Stay Gold - Tobly McSmith Page 0,3

That’s our mascot, Boomer. The buff bear suit looks like Winnie the Pooh, if he gave up honey and picked up protein powder. He playfully wags his tail in Lauren’s face. “Get your butt out of my face, Boomer! Unless you want to take that suit to the cleaners.”

“Kelly!” Mia walks over to the bear. “Class starts soon—get out of Boomer. Wow, that suit smells like the boys’ locker room. You need to clean it before Friday.”

Boomer gives Mia a big bear hug, really bringing her close to the smelly fur. After a couple attempts, Mia pushes the bear away in a playful little scene. Boomer flips Mia off but there’s only four fingers on the fur glove, so it looks ridiculous. We all bust out laughing, and Mia feigns offense.

Kelly is hands down the best mascot ever. She has forever been the class clown. Just try to keep a straight face when she’s doing her weird dances or spot-on impressions of teachers. It’s impossible. I have no doubt that Kelly will be on Saturday Night Live someday.

Mia, Lauren, and Kelly are my main mains. We have been through a crap-ton together. The four of us have been almost completely inseparable since sixth grade—no one speaks of the three months during middle school after Mia kissed Lauren’s boyfriend. Major drams.

I wave my pom-pom at all my peeps as they head into school. I’m friends with nearly everyone at this school: the theater kids, athletes, activists, gamers, skateboarders, even those girls who throw flags in the air when the band plays. Thanks to my middle school days, I know all too well how it feels to be an outsider. So, I friend everyone. I’m a cheerleader of the people.

The crowd on the lawn thins out, everyone heading inside to make it to class on time. Kelly comes jogging back over—fresh out of the Boomer mascot suit—in a cheerleader outfit. For some idiotic reason, the mascot must wear the cheerleading outfits to school when we do.

She tugs at the skirt uncomfortably. “Why must I wear this polyester prison?”

I laugh.

“It’s tradition,” Mia says with overwhelming authority. “You know that, Kelly—you’ve read the Hillcrest Cheerleading Handbook and Bylaws.”

“Every night before bed!” Kelly says, saluting our captain.

Here’s my least favorite tradition: wearing our cheerleading outfits on the first day of school. And game day. And Flag Day and Arbor Day and . . . you get the picture.

It’s the standard-issue cheerleading outfit, complete with an aggressively pleated skirt (short but long enough not to scandalize) and a sleeveless top with HILLCREST stitched across the chest. We have five different cheer outfits, all with varying patterns in our school colors: black, silver, and the brightest red that the eye can register. These getups are crazy stiff and starchy. No kidding, the instructions on the care tag reads: Machine wash cold. Dry by pounding against a rock until the rock breaks.

“Girls!” Mia yells into a megaphone. “Get your ass to class!”

Finally, into the air-conditioning.

PONY, 8:51 A.M.

After ten minutes of confused wandering, I find my locker. This school is supersize. Four separate corridors—that look exactly the same—and some twisty hallways that lead you nowhere. My last school, about a hundred miles away, was probably half this size.

I enter the combination, the locker opens, and—for the first time this morning—I take a deep breath. I unload the binders out of my backpack, then pull up my schedule on my phone.

I’m zooming in on the school map when a kid knocks into me with brute force—he must have been running. His body hits me like a brick wall, but I manage to stay on my feet. My phone goes sliding across the floor, stopping against the trash can.

Instead of bolting, the kid runs over and fetches my phone, wiping it on his jeans as he returns. Before heading off, he hands me the phone back and says, “Sorry, man.”

Man.

Growing up, I wanted to play outside in rock piles with the boys, get dirty, and collect baseball cards. I hated dresses and refused to wear them. Girls made me nervous. I was called a tomboy, which I secretly liked. I pretended that my name was Tom Boy.

Adults mistook me for a boy often. I liked it, but my mom did not. It would embarrass the hell out of her. “She’s a girl,” my mom would say, and they would apologize, and I would want to disappear. When she wasn’t around, I didn’t correct anyone. I went along with it.

Then I hit