Puddin'(69)

The moment is interrupted by the same sports-jam songs they play for the football and basketball rallies. They start up as the athletic director, Coach Culver, announces each of the girls one by one. I’d heard that after the shit list went public, a few were called in to the office for select questionable things, but the most anyone got was a slap on the wrist. With no real proof, the list is only hearsay.

Today, the girls are in what we call our Lone Star outfits. White skirt with a matching jacket and gold trim. The whole look is topped off with white dance boots. It’s the uniform we use for all the various patriotic holiday parades we march in and for annual pictures. My mom and I both have portraits hanging in the upstairs hallway of us sitting in the splits on the football field, twenty years apart, in the same uniform.

“Aaaaaaand of course we can’t forget our assistant and future captain for next year, Melissa Gutierrez!”

Melissa waves to the crowd, focusing in on me.

I flash her the finger, but she’s unfazed.

But then I see Bryce walk in with his ever-faithful entourage of assholes, and that is a run-in I am definitely not looking forward to.

I stand up. Yup. Totally cannot do this. Mama’s goodwill be damned.

Rather than squeezing my way through the crowd, I jump the few feet off the side of the bleachers. My cowboy boots (if I have to attend this thing, I might as well wear stomping-around shoes) make a loud smacking sound just as Coach Culver announces Sam, but I barely notice because I have sufficiently startled the large, burly guy who was pacing beneath the bleachers and just so happens to be Mitch Lewis.

“Uh, did you just fall from the sky?” he asks in a bit of a daze.

“Definitely,” I say, stepping under the bleachers.

Music—music I’d recognize anywhere—starts up, and I peer between random feet to catch a glimpse of the dance team performing the routine they’re taking to State. The routine I worked tirelessly on all summer with Sam and Melissa.

“Of course the dance team would have to perform at their own pep rally. Don’t we have cheerleaders for that?” I roll my eyes. The cheerleading team. At least that’s one less thing I have to deal with now.

“Please tell me there’s beef between the Shamrocks and the cheerleading team,” says Mitch.

I laugh. “Oh, there is so much beef.”

“Is it like the Sharks and the Jets? Do y’all have dance-offs in the school parking lot at night?”

“Mitch Lewis!” I say, poking at his chest. “Did you just make a musical theater reference?”

He smiles like a cat that’s been caught. “Listen,” he says, taking a step closer to me, because this time there’s no front desk to separate us. “One can have an appreciation for musical theater while also playing defensive tackle for the school football team.”

“Well, that’s enlightening,” I say.

“And to be honest,” he adds, “you don’t exactly strike me as a West Side Story kind of girl.”

“Well, I’m not, but my mama is.”

“I think our moms might get along,” he says.

Outside the bleachers, the dance team is finishing up their routine, and now a few guys from a couple of the different boys’ teams have dressed up in some very poorly assembled costumes to do their own take on the Shamrocks’ routine. This is so demeaning.

“So what are you hiding from down here?” I ask.

“Who says I’m hiding?”

I give him a knowing look. “You don’t just chill under the bleachers during a pep rally for no reason. Trust me,” I tell him. “I would know.”

“So I guess we’re both hiding,” he says.

“Looks like it.”

“You could say my friends and I aren’t seeing eye to eye.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “How come?”

“I guess you could say I took your advice.”

This pleases me. “Did you now? You found some new friends?”

“Well, sort of. I don’t know. Patrick did some asshole thing—no different than all the asshole things he’s done every day since the day we met. So I told him it was an asshole thing and that doing it makes him an asshole.”

I whistle. “I can’t imagine that went over very well.”

He nods. “Hence the bleachers. Sometimes I feel bad, ya know, that it’s taken me so long to just tell the guy he’s a dick. I’ve known that guy since we were in diapers.”

“You can’t expect the younger version of you to know who your friends are going to be. People change. Look at Bryce. He wasn’t always a dick.”

“Uhhh.” Mitch grimaces. “He kinda was.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Really?” I ask. “You think?”

Mitch sighs. “Callie Reyes, blinded by love.”

“Well, I was sort of a dick, too. Still kind of am.”

Mitch doesn’t say anything. I wasn’t expecting him to completely refute me, but come on, man. “Who knows?” He shrugs. “Maybe Patrick will come around.”

“Or maybe he won’t,” I say.

“Well, if that’s the case, don’t forget you’re the one who told me to dump my only friends in this place.”