An auburn question mark ponytail with a life of its own. Foreshadowing. Exactly what Ms. Lange of AP English might call that perky ponytail had she the emotional bandwith to remember what it is to be young. Not just a device in a story. Perhaps divine intervention. Or the universe laughing. (If you’re more Buddhist in your leanings.)
Likely just the plain out of the blue fickle fuck you of high school. You know what I’m talking about no matter which side of the hall you inhabited. No matter where you sat at lunch. The top and the bottom can be yo-yoed so quickly. Switch seamlessly. Leave you wondering which way is up.
Those short skirts with polyester promises of friends, of autographs for her yearbook, of football players vying to take her to dances and a couple boys worried she might say ‘no’ lacked courage enough to ask. It was pep rally Fridays and teachers who acknowledged her raised hand and forgave her happy chatting, her propensity to copy mercilessly from Noah, the salutatorian. Somehow this seemed adorable, lovable. It always had been.
Hers was a full social calendar, a mom who felt filled by her successful daughter instead of depleted like mine. It was an internal belief in herself, as foreign to me as Greek, a language I could never learn, no matter how identifiable the individual letters, it would not fit together. I did not have the context.
But gravity is a fact outside of any social construct; a no-nonsense-play-no- favorite buzz kill.
Gravity does not give a crap about dreams, about pain, about junior varsity cheerleading tryouts. Gravity=leveler.
I’ll never forget. The loud echo off the wall of my suburban American high school gym. All sounds at attention. Girl groups of four, brightly colored tank tops and short shorts bound through the double doors. Matching ponytails fill the air with static, explode hirkey after hirkey.
“Fire Up!” Clap clap. “Fire up, and up, and up and up and up!”
Apple cheeks, rouged red and lipsticked, a perfect “o” of naked want. NHS smarts, band geeks, and unfortunate Clearasil immune acne kids decorate the bleachers.
And then the middlings: not outcasts, basic friends in similarly average boats. Not smartest or dumbest, ugliest or prettiest, but the masses. Average. Used to spectating from the sidelines. The caste system of high school impenetrable.
Only today it’s all on its head, tumped on its ass as the din grows louder.
There’s a palpable excitement, an almost violence. Today the invisible possess the power. Get a vote. We get to decide for once. Numbers, like gravity, undeniable.
She’d made cheerleader every year since middle school. Only eight precious spots. “She’s just nice to everyone,” you’d hear them say, students and teachers. Her future written.
Now she just has to keep that smile affixed and perform adequately. She is not worried. Is it vanity, excitement of the moment; does she forget to be careful? She’s taken gymnastics since elementary.
If she’s done one front walkover, she’s done a thousand.
Wowed them at games, incited envious glances from girls, boys craning necks to catch a flash of hidden fabric. It’s not a requirement. A back walkover. But she can do it, and most can’t, so why wouldn’t she?
That confidence has always carried her. She’s never fallen so she can’t know what it will mean; how it will hurt; how one mistake might never go away.
But today, as her first hand contacts the floor, as her wrist stretches, her weight tumbles awkward, off balance this unlucky once.
A held in breath permeates the gym, a stop in time, a what are you doing? A clamp on the collective tank of oxygen. Safety, if it ever existed, sucks outward past the school and life and death like a black hole. She’s on the ground two or three seconds tops, before every winning experience she has ever undergone propels her on her feet again.
A second between exists wherein nothing yet has changed — the unquestionable future in which she is still homecoming queen, head varsity cheerleader, female lead in the senior musical — but it morphs to buried in that second. She’ll remember later.
Things like this never happened to her, until they did.
In homeroom at the end of the day, books packed up with homework and P.E. clothes bursting seams of backpacks.
The principal announced the names of each cheerleader in seemingly random order. She did not cry. (Which she tried to hold on to in the coming months, not succumbing, at least publicly, to her dishonor.)
But she also walked down the halls for a while still slightly stunned, her fame now centered only on her colossal blunder.
Girls who had made cheerleader, who she thought of as friends, hid their mouths behind their hands, focusing intently on their lockers, until she passed. Since she didn’t cheer, she didn’t go to parties after. And since she didn’t go to the parties, why bother to go to the games?
Those she thought were her inner circle were on the field in some form or fashion — playing the game or cheering those who were. So she found out her inner circle had less to do with affection or acceptance but rather right place right time. Geographical. Nothing personal. This can challenge a whole world view. Brain still developing; sense of self in flux; what seemed real one day can the next slip between fingers.
So her demeanor over time, over the next several months, took on the shape and consistency, the shame and embarrassment, of a relentless high-pitched apology. A rueful question mark. A desperate ‘what if?’.
I waited awhile until she knew it wasn’t a phase that was passing. I waited until there was no way any of them would surprise me by taking pity on her. No one did.
Still I waited for the silent but unmistakable fall from grace, to understand viscerally what it is to crash to the proverbial floor, to have kids laugh at you, to be the object of another student’s scrutiny and cruelty, to be like the rest of us. To know that it wasn’t fact, it was luck, and as easy as it comes, it goes.
I know what you’re thinking. What a creep! But it’s not like a plan I hatched. I’m not magic. I could not — through sheer brain power — will her to screw up her front-walkover — the move she didn’t even need to do, which hubris brought to distinguish her. I didn’t take advantage.
In fact, if you think about it, it was an act of kindness. I offered her grace.
She had her tray in her hands — hamburger, tater tots, that sad little paper cup of ketchup — looking down slightly, about to pass our table.
“Hey Stephanie,” I smiled at her.
“Oh,” she looked confused, then recognized me from our English class. “Hi.”
I scooted backward, making room. “Wanna sit with us?”
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Previously Published on Medium
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