From Butt to Booty (14 page)

“That’s what I was thinking, but I wasn’t sure.”

Her expression clouds. “I’m sure there are all sorts of worries being gay.”

I hadn’t really thought about it. “What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re not really a culture that understands that sexuality and gender are two different things. We don’t separate them—”

“Gals? Cake people?” Mike pokes his head in. “Our blood sugar is dropping in here.”

“Sorry, I got caught up in my whole anthro thesis.”

“Huh.” Mike seems to know what she’s talking about.

“Thesis?” I ask. Man nipples as a thesis topic. Sounds edgy.

My expression must show what I’m thinking. “Gender and sexuality,” Heather clarifies.

“Oh, of course.” Now don’t I feel like an idiot?

“Call me anytime.” Heather picks up the cake and hands it to me. She takes a match and starts lighting the candles.

“Thanks,” I say.

We both begin singing “Happy Birthday” as we walk back into the dining room.

I feel like a reporter for Animal Planet. The butt swish is usually reserved for females but I have seen Adam do it occasionally, so perhaps there are instances of gay men using it. I’m not sure. I couldn’t scientifically say. It’s a technique often seen at the mall, and often utilized during a rousing game of bob and weave.

It’s a graceful, sophisticated ability to swivel the hips at a twenty- to thirty-degree slant. If done right, the butt swish is alluring, attractive and the evolution of man in motion. Done badly, it’s seven kinds of wrong.

So beware, and practice with a rhythm of step, slide, swish, step, slide, reswish. I also suggest using a mirror before attempting a public display, which should only be done by advanced flirters or expert seducers. And if you are advanced or expert, then you probably don’t need the explanation of mall flirting. It’s just a thought, though; good to know.

Clarice is standing three people away at the entrance to the gym. We’re waiting to make a grand entrance along with the rest of the soccer team. I really wanted to be sick today and not be here. “Gert,” she whispers in a loud, un-whisper voice.

“What?” I can’t really hear her over the band’s “Wipe Out” rendition.

“Have you talked to Stephen today?” she asks, pantomiming her way through the question.

“What?” I still can’t make out what she’s asking. I push toward her.

“Stephen. Have you talked to him?”

“Why?” Why is she asking? I can’t remember when I last talked to him. I mean, really talked to him.

She shrugs. “Spens asked me if you’d talked to Stephen today.”

The pep band begins playing the fight song. “Why?” I shake my head. She must know more than this unhelpful tidbit.

She shoves her way closer. “Spenser and he were talking about GAGD and Spenser mentioned it to me.”

“Is he taking you?” I lower my voice and raise my brows.

“Stephen?” she asks.

I roll my eyes. “Spenser.”

“I don’t know.” She bites a hangnail. Very sexy habit.

I nod. “We haven’t really talked about it. It’s a couple of weeks away.”

“Twenty-four days,” Maggie says from behind us, moving forward. “Do we really have to run out there and jump around?”

We’ve been told to look peppy and school spirity.

“I guess.” I peek around Karmel, our goalie, who pretty much blocks the goal with her hips, trying to see what the cheerleaders are doing. It sounds like they are passing out X.

“I’m so not into this.” Clarice rolls her eyes. “I thought we were the kids who despised these rallies—how are we part of one?”

“Someone’s bright idea to try out for the soccer team.”

“How was I supposed to know we’d make it? My mom plays lotto all the time and never wins.”

“The odds were much better we’d make the team,” Maggie says. She’s always right.

“I’d rather have won lotto,” I say.

“Okay, people, look alive!” Mack yells down the line as the cheerleaders hold up a big butcher-paper sign for us to bust out of and run through.

We kinda jog through as the band plays “Wipe Out.” Again. Could they have picked a better-suited song?

I can’t breathe; the entire school is looking at me. I’m naked and no one told me. “Why are they staring at us?” I whisper to Clarice.

“They’re supposed to. We’re going into battle on their behalf.”

There are times I can’t stand Clarice’s militant attitude about everything. “We play soccer.”

“Exactly. It’s not a blood sport, but it’s no different than being a warrior in the Middle Ages.”

I don’t know about that. We have no weapons, a longer life span, good nutrition and … “No plague,” I say.

“You haven’t seen the Westside Cicadas, have you?” Maggie asks from my other side. “They’re locusts. We’re so dead.”

“Comforting. Thanks,” I say as Maggie’s name is called over the microphone.

She steps forward and waves quick at Jesse and then at a random group of freshmen.

“You have a big crush on him,” I say without moving my lips, so really it sounds more like “Woo ’avaigcrotch in ’im.”

Maggie looks at me like I’m having a stroke.

I’m about ready to repeat myself when I hear Mack. “Another surprise talent this season is Gerrrr-trooood Garrrr-ri-ballldiii!” Seriously, the alphabet doesn’t have that many syllables. He loves my name.

I wave at Stephen, who hollers and whoops. Wow. Over-enthused. I telepath that he needs to calm down, but he doesn’t seem to understand my message and waves at me again. Boys.

“Be my partner?” Karmel turns to me and grabs my hand.

“Oh—for what?”

“Haven’t you been listening? We’re doing an egg toss.”

Right. How could I forget the cheerleaders’ insane need to humiliate and terrify us with fun games?

Karmel doesn’t even wait for my answer.

All of a sudden there’s a spoon in my hand and she’s tossing an Eggland’s Best scud missile at me. “Catch it!” she screams.

Right. As if this game is winnable when we have tiny salt spoons to catch the eggs. I manage to cradle the egg against my stomach.

Maggie and Clarice don’t even try. They’re such doody heads. A couple more exchanges and it’s only me and Karmel left standing. I can feel all two thousand eyes boring into my solar plexus.

Sweat drips down my back. These nasty-ass nylon uniforms are too small and too itchy. The lights are strobed into my brain. Then someone starts the foot-stomping and then clapping. With every beat of my heart, another reverberation rocks the gym.

I see Karmel’s mouth move but can’t hear anything she’s saying. One of the cheerleaders makes her back up a step before she can toss the egg to me again.

Karmel lets the egg fly.

Have you ever noticed how much like lightbulbs eggs can appear when sailing through the air? I’m sure there’s a syndrome with acute egg-bulb displacia.

I was not looking at the egg sailing in a perfect arc across the basketball court to land without ceremony on the bridge of my nose; I was staring at the lightbulb.

Egg in the face. I’m that girl.

I hear a smack and blink furiously, trying to keep my focus on the “egg” I’m still watching hang air over center court.

The gym gasps. I look around, trying to figure out who we’re all concerned about. Maggie and Clarice and Mack and the assistant athletic director, who is also a nurse, collapse around me. Or maybe I collapse and they just kinda follow my trajectory. Then I realize that there’s blood on my shirt.

After that I pretty much black out. I come to in the nurse’s office with paramedics shining a flashlight into my eyes.

Killer headache.

“Lie still, miss.”

It feels like an alien crawled out my nostrils and took over the world.

The paramedics are a swarm of flies; they are everywhere and won’t stay still. I blink, trying to keep up with the buzzing.

They all nod in unison. “You have a couple of butterfly bandages and swelling, but we don’t have to do any stitches.”

Mack leans down, a complete freaked-out expression on his face, covered by a film of fake-coachy optimism. “Gertrude, your parents are on the way.”

“Huh?” What? No. Why? They’ve graduated high school, why are they coming back?

“They want to take you to the emergency room. To make sure.”

I mumble and shut my eyes. The world is moving too fast. And here I thought February portended to be a great month. Holy-Mother-of-the-Shortest-Month, please don’t get any worse.

“Fine, thanks!” I yell, waving at the freshmen staring at me. Two humongous black eyes and a glaring white bandage and I’m not allowed to stay home. Even the headache I have doesn’t cut it with Dad.

“Nope, you’re an athlete. You need to get back on the horse.”

Huh, cuz I’ve always been such a jockey. What’s with the stupid cliché? He all but shoves me out of our car. (I can’t drive for a few days, either.)

“Are you okay?” Maggie and Clarice shove a couple of Oscar juniors who decide to reenact the whole scene in the courtyard.

“Wait.” I finish watching the almost-actors in their dramatic roles. “Tell me there wasn’t a stretcher involved.”

Maggie and Clarice shoot each other looks. “They were afraid you’d broken your neck.”

“Neck?”

“They put a brace on you and then put you on the stretcher. It was all very Discovery Health Channel,” Maggie informs me.

“Lovely.”

“You okay?”

“Yes, I will live. No practice today, though. I get to watch you run.” At least there’s an upside.

“See you after sixth period,” says Clarice. They wave.

I nod and head down the art wing. If I’m lucky, today might be self-portrait day and then I can go all Picasso on my features and it’ll be accurate.

Stephen doesn’t even bother with hello. “How are you?”

I try to work up a flutter in my belly upon hearing his voice. I can’t. I think the nausea has to do with the head injury and not Stephen. I think. I’m not totally sure. “Fine.”

There’s a silence. A very leaden silence. He’s called for a reason; I can hear it in his voice. It’s not like my nose is still a topic of discussion around school. There’s no embarrassment being associated with Nose Girl anymore. April Collins ripped the seam of her mini and walked around with a rhinestone thong and her butt cheeks showing until one of the teachers noticed a commotion. Rumor has it she was walking around like that for hours,
though how she didn’t feel breezy, I’m not at all sure. So I’m not talked about now.