I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader Read online

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” a voice said, right behind me. “There is a God.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. I moved out of the doorway and was faced with a seriously tall girl with purple hair, black eyeliner and multiple piercings—ear and nose. She was looking down at me like I was her exact version of Mr. Wonderful come to whisk her away to an exotic desert island.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You are so sitting with me,” she replied.

  She grabbed my hand—hers was covered in a fishnet glove with the fingertips sliced off—and pulled me toward the back of the classroom.

  “Shouldn’t I—,” I began, looking over my shoulder at the teacher.

  “She doesn’t care who you are,” the girl told me. She fell into a seat with a cacophony of clangs and clanks from her various zippers and accessories. Then she practically flung me into the desk next to hers. “I, on the other hand, do,” she added. Her brown eyes glistened with interest as she held out her hand again. “I’m Bethany.”

  “Annisa,” I told her, shaking her hand. I glanced around the room and a few of my spectators rolled their eyes and looked away. Suddenly, Ms. Walters came to life and clapped her hands, telling everyone to take their seats—the morning announcements were about to start.

  “You can see me after homeroom, Miss . . .?” the teacher said, lifting her chin to see me over the crowd of shifting students.

  “Gobrowski,” I said. “Annisa Gobrowski.”

  A Britney double in a red bandanna-print halter top a few rows ahead of me snorted and leaned over to whisper something to her friend. They both laughed and cast a disdainful look in my direction before facing the front of the room.

  I swallowed hard and tried to smile at Bethany. At least she was being a human.

  “You have so made my year,” Bethany told me as the overhead speaker crackled to life. “I have been praying for another brunette around here since birth.”

  Someone on the PA said something about the Pledge of Allegiance and everyone stood up. My knees were practically knocking together, but I made it out of my chair.

  “Come on. There has to be another brunette in this school somewhere,” I whispered, scoffing. I pressed my wet palms into my denim skirt and wondered if that slightly offensive smell was coming from my own armpits.

  “Not one that will admit to it,” Bethany answered, looking at my hair out of the corner of her eye. “This is all kinds of cool.”

  The more she looked at me with that stunned, almost loving expression, the more tense I became. My gaze darted around the room from blonde to blonde to blonde to blonde. The Britney-clone looked at me again and snickered.

  “Nice clip,” she mouthed, glancing toward my forehead. Her friend laughed into her hand. Suddenly my rhinestone barrette felt hard and cold and jagged against my scalp.

  It was official. I was in hell. And John Frieda was the devil.

  The best piece of advice my older brother, Gabe, ever gave me was this: When starting a new school, never, ever, under any circumstances, show up to lunch early. Always be late. Hide in the bathroom, get lost in the basement, stay after class to discuss politics with your hair-in-the-ears history teacher if you have to, but get to the cafeteria late or you’re doomed.

  “Why?” I asked him—naïve fifth grader that I was when he imparted this wisdom.

  “Because, loser, if you sit down at an empty table, it will inevitably turn out to be the regular table of the most popular, most evil, most willing to embarrass the hell out of you crowd in the entire school and they will punish you. They will punish you dead.”

  He said it with such seriousness, I almost peed in my Old Navy undies.

  So, like a good new girl, I arrived at the Sand Dune High cafeteria after everyone was seated with their lunches. To be honest, it wasn’t entirely my doing. Ms. Trager had kept me after in choir to listen to me do scales, apparently to decide whether I was a good enough singer to keep around. Finally she’d given me a curt nod and a “very nice.” At least it looked like I wouldn’t have to go shopping for a new elective.

  Most of the tables were outside in the courtyard at the center of the school, and I had entered from the front hallway, which meant I had to walk by a sea of gabbing blonde heads to get to the line where they actually served the food. I kept my eyes trained directly in front of me and tried not to pay attention to my pounding heart. I swear everyone was staring at my head. I may as well have been wearing one of those Viking hats with the big horns that some doof is always sporting at frat parties in the movies. (Where do they get those things?)

  Okay, you can do this, I told myself when I emerged from the lunch line a few minutes later, a rather scary mound of mangled pasta on my plate. All the kids at the first few tables were watching me, and the Britney-clone from that morning leaned over to whisper to a friend next to her—aka Britney Two. Oh, God, please let Bethany be here.

  “Annisa!”

  Bethany stood up from a table at the far side of the courtyard. I forced myself to smile and hauled ass over to her table as quickly as my shortish legs would carry me. In that sea of tan skin, colorful clothing and blonde hair, Bethany looked like home to me. An island of dark-clothed, pale-complexioned normalcy.

  “So, do you want to write an article for my website, sucks-to-be-us-dot-com? I think you would be totally perfect for it.” Bethany jumped right in.

  “Sucks-to-be-us-dot-com?” I asked, shaking my Snapple. I felt so much less conspicuous now that I was sitting down like everyone else.

  “It’s a site for teenage girls that basically gives us a chance to vent about, you know, everything that sucks in our lives,” Bethany said, her nose piercing twinkling in the sun. “Everything from guys to parents to SATs to the current trends in misogynistic clothing and the fact that there’s nothing good on TV anymore. I like to think it keeps people from expressing their emotions in more damaging ways.”

  “Like suicide or liposuction,” I put in.

  Bethany’s face lit up. “Exactly,” she said, jabbing her plastic fork in my direction. “I knew I liked you.”

  “Sounds cool. So, you can write about anything?”

  “Anything goes,” Bethany said, digging into her pasta. “Except I never allow anyone to post anything that tears down another girl. I read everything over personally.”

  “Huh. That’s good,” I said. “But what would I have to write about?” I took a bite of my spaghetti and dropped my fork. “I’m sure cafeteria food has been covered.”

  “What would you have to write about?” Bethany asked, incredulous. “How about the fact that you just got plunked down in the center of spirit central? I mean, trust me, you are about to witness the most sorry display of all-American cheese in the history of mankind. This was the absolute worst time for you to move here.”

  I had to give it to Bethany—she wasn’t trying to sugarcoat things for the new girl. She was starting to remind me of Jordan, my best friend from back home. “Tell it like it is” is her personal mantra. I missed Jordan the instant I thought of her, and struggled to focus on the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, gnawing on a plain roll.

  “The big rivalry game is coming up. We’re talking pep rallies, face painting, spontaneous psychotic cheering.” Bethany’s face grew more disgusted as she spoke. “I so wish I’d gone to school here in the nineties. At least back then there was a prank war. That was all kinds of cool. I may have even participated.”

  “A prank war?”

  “Yeah, you know, West Wind High would chalk their school colors on our gym, then we’d kidnap their mascot, then they would shaving-cream our football team’s cars,” Bethany said. “I heard that one time our guys filled the cheerleading captain’s car with rotting apples,” she added, her eyes glittering. She sighed, looking off into the sky dreamily. “Those were the days.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh, some guy fell off the auditorium roof and broke both his a
rms,” Bethany said, snapping back to the present. “Doesn’t it suck when one person has to spoil everyone else’s fun?”

  “Totally,” I deadpanned. I was starting to like this girl. At least I knew she’d get my sense of humor.

  “Are you gonna eat this?” she asked, pulling my spaghetti surprise toward her.

  “Go crazy,” I said. If her stomach could handle it, more power to her.

  “So anyway, this whole spirit thing is even worse this year because the cheerleaders have some competition coming up and they’re running around here like a bunch of beagle puppies on speed,” Bethany explained. “I swear those rah-rahs are getting on my last nerve. They have the collective IQ of a fruit fly.”

  My stomach turned. Clearly Bethany was one of those anti-cheerleader people. The ones who thought it was lame and not a sport and that every girl who did it was a ditz with a hairspray dependency. Normally I would have defended them, but considering that Bethany was the only person who had talked to me for more than five minutes all day, I decided to withhold the knowledge that I was one such rah-rah. (With an impressive IQ, thank you very much.) At least I had been at my old school.

  I wondered if the squad had replaced me yet. I imagined them at practice without me, laughing, debating new stunts, going over the moves in the halftime dance for the hundredth time. I could practically smell the half-sweaty, half-antiseptic scent of the wrestling gym where we worked out. Okay. Now I was getting depressed.

  “I thought you were anti-tearing-other-girls-down,” I said.

  “That’s on the site. If I tried to do it on a daily basis, I’d have permanent tongue crampage,” Bethany replied. “So, what’s your schedule for the rest of the day?”

  I sighed and pulled my neatly folded schedule out of my bag. We had been in chemistry and Spanish together that morning and I was hoping I would luck out and have someone to hang with that afternoon too.

  “I’ve got geometry, honors English and then gym.”

  “Looks like you’re on your own,” Bethany said as she finished off my lunch. “Just don’t let the blondies get you down.”

  I laughed nervously. “Is there really not a single other brunette in this school?”

  It wasn’t possible, was it?

  Bethany leveled me with a dead-on stare. “Honey, even the mice in the bio lab are blonde.”

  My geometry teacher, Mr. Loreng, turned out to be a spitter. Yes, a spitter. Everyone has had at least one in their lives and it’s never pretty. On every s and th he let out a spray of saliva the trajectory of which must be studied by the Guinness Book of World Records. And sp? Forget about it. This was the reason, of course, that the only empty seats in the room were in the front row. I had failed to notice the trend, however, and had taken a desk front and center, deciding to put myself out there, be daring, show everyone that I wasn’t afraid to be seen.

  I was rewarded with a refreshing afternoon shower.

  And the worst of it was, he seemed to know what he was doing and to enjoy it. I mean, what other possible explanation could there be for the fact that he called everybody “sport”?

  “David, be a sport and open the back window.” (I took a blob on the cheek.)

  “Hey, Sport, what did you get for number ten?” (Something landed on top of my head.)

  “Well, Sporto, if you haven’t grasped the concept of circumference yet, I can’t help you.” (Forehead, cheek again and yes, right in the eye.)

  To make the whole thing even more humiliating, it turned out that the Sand Dune High sophomores were four chapters ahead of my geometry class back home. I had a total grasp of squares and triangles, but Mr. Loreng was raving on about circles and spheres and he may as well have been speaking in Japanese. I was going to have to study my butt off to catch up, and geometry had never been my best subject in the first place.

  I was just trying to figure out a schedule for teaching myself the missed chapters when, out of nowhere, Mr. Loreng shouted my name.

  “Miss Gobrowski!”

  It was like a light spring rain.

  “Yes?” I said, fighting back cardiac arrest.

  “Is that gum you’re munching on, or do you fancy yourself a cow?”

  Omigod, he did not just call me a cow on my first day of school in front of everyone. He was evil. My geometry teacher was pure evil. There was a round of twittering behind me. And did I mention that both the Britney-clone and Daniel Healy were in my class? I thought I was going to dissolve into a pool of Annisa goo on the floor.

  “No . . . it’s gum,” I said.

  “Well, we don’t allow gum chewing in this class,” he told me. “Kindly spit it out into your hand.”

  Shaking, I lifted my hand to my mouth and dropped the wad of grape Bubble Yum into my palm. The girl diagonally behind me let out a disgusted groan.

  “Now please come up here and deposit your gum in the garbage can.”

  How about I dump you in there right on your squirrelly little head? I thought.

  I stood up slowly, glaring at the teacher, and tried to do what he said with as much dignity as possible—which was difficult, considering the badly stifled laughter that followed me. The gum wad hit the bottom of the pail with a nice, resounding thud. I had never been so embarrassed in my life. Or at least in the last hour or so.

  Mr. Loreng smiled condescendingly as I returned to my seat. “Thank you, Sport.” Spittle, spittle. And they wonder why kids today don’t like math.

  In English class I decided to be as invisible as possible. I took a nice, innocuous seat right in the middle of the room behind some guy who was so tall, he had to be the center of the basketball team. With any luck, no one would notice I was there.

  The class was reading Romeo and Juliet, which we had covered in English last year. Sweet relief! Something I knew! As two students read through the classic balcony scene, my eyes flicked to the clock. My first day was almost over. Of course, I could only imagine the shiny new brands of torture they had devised for me in gym.

  When the readers got to the point where Juliet starts talking about a rose by any other name smelling as sweet, Mrs. O’Donaghue stopped them.

  “Now, what does Juliet mean by this? What is she trying to say?” the teacher asked the class.

  Total silence. Five minutes to go, then gym, then I was outta here.

  “Come on, people. What does Juliet mean when she says ‘’Tis but thy name that is my enemy’?” Mrs. O’Donaghue was starting to grow frustrated. “I know you know this.”

  Students around me shifted in their seats and stared down at their books, avoiding eye contact. The teacher was clearly exasperated.

  Someone answer and put her out of her misery, I thought.

  “Anyone?”

  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I raised my hand.

  “Yes? Annisa?”

  “Well, she’s saying that she loves Romeo for who he is and she would love him no matter what his name was. But she’s required to hate him because his last name is Montague—because the Capulets and the Montagues have been feuding for so long,” I explained. “Basically she doesn’t care about their feud, but she knows it’s going to cause problems between her and Romeo.”

  Mrs. O’Donaghue smiled. “You’ve read this play before.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, class. Annisa has made some very astute observations,” Mrs. O’Donaghue said, walking behind her desk. “I’d love it if some of you would take your cues from her and participate. I think it would make our time together a lot easier on all of us.”

  Suddenly I realized that everyone in the class was glaring at me.

  Gulp.

  I’d just broken another of Gabe’s rules: Never show up an entire class on your first day.

  The bell rang and I was out of my seat like a shot. I was blocked by a little crowd of girls near the door, one of whom was the Britney double. Up close I noticed she had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a human being. In a normal time and place I would
have asked what mascara she used, but right then I just wanted to escape. I turned sideways to try to squeeze by them, and as I did, the Britney-clone looked me up and down.

  “Her nose is even browner than her hair,” she said under her breath.

  All her friends cracked up laughing, except one—a tall, athletic girl who looked very uncomfortable. I’d never seen so many bared non-bellies convulsing at the same time. My face burning, I ducked out of the room and tried to get lost in the crowded hall. Fat chance. I stuck out like a sore brunette thumb. I needed to invest in a wig, STAT.

  “Annisa! Um . . . Annisa!?”

  I slowed my pace and turned around. The one non-laugher was speed-walking to catch up with me. She had naturally wavy blonde hair that hung past her shoulders and was one of those people who was so beautiful, she didn’t need products of any kind.

  “Hey . . . I’m Mindy,” she said with a tentative smile. She hugged her notebooks close to her chest. “I just wanted to say, don’t pay any attention to Sage. She’s just . . . like that.”

  As if that was any excuse. And the Britney-clone’s name was Sage? I’m sorry, but she seemed anything but. I mean, “browner”? That’s not even a word. Still, I sensed that Mindy was genuinely sorry, which was nice. Of all the blonde females I’d encountered, so far Mindy was the only human. Except Mrs. O’Donaghue. But hers was a dye job—I could tell.

  “Thanks. That’s good to know, I guess,” I said.

  “So . . . where’re you from?” Mindy asked. She fell into step with me as I crossed the short distance to my locker. I was surprised. Apologizing was one thing. Risking being spotted talking to the brunette suck-up with the gum addiction was another. Sage was clearly a clique leader and Mindy was clearly risking her wrath by chatting with me.