The Cheerleaders(58)

“Most people assume she’s my sister.” Ginny hikes her messenger bag up her shoulder. “She was twenty-one when she had me.”

I restrain myself from needling her for more information about her family, about her dad. I look over at her as we head through the side gym door; Coach left it propped open for us. Ginny is looking down at her hands, rubbing at the scar on her knuckle.

Where did she get it? Who is she, really?

Who the hell am I, for doubting her just because her father drove a pickup truck?

The mood in the gym is somber. One of the sophomore girls stands in front of Coach on crutches. She can’t even look at Coach as she chokes out the words: “I f-f-fell.”

A sprained ankle, obtained when the boy giving her a piggyback at a party last night dropped her. A week sitting out of practice. A lifetime, in competition prep. Coach barely looks her.

My eyes connect with Rachel’s; she’s standing in the corner, looking white in the face. I make my way toward her; she grabs me by the arms and whispers, “Alexa texted me. She just fucking woke up.”

Coach makes the rest of us pay for it. Fifty sit-ups and several laps around the gym. When Alexa rushes into the gym fifteen minutes later, everyone is shooting daggers at her. This is Coach’s MO. Punish the group for the sins of the few. Make us turn on each other.

Coach tells us to take a five-minute break. Even Rachel refuses to look at Alexa as she heads off to fill her water bottle at the fountain in the hall. While Lex practically throws herself at Coach’s feet, sputtering excuses, I look for Ginny.

She’s sitting on the bleachers, downing Gatorade. I plop down next to her, aggravating a brutal stomach cramp. “Hey.”

She swallows her gulp of Gatorade and wipes away the red it leaves on her upper lip. “Hey.”

We’re both watching Coach, standing by the speakers, arms crossed, surveying us like we’re a bunch of particularly disappointing zoo animals. Alexa is on the bench below, lacing up her shoes, despondent. I didn’t expect her conversation with Coach to be a very long one. Several feet away from Lex, the sophomore who hurt herself sits on the bleachers, her bandaged ankle propped up on the bench. Next to her, another sophomore is bent over, forearms resting on her knees, looking like she’s dry heaving.

I turn to Ginny. “Coach is going to put us all in the grave before we even get to regionals.”

She takes another sip of Gatorade. “She obviously does not understand the Geneva Conventions. We’re not responsible for their crimes.”

Ginny nods toward Alexa and the sophomore. Her deadpan elicits a nervous laugh from me. For some reason, my hands are trembling. I stick them under my thighs.

Ginny pauses, her Gatorade bottle inches from her mouth. “What is it? You’re nervous.”

Ginny told me I could ask Mike to look up her dad. But emailing Daphne about him crossed a line. I’m not sure she’ll forgive me if I tell her.

I take a breath. Opt for the half-truth. “My stepdad’s partner, Mike, called me this morning.”

Ginny glances around. Lowers her voice: “Does he know what we—”

“No, nothing like that.”

Ginny picks at the label of her Gatorade bottle. Waiting.

“He called me about your dad,” I say. “He looked him up.”

Her fingers go still. “What did he tell you?”

“Nothing.” My heartbeat quickens. “He just said he ran his information and he couldn’t find him.”

Ginny’s jaw goes rigid; I realize it sounds like I’m accusing her of lying.

Coach’s voice fills the gym. “Two more minutes!”

I’m scrambling to rephrase what I said, when down the bleachers from us, Kelsey B lets her foot drop to the bench with a thunk. “It totally hasn’t been five minutes yet.”

I wince. Watch as Coach looks at Kelsey with an eerily calm face. “Ten more laps.”

A groan ripples across the gym. Next to me, Ginny shows no indication she heard Coach. Her voice is barely above a whisper. “What else did Mike say about my dad?”

“Nothing,” I say, a little too quickly.

The pickup truck. The date he left town. I swallow. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, and I don’t get the chance to explain myself. Ginny silently gets up from the bleachers and joins the girls who have started their second round of laps. She doesn’t look at me again for the rest of practice.



* * *



—

It’s raining again, and it doesn’t stop until around ten p.m. I’m at my desk, watching the house across the street, even though I know Ethan won’t be back.

My email thread with Daphne Furman is open on my laptop, my latest message to her unanswered.

The light from the streetlamp outside blurs behind the raindrops trailing down my window. I don’t trust him. That’s what Ginny said about Ethan, more than once. She sounded convinced he was lying about what he saw outside the Berrys’ house.

Or she wanted to convince me that he was lying.

I return to the stack of files Ginny and I didn’t make it through. Mr. Brenner couldn’t describe the pickup truck, but there may have been someone else on the street who saw it and remembered the make and color.

I flip through the statements, skipping over the ones with familiar-looking handwriting. I pause at a page covered in nearly illegible script. Flip it over, in search of the accompanying typed version.