Cheerleader

When I reach into the recesses of my memory and draw an anecdote from my bottomless arsenal of anecdotes, I remember that I did do a sport, once upon a time.  It wasn’t competitive - some of the other girls had only learned to walk two or three years before - but it was grueling work; almost as arduous and nearly as rewarding as the effort exerted by the boys on the field.

At eight, I was a cheerleader for my brother’s football team.

I watched the games from behind the line of grass that separated the track from the field and, of course, us - a funky, heterogenous mix of fourteen or so girls with uniforms made from some itchy polyester blend that didn’t breathe very well and the players themselves - all about the same height, size and age apart from the obvious outliers, and all in bulky, maroon uniforms and helmets that left identity on the bench.  I could never tell which one was Abraham - I don’t even remember his number - but I knew anyone could pick me out from the lineup of my group.

I was the girl that lingered the longest on our breaks, grabbing extra packets of fruit gummies and scraping my hand at the very bottom of the Capri-Sun box just to make sure there weren’t any bonuses.  The snacks were the best part, in my personal opinion. It was what I came for, and what I loved about cheerleading the most: they fed us really well.

The season was a disappointing one.  Not a single game had been won, and the soreness of loss had long since faded around the halfway mark - which might have been what made victory at the last game more surprising than satisfying.  It took a good half an hour after the handshaking line before everyone got enough of their wits back to celebrate, and amidst the din, the cheerleaders - the sunshine of every game, overshadowing even the most gruesome of tear-downs on the field - were forgotten.

I didn’t mind.  They still fed me, after all.

I was lost among the crowd in the aftermath, a granola bar in one hand and a boxed juice in the other, as I searched for my mother to take me home before someone noticed that I had two single serve bags of chips stuffed into the elastic waistband of my skirt.  Three of my fellow cheerleaders- three that I knew slightly better than the rest, and who usually clumped with me in the middle - stood together off to the side of the chaos. I drifted toward them, figuring that if my mother saw a cluster of four of us in the same uniform she might stand a greater chance of finding me.

As I drew nearer, their conversation drifted toward me on a light summer breeze, and I froze in my tracks.

“...has no rhythm,” said one.

“And she’s just weird,” said another.

“Yeah,” said the third. “She doesn’t talk Black.”

The nibbles that I had already consumed turned sickeningly in my stomach.  Unbidden, the corners of my mouth pulled downward.

I knew - I knew that they were talking about me.  They had remarked upon my strange, “white” accent before, but I hadn't thought much of it.  Plenty of people were surprised by my literacy for reasons I wouldn't understand until I was much older. 

But while their tones had been politely curious at first, they were spiteful and almost blithely vitriolic right then.  I took a rough bite of my granola bar, turned on my heel, and walked away.

When I found my mother, my discontent must have shown on my face, because she asked after my well-being with furrowed eyebrows and a comforting hand running across my thick braids.  I told her I didn't want to do cheerleading anymore.

And I didn't; it was the absolute truth.  And not just because those girls - who may not have been my friends, but looked me in the eye and talked to me casually on a tri-weekly basis - didn't think as much of me as I did of them.  It was because I knew I was only in it for the snacks; it was because my cheering didn't exactly affect the outcome of the games anyway; but most of all, it was because I didn't put any stock into into I was doing.  I knew I would eventually give it up, because I was never fully present in the first place.

My mom accepted my resignation - as did Ms. Theresa, the coordinator of the cheerleading squad - and a week after that, I had already forgotten those girls and what they'd said.  It was a small footnote in the story of my life, and would remain so until the day I would drag it from the deep, dark abyss of my early, formative memory.