A Non-Blonde Cheerleader in Love (19 page)

Nothing!

Finally, I knew what I had to do. I had a phone call to make. And thankfully, I had free weekends on my cell plan. I turned off the TV, shoved myself up from the couch and held down the speed-dial 1 button. Not even Daniel had bumped my
numero uno
gal down on my dial list.

“Neece!” Jordan Trott, my best friend from New Jersey, screamed in my ear. “I was just thinking about you! Do you have any idea where I am right now?”

“Where?” I asked, trudging toward the kitchen.

“Medieval Times!” she shouted as a huge cheer went up in the background. “It’s Maria’s birthday!”

“Omigod! The Fourth Annual Cheesefest?” I said, feeling an intense nostalgia for home. Each year Maria Rinaldi celebrated the day of her birth by finding the single cheesiest thing to do and making us all do it with her. We’d participated in video bowling at the Bowl-O-Rama, gone karaoke-ing at PartyWorld, and seen a magician-comedian-ventriloquist at Bananas Comedy Club. But Medieval Times? Maria was really outdoing herself.

“At this very moment I am eating a disgusting turkey leg with my hands while watching two college kids with King Arthur envy pretending to joust each other,” Jordan announced. “This rocks!”

I leaned back against the island in the kitchen and stared at my distorted reflection in the stainless steel refrigerator. Somewhere out there my best friend was having the time of her life with a bunch of my other former friends. Meanwhile, I had been, once again, burned by the blondes—a category that, this time, included my tow-haired boyfriend.

“I wish I was there, Jor,” I said.

“Me too!” Jordan replied. “Hey. What’s the matter?”

“Oh, the usual. Sage called me pretentious in front of everyone.”

Jordan snorted. “Oh, I am going to come down there and kick that scrawny little butt of hers all the way to San Juan.”

I smiled sadly. “But that’s not the worst of it. I think I’m in a fight with Daniel.”

“What?
Hang on a sec.”

I heard a lot of jostling, a muffled curse from a guy with a deep voice and then some footsteps. Soon Jordan was back and now there was no background noise on the other end.

“What happened? Talk to Jordan.”

So I told her the whole story. About Jaimee and Terrell and the wings and the laughter. My outburst and Daniel’s clenched-jaw stare.

“And then he left and didn’t even say good-bye,” I told her. I took a deep breath and yanked open the refrigerator. Fruit juice, leftover Chinese, a plastic container of hummus. Nothing I wanted. “So, what do you think?”

“We-ell . . . ,” Jordan said.

Instantly the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I grabbed a slice of Kraft American and held the phone between my ear and shoulder while I unwrapped it. “What?”

“Can I play testosterone advocate?” she asked.

“Please.”

“Okay, pretend you’re Daniel,” she said. “You just spent an entire night negating your manhood to show your girlfriend that you were dedicated to her squad and then she yells at you in front of everyone and says you have no feelings. I mean, this is the guy that just told you he loved you, right? That cuts a little deep.”

I felt kind of sick to my stomach and dropped the cheese slice on the counter. “Yeah. But Jor, it’s not just
my
squad anymore. It’s his too. He doesn’t have to prove to me that he’s dedicated. He should just
be
dedicated.”

“Well, he clearly is. A lot more than those other buttheads,” Jordan said.

I snorted a laugh. “Okay, you have a point.”

“I’m not saying he was a hundred percent right,” Jordan told me. “He shouldn’t have laughed. But cut the guy a little slack. He didn’t order the wings. He didn’t throw the wings. And he didn’t
mean
to hurt your friend’s feelings. And besides, he
is
completely dreamy. That should count for something in this world.”

Slowly, I smiled. “You’re sick, you know that?”

“Neece,
everyone
knows that,” Jordan joked. “Listen, I should probably get back. They’re gonna pick someone to be the princess soon and if I have anything to say about it, it’s gonna be me.”

“Godspeed, fair maiden,” I said.

“Right back at ya.”

Out of nowhere, tears prickled behind my eyes. “Jor? I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” she said quietly. “Bye, Neece.”

“Bye.”

I hung up the phone, took a deep breath and stared at the sun and moon animation on the screen. Maybe Jordan was right. Maybe
I
should call Daniel. Just one call and I could end this now. But even if I knew that Daniel wasn’t a hundred percent wrong and I wasn’t a hundred percent right, I still wasn’t quite ready to swallow my pride and apologize. I had to think about what I was going to say or it was all going to come out wrong.

So as much as my heart was telling me to hit speed-dial 2, I fought the urge and shoved my phone into my pocket. Tonight it was just me and the cheese. I’d deal with Daniel tomorrow.

 
Monday morning, I was back in SpaceyVille. (Actor Kevin Spacey, mayor.) After a full night of staring at my bedroom ceiling obsessing, I was not in the mood to deal with primping. So instead I showered, shoved my wet, short brown hair back in a tortoiseshell headband, put on my favorite light blue SDH sweatshirt and headed out for school. It was an unusually chilly morning and I even spotted frost on some of the flowers along the driveway. I was about to turn around and head back for a jacket when I saw Daniel waiting for me by the mailbox. I nearly tripped myself when I saw him standing there. Suddenly I was perfectly warm.

“You okay?” Daniel asked, reaching out as I skipped a few steps forward to catch my balance.

“Fine,” I said, striding right by him.

My heart pounded crazily. On one shoulder, my angel screamed at me that I was being immature.
Hello! Last night you decided to apologize, Annisa!
While on the other, the little devil was just snickering.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

I would have reached up to flick the shoulder angel off if it wouldn’t have made me look totally insane. How could Daniel just stand there like nothing was wrong? Just seeing him brought the insult of Saturday night back full-force, washing all the rationality away.

“You’re mad,” he said.

I swung around. “Of course I’m mad! Why didn’t you call me yesterday?”

“Uh . . . because I knew you were mad?” Daniel said, shrugging and biting his lip.

Damn. Did he have to be adorable right now? I was trying to be stoic over here.

“Oh, so, what? You just thought if you gave me twenty-four hours, I’d forget all about it?” I asked.

“Didn’t work, huh?” he asked.

“Nice try,” I told him. Then I turned and started walking again.

“Look, I’m really sorry I laughed, okay?” he said, jogging to catch up with me. “It was more nervous laughter at first, you know? Like I knew you guys were going to explode and I just couldn’t help it.”

I just kept walking. I knew about nervous laughter. A girl with my Class A klutz status was all
about
nervous laughter. But you didn’t laugh at someone else’s expense. And you certainly didn’t do it in her face when she was crying.

“And you gotta admit,” Daniel said. “It
was
kind of funny.”

“Ugh!” I blurted, whirling on him. He was grinning. Grinning right at my indignation. Infuriating. “You are such a . . . such a . . .
guy!”

Daniel blinked, his brow knitting. “Thank you.”

Okay. Look. It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
him to be a guy. Of course I did. I probably wouldn’t have been dating him if he
wasn’t
a guy. But Daniel had never been
this
sort of guy. This sort of grunty, testosteroney, laugh-at-other-people’s-expense guy. What had happened to him? Where was sweet, sensitive Daniel? The one who played the guitar and sang in choir and always bought me one of the warm chocolate chip cookies at lunch. The guy who had skipped school to come down to nationals to show me how much he cared about me. I’ll admit it—this whole boyfriend thing was new to me—but were they always so . . . schizo?

“That was not intended to be a compliment,” I told him in a huff.

“Annisa, look, the point is, we all feel really bad about the banner. Maybe we didn’t react so well at the time, but no one
wanted
to make Jaimee cry.”

This echoed what Jordan had said and I paused, feeling slightly guilty for turning the screws.

“Even Terrell feels really bad about it,” Daniel said.

I crossed my arms over my chest and held on. It actually helped warm me up a little. “All right then,” I said. “What’s he going to do about it?”

“What’s who going to do about what?” Daniel asked.

I rolled my eyes. “The sign! What’s he going to do about it if he feels
so
bad?”

I had never seen Daniel look so blank before. I might as well have just asked him to divide 3477 by the square root of 13.

“What can he do?” he asked finally.

“Well, gee, I don’t know,” I said sarcastically. “He could help Jaimee make a new banner. Seems pretty obvious to me.”

Daniel blew out a scoff. Honestly, if I didn’t love him, I might have stomped on his foot. I was being serious here and he was totally blowing me off.

“Come on, Annisa. You know that if the guys walk into the lobby and see some ‘Snag the Dolphins’ sign that Terrell helped make, he will never hear the end of it,” Daniel said, throwing in some facetious air quotes.

“How would anyone
ever
know that Terrell helped make it?” I asked.

“Do you even go to this school? These things kind of have a way of getting out,” Daniel replied.

Oh. Now
he
was getting sarcastic with
me
? I don’t think so!

“Look. If you guys didn’t want to be cheerleaders, then maybe you shouldn’t have tried out for the squad,” I said.

There. I said it. Take that.

“Geez, Annisa, what’s wrong with you?” Daniel said. “You sound like Tara Timothy.”

My jaw dropped so fast, it made a gouge in the asphalt at my feet. How dare he compare me to Tara! He
knew
that was hitting below the belt. Was this what we had come to?

“That’s it. I’m outta here,” I said, turning and striding toward the football field, which we cut across each and every day.

“Annisa—”

“No! You stay at least ten paces behind me, Healy,” I said, throwing a hand up behind me as I speed-walked. “Otherwise, I cannot be responsible for my actions.”

Nice!
My shoulder devil cheered as my nostrils flared.

The angel shook her head and sighed.
This is going nowhere good.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized I had never had a chance to apologize for saying he had no feelings. Once again, Annisa Gobrowski talks before she thinks.

Shocker.

That afternoon we were supposed to work out in the weight room before a light practice. The guys got there before us and commandeered the good weight benches in the rear corner of the room. Joe was on his back shoving some ridiculous amount of weight up and down above his chest while Terrell spotted him and Daniel and Steven hovered. While Joe worked, the guys muttered amongst themselves. And when we arrived, they turned their backs to us. They couldn’t have made it any clearer that they wanted to have nothing to do with us.

“Where do they get off acting like
they
are ignoring
us?”
Tara said under her breath, grabbing a couple of free weights off the rack. She dropped them on the floor, then put her foot up on the barre to stretch, trying to act like nothing was amiss. The rest of the girls gathered around one by one as they trailed through the door.
“They’re
the ones who screwed everything up,” Tara added.

I couldn’t have agreed more. Maybe I
was
turning into Tara Timothy.

Uh, no. Didn’t want that. Both because it would be scary
and
because it would prove Daniel right. I hooked my arm behind my head and held on to my elbow, stretching out my triceps.