Snark and Stage Fright (16 page)

After the show ended in time for the next band to set up for the club’s usual over-21 show, Dave jumped down from the stage and grabbed me, knocking the breath out of me because I was so stunned by this very un-Dave-like behavior. I guessed he was pumped on some serious punk-rock endorphins, so I recovered and hugged him back.

“Thank you so! Much! For coming!” he yelled as he continued crushing me, even though with the band unplugged he didn’t need to yell anymore. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Michael was watching even as he high-fived Gary. He must have found it odd, too.

When he released me, Dave ran his hand over his carefully coiffed spikes, which were tinted blue at the tips, asking, “You like the spikes?”

“You know I like the spikes,” I said and I think he actually blushed a little. Michael frowned, however, probably because no one asks him for advice on their ’do’s.

Outside, Michael offered me and Shondra a ride home but I said that I had driven her there. Before we parted ways in the parking garage, as Shondra was buckling herself into the passenger’s seat and I was digging in my bag for my car keys, Michael put a hand on my shoulder and said he wanted to talk to me tomorrow. I looked up from my bag to see that he was looking at me, his eyes dark but soft as a melted chocolate chip, and his hand was still on my shoulder.

“Sure,” I managed to say while my nerve endings slam-danced up my spine. “Okay.”

“I’ve got something in the afternoon but I’ll call, maybe in the evening?”

I nodded, dumb with hope, and climbed into my car and started the ignition with a shaky hand. I was so afraid to jinx what I thought might be happening, I didn’t even tell Shondra on the ride home.

After dropping her off, I went right upstairs to shower the sweat and club stink off of me but the bathroom door was locked. I waited a minute or two, but I didn’t hear anything so I knocked.

“Hey, is someone in there?”

“Yesssss,” Cassie hissed like a cobra.

After digesting the shock of her being home before dawn on a weekend night, I said, “I need a shower. I smell like I slept in a sauna. It’s pretty gross.”

She gave a loud groan and then the door flew open to reveal Cassie looking like Alice Cooper on the cover of one of Gary’s CDs, with her black mascara and eyeliner running down her face.

“It’s all yours. Ya happy?” she snapped, but I grabbed her elbow before she could walk away.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

She collapsed a bit against the flowered wallpaper in the hallway and sighed, “You should be
happy
about it. Because I’m probably going to quit the cheer squad.”

“Why?” I actually gasped at this. Hearing Cassie say this was a little bit like hearing the Pope renounce Catholicism. “You love it.”

“Not all of it. Not the bus rides to the away games.”

She started crying then and I stood there in horror for a few seconds until I fumbled my arms around her; we crumpled onto the hallway floor together while I wished for the first time in my life that our mom would show up.

“What happens on the bus rides, Cassie?” I asked, and she began to tell me how some of the players liked to walk up and down the aisle of the bus grabbing the girls and trying to feel them up, or lifting up their little skirts to reveal what’s beneath, or getting them to touch them through their tight football pants. “Ewww, that’s gross!” I cried, feeling my stomach turn over. “And criminal, Cass. They can’t do that.”

“It shouldn’t be a big deal, I guess … they’re just playing around … ”

“Cassie, it’s sexual harassment. Or
assault
, even. These boys can’t do that to you! What do the other girls say?”

“Nothing. If a girl complains, everyone calls her a ‘frigid bitch’ and then they all sort of gang up on her. Girls, too, and especially when they lose the game, like tonight.”

I was so stunned by this that I thunked my head against the wall by accident. But I was too angry to feel the pain. I never thought that the jocks at our school had gender politics any more enlightened than the Taliban’s. I knew that some of the players—and some of the cheerleaders—could bully the smaller, dweebier kids. They were easy targets. But I had not known that they bullied each other, too. And this went way beyond teasing and insults.

As calmly as I could, I said, “This has to stop, Cass. Did they do this to you?” She nodded before dropping her head to her knees. “You should file charges,” I said.

“No!”

“At least tell the principal,” I pleaded. “This has to go on record. And they have to be punished, at least by the school if not the police.”

“No way. Everyone will get mad and then it will be worse. They never get in trouble for anything.”

“Maybe because no one ever reports them,” I reasoned, but she shook her head again. I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat and tried to think. While I know the world would be a better place if cheerleaders everywhere turned in their pom-poms and devoted themselves to something more genuinely empowering, I knew Cassie loved being on the squad. She loved supporting a team, even if it didn’t deserve her support and treated her like toilet paper. But what could she do? Last spring, when those same guys were harassing Cassie about the photos of herself she had sent to Jeremy Wrentham, nothing ever happened to them or the other people who’d texted the photos or written foul things on her locker. Cassie knew exactly where appealing to school authorities would land her—in an even worse position. Quitting the squad seemed like her only option. But that wouldn’t change anything, not really.

I suggested, “I’ll write an article about it. People have to know what’s going on.”

Cassie looked up at me, puffy-faced like a chickadee in the cold and disgusted. She said, “George, if
you
write it then they’ll know I’m the one who told on them.”

“Well, they de
se
rve to be ‘told on’! This isn’t third grade! These guys didn’t just squish somebody’s lunch box. This is serious.”

“I
do
want it to stop,” she admitted. “It’s humiliating.”

“It
has
to stop, and you shouldn’t have to quit. I can ask Dave to do it, instead of me … ” I said, though I knew the best person to write it would be Michael. Last year, it was his anonymous letter he had written to
The Alt
that had finally gotten everyone to leave Cassie alone. But I didn’t want to ask him. Or Dave. I wanted to write it myself, for my sister and all the other girls who felt like they had to accept this because boys will be boys.

I got up, grabbed some tissues from the bathroom, and bent down to hand them to her. She cleaned up her face and tried to explain, “It started with some of the guys just teasing their girlfriends, and then it just … spread.”

“I still think you should call the cops, but I understand why you don’t want to.” I couldn’t make Cassie take a stand for all womankind, and I shouldn’t blame her for not wanting to. “But maybe think about it?”

She nodded and blew her nose.

“We’re going to make this stop,” I promised, and she went back into the bathroom.

I went right to the laptop I’d shared with Tori and typed so furiously I thought my fingers would break off and sent it to Dave before even proofreading it, let alone revising it. It was the eight-page equivalent of my screaming on paper, and I got an email back the next morning. Dave said he would later send some suggestions for tightening it and making it less threatening to any particular individuals so that “no one would sue our asses.” He advised me
not
to tell Gary about it until he did because Gary was likely to get all of his brothers together and randomly terrorize anyone connected with Longbourne football. While that seemed like a fine idea to me, I didn’t want to get Gary in trouble.

I spent the day exchanging emails with Dave until I got the article down to a one-page scathing but non-libelous indictment of appalling alleged behavior. When I went to bed that night, I was still so angry I probably looked like a cartoon character with smoke coming out of my ears, and instead of practicing landscapes that night (I’d moved on from portraiture), I drew some really killer cartoons of cavemen in football jerseys, swinging clubs and dragging girls by their ponytails.

But I guess there was one small benefit from hearing Cassie’s story.

I didn’t think
too
much about the fact that Michael never called.

13 
The Trouble with Superheroes

At lunch the next day, Dave and I told everyone about my article and Cassie’s revelation without mentioning her by name. Diana listened, stunned, her hand to her mouth, and I could see Michael’s jaw grow so tight as I spoke that I thought it would snap off.

As expected, Gary went into berserker mode, pounding the table once with a fist. “I can’t even fucking believe those guys,” he roared, butting his head toward the table of football players as if he’d happily knock them all down with his skull like a bull in Pamplona, until Dave put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

Michael finally put down the fork that had never quite made it to his mouth and asked me, “You’re absolutely sure about this, about what these guys did?”

“Do you think I would make something like this up? Why?” I exploded. “Why would I libel a bunch of Visigoths for kicks?”

“Don’t get angry. We just need to be really sure before we take any action.”

“Yes, I am ‘really sure.’” I thought for a second, then added, “I cannot reveal my anonymous main source, but I can assure you she wasn’t just acting distressed. She’s a terrible actress. When she played a turkey in a fourth-grade Thanksgiving play, she was indistinguishable from the ones made out of cardboard.” I could see in Michael’s eyes that he had figured out that Cassie had told me about this, so I hurried to add, “And her story has been corroborated by others.”

“Then we have to do something about this,” Michael agreed, glowering over at the table of (alleged) sex offenders who were guffawing over something. Somebody had probably given a freshman a swirly in the boys’ room earlier and they were now reliving the magic moment.

“Yeah, Michael,” I said. “‘Doing something about this’ was the whole idea behind the article.”

Diana said quietly, looking down at her tray, “This makes me miss my old school. A girls’ school.” But Michael seemed focused on me for the moment.

“What do you have planned?” he asked me.

“The article, which comes out Wednesday, if we rush it, which isn’t ideal,” I admitted.

Michael nodded and poked a straw into his carton of juice. After a moment of contemplation, he told me, “I have an idea, okay? I just need to talk to some people.”

There was something so authoritative in his tone, something that said, “Calm yourself down, little lady, and let the menfolk handle it,” that made me erupt.

“Why do you think that I need
you
to handle it?”

Diana gasped a little and Shondra, who was just about to sit down with us, took an involuntary step backwards and said, “Whoa.”

Michael’s eyes got hard and black as obsidian; he smirked and leaned back in his chair.

“Okay, Georgia, what else do you have planned besides the article that you still need to revise? Ritual castrations around a Wiccan bonfire tonight? Maybe you can make it part of Friday’s halftime show.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Gary laughed. “I’m in. I’m sick of fucks like those guys making
all
guys look like Neanderthals. Maybe we can tie them to posts and let some other team use them as tackle dummies.”

Dave looked at me over his black horn-rimmed glasses and said, “Georgia’s article needs a little work, but it’s a much less violent plan. But … ” He paused here and looked at me a little sheepishly. “Michael has a point. There’s only so much even the best article in a newspaper can do.”

“I think we need a plan of action,” Michael said, twiddling his spork between his fingers.

“Right,” I snapped. “I’m all talk and no action, right? Just a tease.”

“You said it, not me,” Michael sniped, looking at me, mouth open slightly, as he tried to calculate whether I had made an oblique reference to the cause of our breakup or not. I couldn’t believe I had done it myself, so we stared at each other as everyone else stared at us. Gary shook his head in confusion, Diana squirmed a little, and Shondra began folding her paper napkin into a tiny square.

“I don’t know what the last thirty seconds of this conversation has been about,” Dave said after a while, “but a plan of action is a good idea.”

“Well, once Georgia’s article comes out, the offenders will be called out and shamed, right?” Shondra reasoned. “Like last year, when Michael called out everyone for bullying Cassie.”

“Or the offenders will just deny it. And then we look like bullies—or just ridiculously wrong,” Dave sighed. The bell rang for the next period and we all started gathering up our things as Dave said to Michael, “I’d be interested to see what you come up with.” Michael nodded as they both headed for the trashcans, taking my feminist revolution with them.

Gary put an arm around me as we walked to the door with Diana and Shondra behind us.

“It’s okay, George,” he said. “You and I bring the fire—and they keep us from committing arson. It’s a good system.”

I nodded, but I hated to think that I needed anyone—especially Michael—to be my human fire extinguisher.

Even worse to consider was how I’d obviously misread his puppy eyes and promise to call me after the Pigs show as a desire for reconciliation. Obviously he had not forgiven me for that last night on the Cape. Determined to prove Michael wrong in his assumption that I couldn’t raise the consciousness of my classmates on my own, I spent all the time I should have been doing homework rewriting and reworking my article. By the Wednesday morning it came out in
The Alt
, I was wishing that I could use it for my college application essay.

But it was Michael’s article, an open letter titled “You Give Jocks a Bad Name,” printed next to mine, that got everyone’s attention. Even in my righteous anger at having a guy grab the wheel of the feminist juggernaut I had intended to pilot, I had to admit it was really good, though I’m not sure Michael intended the title to refer to a stupid Bon Jovi song from the 80s. Not everyone’s mother insists on singing along to classic rock on the car radio, after all. The letter called out members of the football team for their boorish and sexist behavior, said that the other male athletes at LHS were not going to stand for it, and intimated that if the football team pulled any sexist crap on the cheer squad again, they’d have to answer to the members of the cross country, lacrosse, tennis, and basketball teams that had signed the letter under Michael’s name. There were
lots
of names below his and all of the guys who had signed the open letter were wearing armbands to school in solidarity with the oppressed cheerleaders.