attack on that freshly purchased hot pretzel you just raised to your mouth. They will swoop in and tear that Italian sausage sub sandwich right out of your grubby hands. Seagulls will literally steal cotton candy from a baby.
Seagulls don’t play. For real.
But I wasn’t feeling mighty at that moment. My silly dancing and comic mugging for the audience was all very uninspired. The fans in the bleachers were bored, and I was probably about two seconds away from getting booed off the field.
Until I felt a tug on my tail feathers.
I craned my bird head around as best as I could to see what was happening.
“HOOOOOONK!”
It was the biggest goose I had ever seen. And he was honking at me.
Why was this bird the only living creature that didn’t mistake me for an ugly chicken? Nope, it mistook me for a gorgeous goose.
I don’t know if I was pumped up by the pep band, the spirit of competition, or the three liters of Coke I drank before the game, but I instinctively flapped my wings and scared it away. The audience liked this. So I started playing up my victory over the goose by striking bodybuilder poses. The mighty Pineville Junior High seagull had vanquished another foe!
I was still showing off and flexing my bird muscles when I felt a more aggressive nip in my feathered nether regions.
Okaaaaay.
In elementary school, we had a special assembly when a policewoman came in to warn us all about Stranger Danger. She talked about how you just have to trust your gut when it tries to warn you there’s something that just isn’t right about a certain individual, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. She called it the uh-oh feeling, and when you get the uh-oh feeling you’re supposed to forget whatever else you’re doing and get the heck away from the source of the sketchiness as soon as possible.
The goose gave me the uh-oh feeling.
He must have interpreted my dancing as some sort of mating display. I wasn’t sure if he was intimidated or impressed by my moves and I definitely didn’t want to find out. So I panicked. Again.
I took off running with very little idea of where I was even going because the sun was right in my eyes and it’s very hard to navigate when you’re wearing a giant bird head unless you’re an actual giant bird. Like the goose.
He had no problem keeping up with me. He attacked from all directions at once. Feathers—mostly synthetic, mostly mine—flew all over the place. Again, I cried out for help. “Helllllblurgh” must translate to “hey, baby baby” in goose-speak because the goose honked back at me like he was more determined than ever to make me his girlfriend. And this is when I must have really lost my mind because there was a brief moment when I actually wondered if this would qualify as IT List #3: Pick your first boyfriend wisely.
This is also when I must have sprinted past the sidelines and onto the football field right in the middle of a crucial fourth-down play on the third yard line, or so Miss Garcia told me after the fact because I had zero awareness of anything that was happening beyond the major panic attack happening inside my bird head.
Suddenly, miraculously, I spotted a flash of activity across the green. I couldn’t see very well, but it was huge, brown, and headed right for me. I’d find out later that the opposition’s mascot, the Baygate Bear, took my disruption of the game personally. I wasn’t trying to sabotage the visiting team! I was just trying to get away from the goose! But the Baygate Bear didn’t care. It had a score to settle! It came charging after me from the opposite side of the field.
So now I was being attacked by a lovesick goose and a crazed grizzly.
I have no idea how long this chase went on. During a crisis, time simultaneously speeds up and stands still, a description that I know doesn’t make any sense, but does anything about this story make sense? Just about the only thing about this story that does make perfect sense is what happened next.
I smashed beak-first into the goalpost.
Chapter Twenty-One
When I woke up, I wasn’t dead. I was in the nurse’s office. But from the murderous look on Bridget’s face, I might as well have been dead already.
“YOU!” she yelled. “It was YOU! The whole time!”
There was no denying this. Someone had used the jaws of life to remove the bird head, but from the neck down, I was still Mighty the Seagull. I had lost most of my feathers in the chase so I looked like the scrawniest piece of poultry Bob Cratchit could buy with Scrooge’s half a hay penny. My pathetic appearance did not inspire pity from my best friend.
Ex–best friend.
“How could you do this?” she raged. “How could you sabotage everything so important to me! I’m your best friend!”
I tried to explain. “I wasn’t trying to—”
She cut me off. I’d never seen Bridget like this before. Fury distorted her face in a very… um… unpretty way I hadn’t thought possible.
“You were jealous that I made the team! You’re no better than Manda and Sara and their stupid Spirit Squad!”
I was about to deny her accusation when I realized that there was a hint of truth to what she was saying. I wasn’t jealous of her making the CHEER TEAM!!! But I did envy how effortlessly she had adjusted to junior high. Bridget was the living example of my sister’s IT List. Not me.
And if I was being totally honest, I was a bit jealous of Bridget’s rekindled friendship with Dori. What if it turns out 2ZNUF after all?
All these thoughts were zooming around my goalposted brain. So when I finally got around to arranging them into something I could say that would make sense, it was already too late. Bridget had put up with enough.
“You know, when your sister told me that you had a crush on Burke Roy, I didn’t want to believe her.…”
WHEN MY SISTER TOLD HER WHAT???
“I was, like, no way. Bethany had no idea what she was talking about! But then you were acting all shady and Dori said I should confront you. So I did! And you lied! You were lying the whole time about everything!”
I was so shocked by this accusation that I inhaled one of the few feathers left on the bird suit.
COUGHCOUGHHACKHACKCHOKECHOKE.
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” Bridget said, ignoring the fact that I was coughing, hacking, and choking to death. “And I’m not sure I want to.”
Bridget exited, and I swear all the air in the room, maybe all the air in the atmosphere, went with her. When I finally yakked up the offending feather, I was too stunned to cry. Was I upset about the false accusations? Or the ones that sort of rang true?
I didn’t have time to answer these questions because a few seconds later Nurse Fleet was ushering my parents into the treatment room. I must have been in really bad shape if she was able to persuade both of them to leave whatever they were doing to come get me.
“Are you okay?” Dad and Mom asked simultaneously.
I nodded, though they didn’t look convinced. I must have been quite a sorry sight in my goose-pecked, nearly featherless
bird suit.
“Her vitals are fine,” Nurse Fleet said. “That bird head offers better cranial protection than the football helmets.”
Then she shut the door behind her to give us some privacy.
“See? I’m fine,” I reassured them in a very unreassuring voice.
Sure, physically, I was fine. But mentally and emotionally, I was a mess. My best friend had just broken up with me!
“You ran into a goalpost?” my mom asked. “Because you’re the school mascot?”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were the mascot?” my dad asked. “We would’ve cheered you on.”
They weren’t asking these questions in a “we are the annoying parents interrogating you” kind of way. They were asking them in a “we need to understand this weirdness” kind of way. And for that, I couldn’t blame them. They had no idea that I was living a double life.
“I ran into the goalpost because I was the school mascot. And I didn’t tell you I was the school mascot because I was supposed to keep my identity secret,” I said. “But I don’t have to anymore because I’m not the mascot. I’m hanging up my wings.”
Talking about it got me all choked up. Not because I was sad to give up the bird suit. I was sad because Bridget had given up on me.
But my parents didn’t know that. They looked at each other, then looked at me, speechless. No parenting book has a chapter titled, “What to Say When Your Daughter Dresses Up Like a Deranged Seagull and Almost Cracks Her Skull Open Like an Egg When She Runs Headfirst Into a Goalpost Because a Goose Wants to Make Her His Girlfriend.”
I made it easier for them by giving them something to do. I swallowed my tears and managed to ask for help.
“Speaking of my wings, can you help me get out of this thing?”
While my mom unzipped me out of the bird suit, my dad talked to the nurse just to make sure I was as fine as she said I was. Dad’s a noticer. Like me. He knew something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what was wrong.
I knew only too well what was wrong.
We were all quiet on the car ride home, which was a relief. I was so afraid that if Mom and Dad asked more questions, I’d just start crying again. And if I started crying again they’d ask more questions about why I was crying and I’d end up telling them about Bridget and how she thought I was lying about not liking Burke Roy when I wasn’t lying about that at all, but it was hard to explain because I had lied about Burke Roy to Bethany, which was dumb and I never should have done it, which is why I couldn’t even be mad at her for blabbing about it to Bridget since my sister must have figured that if I had a crush on Burke Roy surely Bridget must already know about it because best friends don’t keep secrets from each other when, in fact, I had been keeping a secret from Bridget when I didn’t reveal my secret identity and even though that wasn’t the secret she thought I was keeping, it was almost as bad as the one she thought I was keeping about Burke Roy, which wasn’t a secret at all but a lie.…
Ack. I can’t still straight think.
I still think can’t straight.
I STILL CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT.
Maybe the bird head didn’t protect my brain after all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
So it’s been a week since I permanently retired Mighty the Seagull. Even Miss Garcia agreed that it was the best for everyone involved.
“Tell your sister I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she said.
I said I would even though I knew I wouldn’t because I wasn’t sorry at all.
I was only sorry that Bridget wasn’t talking to me. To my surprise, she hadn’t told anyone that I was the infamous mascot the whole school was buzzing about. Honestly, I preferred it that way. After all the secret-keeping, I deserved to be the most popular nobody at Pineville Junior High.
Bridget started sitting with Burke on the bus every morning and did an excellent job of pretending I didn’t exist. So it wasn’t surprising when Sara broke the news to me in homeroom.
“Omigod! I hear Burke is totally going to ask Bridget out, like, officially.”
I’d known it was coming, of course. I just wished I’d heard it from Bridget. But I supposed Dori was the friend she confided in now. They sat together at lunch every day. Though being on the CHEER TEAM!!! had boosted their Line Cutting status immensely, they both brought their lunches every day. One day soon they will decide to buy and they will cut Manda and Sara on line. And that day will be a very, very bad day.
I got so deep into my worries that I’d forgotten Sara was talking at me.
“Jess! Is it true?” Sara asked. “You would know, right? You’re still Bridget’s bestie, right?”
Sara was totally aware that Bridget and I had a falling-out. She was just trying to find out why. Ack. The whole business made me feel sick to my stomach. I raised my hand to get my homeroom teacher’s attention.
“I need a pass to the nurse,” I groaned. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
When I arrived at the nurse’s office, all the cots were empty. It was only homeroom, after all. Barely enough time had passed for any medical emergencies to occur. I clutched my abdomen.
“Girl stuff,” I explained.
And this time, it was totally true. It was girl stuff that was making me feel so sick. Just not the kind of girl stuff Nurse Fleet typically dealt with. She looked up from her paperwork and her face lit up like she was thrilled to see me. It turned out she was thrilled to see me.
“I’m thrilled to see you!” she said.
“You are?”
“I am,” she said. “How’s your head?”
Such a complicated question. How was my head? My head was a mess. But she wasn’t referring to the psychological state of my head. She was referring to the physical state of my head, you know, after the goalpost injury. So I answered that question specifically.
“My head is just fine,” I said.
“You were amazing out there on the field that day!”
That was not the reaction I was expecting.
“Are you aware that you outran a lovesick goose, a vengeful mascot, and twenty-two football players?”
Uh, let’s see. IT WAS ONLY THE TALK OF THE ENTIRE SCHOOL AFTER IT HAPPENED. So yeah, I think I’m aware of that. I bet the whole school would still be talking about it if an anonymous prankster hadn’t sent a pair of SpongeBob boxer shorts up the flagpole. Now the whole school was talking about that. Until the next thing happens. See, that’s how it is in junior high: Nothing is big news for very long. This is a bummer when it’s good news about you worth remembering. But a short attention span is definitely a relief when the news is about you and it’s bad.
Nurse Fleet continued.
“I can only imagine what you might be capable of when you aren’t weighed down by fifty pounds of feathers!”
By the time I’d run into the goalpost it was more like one pound of feathers, but I didn’t have the energy to correct her. And I must have looked totally clueless because that’s when Nurse Fleet really started beaming at me.
“I’m not just the school nurse,” she explained. “I’m also a coach. And you’ve got more raw talent than I’ve ever seen before!”
So that’s how I ended up at cross-country practice after school.
I know. I’m totally not the athletic type. But running is as good a hobby as any, I guess, to get my mind off the fact that my best friend hates me. It’s definitely better than wallowing alone in my room every afternoon.
Plus, it was kind of nice to be needed, to tell you the truth.
“Ladies,” announced Coach Fleet, when I met up with her at the track, “welcome Jessica Darling to the Pineville Junior High cross-country team!”
The Pineville Junior High cross-country team had exactly four girls on it. Two of them were the Sampson twins. Everyone in school knows the Sampson twins. The other two girls I didn’t recognize at all. The seventh grader who’d later introduce herself as Molly was a tiny but tough tomboy from Woodbeach Elementary. The eighth gr
ader was Padma, who was experiencing major culture shock because her family had just moved to the crowded gridlock of New Jersey from the wide-open spaces of North Dakota.
All four girls looked at me skeptically.
“Really?” they asked.
“Really!” Coach Fleet said. “Now we’re officially a team!”
Then Coach Fleet, the Sampson twins, Molly, and Padma jumped up and down and back-slapped and high-fived like I’d just won a gold medal.
“We had to forfeit every meet!” said Shandi, the Sampson twin with silver beads in her braids.
“Now we can actually compete!” said Shauna, the Sampson twin with gold beads in her braids.
Inspired by their unintentional rhyme, Padma started rapping.
“Used to be we hadda forfeit every meet/Now with J.D. we gonna compete!”
I must have looked confused because Coach Fleet explained how a cross-country team isn’t an official team unless it has a minimum of five runners.
“And you make us five!” said the Sampson twins.
As we warmed up with a series of stretches, Coach Fleet explained that too many girls go out for the more glamorous after-school activities like CHEER TEAM!!! Or sports that actually attract fans like soccer or field hockey. With one and a half miles to cover in a race, it’s kind of hard for cross-country runners to keep in view of spectators, unless the spectators are running alongside you, in which case the spectators would just be on the cross-country team instead of rooting for it.
Anyway, Coach Fleet was eager to see what kind of shape I was in. So she timed me and the rest of the team as we ran a mile and a half around the track. Six laps. The Sampson twins took off together and never looked back. I only saw the backs of their PJHS T-shirts. Molly started out with them for the first lap and a half or so, then fell back. I passed her on the third lap. Padma never tried to run any pace but her own. She started and finished behind me but just ahead of Molly.