Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2020-10-31T05:00:00+00:00

Halftime was at once an inevitability and a shock. We had just finished cheering for a touchdown scored by our team when the whistle blew and the players started filing back to their locker rooms, leaving the field empty. I turned, ready to put my pom-poms aside, only to whirl and gawp as the marching band appeared, starting to play a loud and only slightly cacophonous version of a song I’d never heard before.

A hand touched my elbow. I turned to see Jude standing there, looking amused. “Welcome to halftime,” she said. “You’re not ready to fly with us. Are you hungry? I could give you money to go buy yourself a hot dog.”

She was giving me an excuse to get off the field before I had to watch the rest of my team perform a routine I couldn’t be a part of. I was grateful for that, even as a small voice—not the one that knew things; this was the voice of my own selfishness, my own desires—whispered that she wouldn’t have needed to get rid of me if she had just been willing to let me perform with my team like she should have. The rest of my mind was more sensible, and noted that right now, I was better at falling than I was at flying. I didn’t even manage “falling with style” most of the time. I just plummeted, and woe betide whoever was supposed to be my spotter.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Thank you, though. I just want to watch and see what you all do during an actual game.”

“You’ll be out there with us soon,” she said, a polite lie that we both let pass without comment. The football season was almost over—the rains would shut it down soon enough—and no matter how much I practiced, I wasn’t going to be good enough to compete with the Pumpkins for a long time. They had years of working together. I had weeks of existing at all. It was a catch-up that I was never going to accomplish, but I could sure as hell try.

“Okay,” I said, and smiled. She smiled back. Then she was gone, bounding away to start herding the other Pumpkins toward the field, like the world’s most vividly colored Border collie.

I watched her go, still smiling, until I was sure no one was looking at me. Then I turned and walked back to the bench that was intended for our use between plays, when we stopped to adjust our socks and retie our shoes, and—in Laurie’s case—flirt with the people sitting in the front row of the stands. Colleen had assured me that it wasn’t unusual for one or more cheerleaders to sit out the halftime show.

“We get hurt a lot,” she’d said, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “Girls get dropped, or they land wrong, or there are evil scarecrows stalking in the strawberry fields. Normal stuff. Anyway, no one will look at you funny for sitting it out, they’ll just figure you’re injured.

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