Elise stopped in front of them, blatantly considering them. “That’s good,” she said, “but if you want to make the cheerleading squad you have to do the splits all the way.”
Chad glanced up at her and smiled. “I’ll remember that if I ever go out for cheerleading.”
Elise swung her racket lazily back and forth. “They don’t work you hard enough at football practice, so you come here on your spare time?”
Mike shrugged. “You can’t take a break if you want to be the best.”
“What a wonderful motto,” Elise said. “And it sounds like the beginning of a cheer. Are you sure you don’t want to go out for cheerleading?”
“I think I’ll stick with football,” Chad said. “I like knocking men down.”
“So do the cheerleaders, from what I hear.”
Chad and Mike both laughed.
I still couldn’t think of anything to say. Why was this so easy for Elise?
Chad switched legs and stretched again. He was tan and muscular, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.
Elise spun her racket slowly between her hands. “You know, I don’t know why they don’t have cheerleaders for tennis. It’s the more difficult sport.”
“Yeah, right,” Chad said, tilting his chin down in mock challenge. “I’d like to see the tennis team do squats or bench press 250.”
“They could do it,” Mike said, “collectively.”
Elise paused to take a quick drink of water. “If it’s so easy, you think you could beat us?”
“Sure,” Chad said, “right after you take us on in football.”
“We could do it,” she said airily. “Where’s the football? Let’s play.”
I had gone back to take another drink of water and nearly coughed some up my nose. What was Elise thinking? I couldn’t throw a football, and even if she could, I couldn’t catch one. Flirting was hard enough without turning it into a contact sport.
Mike straightened his legs, done with his stretches. “We didn’t bring a football with us.”
“In that case,” Elise said. “You lose. I’m pretty sure that’s how the rules go.” She was still spinning her racket but looking at Mike now instead of Chad. “Are you up for a game of tennis? Cassidy could lend you her racket.”
I prayed he would say yes. It would leave Chad and I on the sidelines watching them. “I’d be your cheerleader,” I put in. “What was your motto again? Something about being the best?”
Chad let his blue eyes rest on me. “You can’t take a break if you want to be the best.”
I liked the sensation of having him gaze at me, of holding his attention even for a few seconds. “Right. The best. That should be easy to rhyme with something.” I looked upward considering. “The rest. The blessed. The dressed. The stressed . . . watercress.”
“Infest,” Elise added. “Oppressed. Digest.”
“Abreast—” I broke off because Chad and Mike both started laughing.
“I want to hear that cheer,” Chad said. “Go ahead and tell me that one.”
I felt myself color. “I meant abreast as one word. As in, ‘I want to stay abreast of the news.’”
Mike laughed harder. “If that’s the sort of news you have, so do I.”
Chad stood up, grinning at me. “You’re bright red.”
There was a downside, I realized, to having a big vocabulary. Some words were best left unsaid around teenage boys. Maybe I should lay off the Shakespeare for awhile.
The guys, still laughing, told us goodbye and went to run laps. Elise and I walked back to the tennis courts. She was shaking her head at me the entire way.
All through the next set, I thought of words I could have chosen instead of abreast. Confessed. Messed. Depressed. Yep, I should have gone with depressed. That one worked well.
* * *
Monday, while Elise and I were walking to our lockers, Chad sauntered by. When he saw me, he smirked and asked, “Rhyme any good words lately?”
“I’ve given up poetry,” I said.
“Don’t do that,” he said, walking past me and down the hallway. “You were coming up with some good stuff.”
I watched him for a moment, then turned to Elise. “Was that flirting or just general mockery?”
“Flirting,” Elise said, but I didn’t think she meant it.
For the next few days, Chad smiled at me every time we passed in the hallway, but never spoke to me again. Unless you count the time he walked by murmuring, “Pressed. Caressed. Undressed . . . Hey, you’re bright red again.”
It was amazing how many suggestive words rhymed with best.
Still, this sort of attention was better than being ignored altogether. Homecoming was in two-and-a-half weeks. In my more delusional moments, I pictured Chad asking me and then worried that someone else would ask me first. In reality, I worried no one would ask me at all. Half the people at school already had dates.
Elise ate lunch at my table everyday even though we were the National Honor Society crowd. I knew, although she never came out and said it, that she was trying on the persona. She was testing us out to see if she could be happy in high school as one of the smart girls. She even raised her hand willingly in English and answered questions.
On Thursday after school, while I was putting books in my backpack, Josh walked up to my locker. I usually didn’t see him until Elise and I climbed into his car, so I was surprised to see him.
“Is Elise around?” he asked.
“No. She’s probably still at her locker.”
“Good. I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“Oh?” My gaze went to him. He was leaning up against my locker in all his senior-guy studliness. Seriously, the guy had biceps. I wondered where he worked out since he didn’t do sports.
“I wanted to talk to you about Elise.”
“Oh.” This shouldn’t have disappointed me, but still did.
“How has she been acting at school? I mean, she’s not skipping class and drinking, is she?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
He didn’t look at me. He was scanning the hallways watching for her. “She’s been good at home, too. I can’t figure it out. She hasn’t challenged my parents’ authority in days.”
“Maybe she’s turning over a new leaf.”
“Or working on a new con. She’s quite an actress when she wants to be.” His gaze flickered to me. “You’d tell me if you knew she was up to something, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“She’s never kept her partying a secret before, but maybe her tactics are changing.” He looked past me and on down the hallway. “Elise is coming. Pretend we’re talking about something else.”
“What?”
But he didn’t answer me. He just leapt into a conversation about one of his teachers—I wasn’t sure which one. I nodded and tried to keep from doing something stupid—like giggling.
If Elise thought it was strange that Josh was at my locker, she didn’t show it. “There you are,” she said.
He straightened. “Are you ready to go?”
As we walked out of the building, I wondered which of the two was really the better actor.
* * *
On Friday I turned sixteen. My friends came over and we ate pizza, sang karaoke, and made silly videos—mockumentaries of our lives as rock stars.
All day Elise had kept saying, “You’ll probably get a car for your birthday. When parents only have one kid, they always buy expensive presents.”
But Mom and Dad gave me a new iPod. As I opened it, Dad said, “This is really a present for us. Now we don’t have to listen to that awful music of yours.”
My cake, however, was in the shape of a car. Mom handed me a knife and said, “You can destroy this one. But if you so much as put a scratch on mine, you’ll be walking until you’re eighteen.”