Michelle Krys: Hexed

Exactly twelve minutes into cheerleading practice, and I already wish I were dead.

Sweat collects along my hairline. Blood fills my head, and a hammering pulse pounds in my neck. I can’t be the first to fall, but my arms quiver under the weight of my body until, finally, they buckle and I collapse onto the cold blue mat of the school’s gymnasium.

“What the hell was that, Indie? My grandma could do a better handstand.” Bianca Cavanaugh, Fairfield High’s resident slave-driver cheer captain (and my best friend), marches up to me with her hands on her hips.

Julia tosses her peroxide-blond head back and laughs. So of course the rest of the squad erupts into giggles. Even Thea, the little Chinese girl Bianca treats like crap because she can barely speak English and only keeps on the team because she weighs ten pounds and makes a great flier. Bunch of traitors.

Gritting my teeth, I push myself up onto my elbows. Most people would assume that the coach not being able to make it to practice would mean we’d get to slack off for an hour and a half. Nope. When Coach Jenkins is absent (read: every second practice, due to her various commitments to French manicures and online dating), Bianca uses her power to practice medieval torture methods on the squad. Which, okay, I’ll admit it, didn’t bother me too much until she turned on me too—coincidentally around the same time I started dating Devon.

“Well?” Bianca says. “What do you have to say for yourself?” She shifts her weight to her other foot.

I almost spit out my standard apology. Almost. “I guess I just fail to see the point of a two-minute handstand, unless your plan is to bore the opposition to death.” Titters from the squad bolster my confidence. “And if Granny is so much better than me, why not ask her to join the squad?”

Bianca takes one step closer and stares down her ski-slope nose at me, eyes narrowed to slits. A casual observer might call it a death stare, but after nine years of friendship I know better; it’s an “embarrass me in front of the squad again and you’ll come to regret the day you were born” stare. Big difference. Still, I decide to back off.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll try not to suck so much next time.”

Bianca cocks her head.

I sigh. “And your grandma’s actually aging really well. I bet she’d look hot in spankies.”

Bianca rolls her eyes, then twirls on her heels to face the rest of the squad. “The point of a two-minute handstand isn’t to bore the opposition to death or even to flash them our awesome asses. It’s to improve our balance and stability.” She claps her hands so hard a few girls startle. “Now get on your feet, losers. Three minutes this time.” And with a pointed look at me she adds, “That includes you, Blackwood.”

Exactly fourteen minutes into practice and I decide I’d rather Bianca were dead. I get through the rest of practice by imagining thirty-two ways I’d like to kill her.

When the clock strikes five and the basketball team charges into the gym to boot us out, the break in tension is practically palpable. The squad stops just short of celebrating, in light of the fact that Bianca hates complainers, and limps off toward the locker room for scalding-hot showers. It's only September. It's going to be a long year.

“Hey, bitches, I need help taking these mats back,” Bianca says. By “help” she means do it for her.

Pretending not to hear her, I hightail it to the locker room, strip out of my practice T-shirt and shorts, and escape into the first shower stall available.

I turn the tap to the hottest temperature possible and let the burning spray massage the tense muscles in my neck, watching the water circle the drain. I’m in love with this shower. I’d like to make out with this shower. If I could move into this shower, with its gloriously strong water pressure and hell-hot spray, I would. But Mom will kill me if I’m late for work again.

I turn off the tap and reach for the towel hanging on the hook on the other side of the curtain.

Bianca whips the curtain open. “ ’Bout time.”

“Mind?” I scramble to cover myself with the towel.

“Relax. No one cares what your tits look like. Right, girls?”

“Right,” twenty girls confirm in unison. Crazy how it can appear as if they’re going about their own business—toweling off, getting dressed, fighting for a spot in front of the mirror to apply their makeup and blow-dry their hair—but really be watching every move Bianca makes.

Bianca perches on the bench outside my stall and starts passing a brush through her thick blond hair. “So listen, sorry if I was a little hard on you today.”

I snort. “A little?”

“Okay, so a lot.” She leans toward me and lowers her voice. “But I kind of have to make an example out of you, you know? I can’t have the other girls thinking I’m going easy on you or they’ll never respect me when Jenkins is away. I thought you’d understand.”

I don’t care if it sort of makes sense and we’d probably suck a lot of ass if it weren’t for Bianca going extra hard on us in place of our absentee coach—I consider her paddle brush as Way #33 to kill her.

“So,” she continues, “did you hear everyone’s going to In-N-Out Burger?”

“Yeah, I heard something about that.” I tighten the towel around my chest and move past her, wet feet slapping against the gritty tiles. I can guess where this is going.

She follows me. “Devon’s coming too.”

Ding, ding, ding!

Bianca leans against the locker next to mine and pretends to check her hair for split ends while I pretend to be really interested in the contents of my bag, because I just don’t know what to do when she gets like this. I thought she’d be over Devon by now. We’ve been best friends since the first grade, and he’s just some guy. Some sickeningly hot, captain-of-the-football-team guy.

But if I’m being honest, there was friction between us before Devon ever came along. Things got a little weird around the time Bianca became morbidly obsessed with popularity and dragged me along on her mission to become high school royalty.

Supposedly it’s normal; Mom says friends can drift apart as they get older, as their interests change and their personalities develop.

This is bullshit, of course. Bianca’s the person who pushed Stacey Miller in the first grade after she told me my hair was ugly, and then offered me half of her banana sandwich. She was there for me when Grandma died when I was eight and I thought the world was ending. She’s the girl who dressed up in fur hats and muffs with me when we were eleven and traipsed around the mall pretending to be my Russian sister. Who gave me the giant collage of pictures of us for my fifteenth birthday last year, a collage that was (and still is) so awesome it had me both spitting Coke out of my nose and tearing up. We’ll always be best friends. This is just a little rough patch. And since she shuts down any attempt to talk about it and won’t admit there’s even a problem, I’m left with Door #3, which is to ride it out until she gets whatever this is out of her system.

Still. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“What about Sebastian?” I ask. “He going too?” Sebastian is a friend of Bianca’s older brother who she’s had a mambo crush on since forever. He’s got an acne problem (as far as I can tell from the pictures), but he’s older and plays lacrosse, so I guess that makes him awesome. He’s her date for homecoming.

She dismisses my comment with a wave. “Like he wants to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers.”