Delilah struck a pose with her batons crossed above her head, signaling her finish. The gym exploded with applause. I jumped up, eager to make it to the center of the gym before I decided to run out the door instead.
“Break a leg,” Addison said.
I turned. She scowled up at me without a hint of goodwill in her face. I was pretty sure she wasn’t really wishing me good luck, and she wouldn’t have minded if I’d broken a leg for real.
I high-stepped majorette-style to the center of the gym. Then I carefully placed my third baton to one side on the floor and put my hands holding the other batons on my hips. As I waited for my music to start, I stared at the back wall, feeling I did not have a genuine friend in this entire crowd of twelve hundred.
“Shake it, Gemma!” came a shout of five or six voices. The rest of the crowd giggled and looked to see who had yelled. They might not be able to tell, but I could. Robert and the trumpets around him bent their heads, hiding their faces.
If I’d had any lingering doubts about whether I should be furious with Robert, they were gone now.
My music started, thankfully. And for once in my life, I felt like I had total control. I’d picked a song with a booming disco beat that I knew the crowd would love. To keep their attention, I twirled one baton while I tossed the other incredibly high and turned three times beneath it. I had snuck into the gym and practiced to make sure my Converses wouldn’t get hung up with too much traction on the slick floor. Before I could panic, the heavy baton smacked into my outstretched hand.
The crowd roared.
I concentrated on my routine, determined to make it through. I had choreographed the song with my body in mind. I did some toss-ups with double and triple turns, my flashy specialty. But my back was to the audience for only a split second each turn. Other than that, I never turned my back on the crowd. The trumpets had already told me to shake it, but nobody was going to shout “wide load” during my number.
I hadn’t included any illusions, either, a staple of advanced routines. Delilah had impressed the crowd with one. She had a cute figure. But I refused to expose the insides of my thighs. This was why, though my baton teacher had told me I was her best student, I had never competed. I had never performed at all, except for the mandatory dance recitals at the end of the year. I kept my thighs to myself.
Carefully placing a second baton on the floor so it wouldn’t roll away, I flipped the other on my elbows and spun it on the back of my neck. It wasn’t hard once you got the hang of it, but it looked impressive. Only one junior with a lot of baton experience had this in her routine. The crowd noise now was an impressed “Oooooh.”
I swept up my batons. It was time for my grand finale: juggling all three of them. This was a trick for a feature twirler, an expert who performed an independent routine on the football field. A regular majorette didn’t need a move like this in her arsenal. Majorette routines for the halftime show were dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. If the whole line couldn’t do a trick, none of the twirlers would do it.
But I would. As my song drew to a close, I gave the last baton some extra oomph, caught the one I already had in the air, spun around twice, and caught the last baton. I’d tossed it so high that it reached terminal velocity on the way down and clobbered my hand as it connected with my palm. I did not wince. I grinned until my cheeks ached, and I put my hands on my hips.
Then I prepared to transfer all three batons to one sweaty palm so I could use the other hand to shoot the whole gym the bird. Ms. Zuccala would surely suspend me. Addison wouldn’t speak to me for a week because she would be embarrassed I was her friend. Robert and the music crowd would shun me because they would know the gesture was meant for them. But to tell them publicly how I felt about the way they’d treated me, it would be worth it.
Before I could shift my batons, the entire audience jumped up with a yell so loud, I felt the force of it in my chest.
Except for Addison, who was bent over in the bleachers, getting up her nerve. I was sorry she had to follow me. I could still shoot the gym the bird, removing myself from the competition. I had dropped a baton on purpose at our dance recital in sixth grade because Addison had dropped hers twice. I hadn’t wanted her to hate me afterward for showing her up.
But removing myself from the contest out of fear of how my best friend would treat me, or out of spite—those were things I would do if I still thought I didn’t have a chance of winning.
And now I thought I did.
I gripped my batons tightly and high-stepped back to the bleachers. I passed Addison as she marched on. She did not give me a high five.
A few hours later, at the end of the day, Ms. Zuccala came over the loudspeaker and called the majorette candidates into her office—probably so the Losers didn’t swoon in public, fall into their Bunsen burners in chemistry lab, and sue the school for pain and suffering. Personally, I would have preferred to stay en classe de français. Nobody there had ever spoken to me except in French as directed by the teacher, asking me to bring them a citron pressé. But today at least five people leaned across the aisle to tell me I’d done a great job in tryouts. I enjoyed being the center of friendly attention for the first time in my life, and I dreaded what would happen next. Addison was in English then. I did not want to face her.
When I dragged myself into Ms. Zuccala’s crowded office, Addison didn’t rush over to me and hug me. She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and deliberately turned her back, laughing with the popular juniors like she was working the room. Delilah talked with someone else. I didn’t really know the other girls. Several of them looked at my hair—I was still wearing the tiara—then down at my shoes, and took one step backward. Since I was cornered by a huge glass trophy case, I pretended to be interested in the awards inside: the state football championship last year, the wrestling championship from a few years before, and lots and lots of trophies the majorette line had won at band contests.
“May I have your attention, please,” Ms. Zuccala called. The giggling and shrieking quieted. Ms. Zuccala spoke to us and into the microphone, which broadcast across the school. We could hear her voice and her echo on the loudspeaker from the waiting room.
She consulted a slip of paper for several end-of-the-school-day announcements. Finally she winked at the room and said, “The moment we’ve all been waiting for. The members of the new majorette line are, in alphabetical order: Delilah Allen.”