three girls in her hands, grinning all the way,’” she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together.
“‘Your mom built pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they’re still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens.’
“Don’t you want to be able to say that?”
Our innermost selves, in some magnificent ascent, and a clattering as some girls leap onto the benches, crying out, overtaken.
But not me—me who wants to bathe in the moment’s sacredness forever.
“You may have the bodies of young girls,” she says, her voice deep and holy, “but you have the hearts of warriors. Tonight, show me your warrior hearts.
“That’s all.”
And she turns and pushes through the locker room doors into the brightly lit hallway.
But instead of turning in to the clanging gym, its frenzy pitched to madness, she walks straight out the loading dock doors, into the starred night.
It’s like when a fever breaks, and you don’t know what’s happened, or what all those voices in your head meant, but the Celts squad does their halftime routine and all I see are flying bodies and cries and the greater and greater sense of a battlefield of fallen enemies on which we will march.
And I realize, Beth gone again, I don’t even know who Top Girl is.
“It’s gotta be the JV, right?” whispers RiRi. “We’re tossing her up, right?”
But there is no time, and there we are, running out on that gym floor, and I feel my body flipping into my handspring, and Brinnie Cox’s legs spiraling next to me, and suddenly we’re twenty seconds in and I can hear myself shouting:
…said shah shah shah shah booty
Got that rhythm feelin’ tight
Let your body rock SNAP-SNAP
Let your hips show some might STOMP-STOMP-STOMP
shah shah shah shah booty
I’m looking for the JV Flyer, but I don’t see her.
We don’t need no music
We don’t need no bands.
All we need are Eagles fans jammin in the stands!
Oh wait, stop a minute, WAIT
shah shah shah shah booty
I feel her before I see her.
Dark hair shimmering, the thunderbolt seared to her face.
Beth, in the JV’s place. Lining up in the top Flyer spot for the two-two-one.
And if you could understand how time can stop, it did for me.
Mindy has her hands on my waist, my hands gripping soft shoulders, my toe slipping into the pocket of her bent knee, pushing off with my right foot and lifting my other knee as high as I can, planting it on her shoulder, front-spotting Paige below, propelling up my other foot.
RiRi and I face each other, feet fixed on Mindy’s and Cori’s shoulders, their hands tight on our ankles.
“Who’s counting?” I shout.
shah shah shah shah booty
Emily, swinging her boot brace across the front row, her eyes avid, her fear gone.
“I’ll do it,” she cries. “I’ll count. No one knows better than me. No one knows—”
We are now ten and a half feet high, my eyes fixed on RiRi’s wild green ones, her face cobalt-brushed, ecstatic, mouthing, “B-E-T-H!”
shah shah shah shah booty
“One-two, three-four,” Emily’s fierce counting like a pulse in my brain, like a hammer over my heart.
The whole pyramid sponging, rubber-banding as it should, the living thing, the beating heart.
Below I see Beth’s black hair, and she flings her head back, her eyes squeezed shut.
I will die only for you above all.
That’s what she’d said, and I remembered it now, from long ago. Age nine or ten, poring over a Time-Life book in my dad’s library, an old picture of a Japanese pilot tying his headband, eyes determined, jaw set.
And the caption: “I will die only for you above all.”
Beth loved that picture and tore the page out and pasted it in her locker with rubber cement, and at year’s end, we tried to claw it free, but it came off in shreds and there was nothing she could do.
I will die only for you above all.
Six hands on her and she’s propelled up between RiRi and me. Lying flat, her arms outstretched, and we pop her up so she is standing.
Blocking out Emily’s dire warnings of what it’s like from out there, from the stands, as they see all of us spring-loaded into the air, defying gravity, logic, the laws of physics itself, I know all I must think of is Beth’s wrist in my tight-clawed—
One
shah shah shah shah booty
and loading her forward, slingshotting her back to life, pitching her higher, locking her in place, holding her widespread