school entrance, a tissue paper eagle, wings stiff and high, rising behind it.
I let my heart rise to it.
The morning passes, I don’t see Beth at all, and Coach has called in sick. That’s all anyone can talk about.
She’s abandoned us twice, three times over. We are losing count.
She doesn’t care about us at all.
She hates us.
“What did we do wrong?” the JV girl sobs, pressing her face against her locker door. “What did we do?”
School skitters by without touching me, and Tacy, face bleach-white, will not meet my gaze.
I am thinking of things, of the Abyss and its greasy stare and how I won’t blink. I can’t.
At three fifteen we are in the gym, jumping high.
“Scout’s a-coming!” RiRi hollers. “Wait till she sees what we got!”
Everyone screams.
And it feels like God touching me. What would I do without this, because here I am, propelling to heaven itself, soles resting on Mindy’s knotty shoulders—or on the floor, knees sponging, lifting Brinnie Cox, nimble feet in my palm, surging her straight to God.
That feeling, it is God’s greatest gift.
Just like that adderall. Found that morning in the corner of my hoodie pocket from a long ago act of Beth’s generosity, it gallops through me, and I know I can do anything.
When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.
With Jesus in my heart, and with that seismic blast, who could stop my ascent? Any of ours?
In the locker room, forty minutes to game time, we are Vegas showgirl–spangled. The air thick with biofreeze and tiger balm and hairspray and the sugared coconut of tawny body sprays, it is like being in a soft cocoon of sugar and love.
There’s RiRi, slinging her curling iron like a gunfighter, shaping the spring-shot ponytail, its helix curls.
There’s Paige Shepherd, temp tattoo blazing across her tan face, kicking her leg high and twisting, tumbling into Mindy’s arms, her wrists black duct-taped like Roman gladiator cuffs.
See Cori Brisky, rubbing flexall on her numbing wrists, her smile showing all her teeth, and how sharp they are, and I know that there’s a jungle princess in there who’s ready for hot blood.
See even shell-shocked Emily, our fallen comrade, fingers glazed with icy hot, running it across Mindy’s armor shoulder blades, whispering in her ear.
And there I am. If you could see me—tall, tight, lightsome, and powerful, flipping my back tucks on the slippery tile, afraid of nothing, no one. Just try to stop me.
That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything.
You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feathers and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.
But where’s our fearsome leader? Either of them?
We need somebody to gather all this hectic energy, to link these pulsing organs into one powerful, unstoppable body.
What if that somebody were me?
Moving girl to girl, I start back-stroking, French-braiding, tiger-balming, offering rallying words, C’mon girls, let’s show them what we got.
I even talk, for the first time ever, to that poor yellow peep JV, the one who will have to fly tonight if Beth doesn’t show, the one shivering like a downy chick.
I know I can lift her, I can.
She’s not a girl but a butterfly resting on my fingertips.
But then there’s a clatter from the backdoors, and a flurry of whoops and bratty squeals and, baby lamb JV tucked under my arm, I turn and know I will see her.
Beth.
Leaping up on the locker room bench, eyelids scorched with blue glitter, she heaves her throaty voice to the drop ceiling.
“Hella, bitches!” she bellows, rocking her feet on the bench so it shudders. “Our scout, that Regionals scout, I can feel her out there, waiting. And, bitches, she is so ready to be fucked.”
The gasp from us is loud and exultant.
“I’ve just trawled through that gym to check out the Celt squad and I’ve never seen anything so appalling. Ana girls with accordion ribs, a coupla dykey ringers with treebark legs and Charlie Brown faces. And those Celt ballers, skidding and squeaking, tossing that baby’s ball around like they’re kings of the world? Pathetic.”
Everyone, so eager, twirling near her, just like the old days when she’d preen and twist and flash her blue Eagles tatts and we’d clamor, Give it to us, Captain, rise up, rise up!…
“You know who the stars are? We are. Why? Because we don’t throw around a fucking rubber ball.