Night of the Pompon, page 6
“Cheerleaders?” I repeated suspiciously. “I don’t remember that last one from our ancient mythology unit.”
Tina waved that aside. “Well, Jendra, you’re only in seventh grade,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders and a roll of her eyes. “Nothing you’ve learned up to this point is really true.”
“Okay,” barked Jamey Fitzhughston, holding up a brown paper bag, “we’ve wasted enough time. Let’s get started. Today we’re going to pray for poor old Chrystal, while we perform a ceremony to send her uniform into another dimension.” She pulled the hideous coyote suit out of the bag, unlocked the glass case, and set the suit on the shelf next to the pompon.
“You don’t mind about the uniform, do you, Jendra?” asked Tina innocently. “We’ll have to get you another one or something. But the secret rites must be heeded.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I agreed even though I had no clue where she was coming from with that. I’m not real big on secret rites, you know? “Listen, can I leave?” I knew they wouldn’t like that, but I didn’t want to stick around and play the virgin sacrifice.
“Not yet,” Tina said. “If you’re really scared of Athena, you can wait on the raft while we finish the ceremony.”
“Okay,” I said. I don’t know if she expected me to do that or not, but that’s what I did. It only took them a few minutes to finish, and when they did, Tina rejoined me on the boat.
“You can come back inside now,” she said, tugging on my sleeve. “It’s time for your initiation.”
“Oh, great,” I groaned. I sort of had to follow her. I really didn’t have much choice.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked, standing expectantly in front of “Athena.” The mascot uniform, I noticed, had disappeared.
“Take off all your clothes,” Lien Hua told me immediately. “And then hop around in a circle three times, while you sing the Barney song!”
“What?” I exclaimed. That didn’t sound like much of a secret ceremony to me.
“Lien Hua!” Jamey whined, slapping her. Lien Hua was lying on the floor giggling wildly, so I kind of figured she hadn’t been serious.
“Just ignore her, Jendra,” Tina assured me. “Really, it’s much, much simpler than that. All you have to do is cut off a lock of your hair and place it next to the pompon.”
“What?” I exclaimed again. But nobody slapped Tina, and she didn’t start giggling or anything, so I figured she had been serious.
“But why do I have to do that?” I demanded.
“Because,” Tina said, making it sound as simple as slice and bake, “you’re the new mascot. You and Chrystal both wore the coyote costume, and now you must bond in spirit by merging cells in another realm.”
“What?” I shrieked. I didn’t particularly want to bond with anybody in spirit. Especially not with somebody who had just been spirited away to Australia.
“Jendra, just put your hair on the shelf!” Tina snapped with a heavy sigh, like I really tried her patience a lot or something. As if all that was just business as usual to me.
“I don’t have anything to cut it with,” I said.
“That’s okay,” said Tina. “Here.” And at that instant both Jamey and Lien Hua whipped out a pair of scissors and started hacking away at my hair.
“Aaah!” I screeched.
“Oh, sorry,” said Lien Hua. “I guess I cut a little too much.”
“Me, too,” admitted Jamey. I wondered if she’d done it on purpose.
In horror I felt my head. Not only was my hair completely uneven now, I also had a huge bald spot right in the center of my scalp.
“Sorry,” said Lien Hua.
“You moron,” Tina scolded. “Now we’re going to have to fix her hair.”
“I hope so,” I said.
Tina was watching me expectantly, so I took a handful of hair over and set it inside the case. I wondered if something phenomenal was going to happen next, but nothing did.
“Jamey and the others can finish up here,” Tina said, grabbing my hand. “I’ll take you back up the stairs now for punch and cookies.”
“Punch and cookies?” I repeated slowly. I had seen a lot of freaky, freaky stuff that day, and as much as I liked Chips Ahoy, I really didn’t think they would be much of a cure-all. And I didn’t want any punch, either.
Basically, I just wanted to go home.
12
The Cheerleaders’ Conclave
When we got upstairs, Tina tried to fix my hair, but it didn’t do a lot of good. I still ended up looking like a French poodle gone mad, especially after she stuck a stupid little bow in my hair to cover up the bald spot.
Tina wouldn’t let me leave until I had at least tried the punch and cookies. “Sit down, Jendra,” said Tina, “and breathe, for heaven’s sake.”
They did have a very nice dining area, I’ll give them that. We all sat around a polished mahogany table, and Lien Hua went into the kitchen and brought back a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. I wondered how they baked them without an oven. It also surprised me that since Tina hardly ate any food at lunch, she did eat chocolate-chip cookies and drink peach-flavored Crystal Lite, which was what we were drinking. In honor of Chrystal, I guess.
“So, was that all there was to my initiation?” I asked hopefully.
“Pretty much,” Tina said and handed me a napkin. “You’ve got chocolate on your nose,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I’ve also got a dog bow in my hair,” I reminded her.
“Now that the ceremony is completed, Jendra,” said Jamey Fitzhughston, “you’re officially one of us.”
“One of whom?” I asked.
Tina tipped her glass and told me, “You’re officially a member of the cheerleaders’ conclave.”
“The what?”
“You know, our conclave,” Lien Hua explained, “like a secret council or something. Kind of like student council, but . . . not. Get it?”
“Sure,” I said, taking a sip of my drink and feeling uneasy. “So, besides worshipping some pompon named Athena, what do we do at the cheerleaders’ conclave?”
“Whatever we want,” Tina told me, demurely munching a cookie. “Mainly, we decide what we’ll allow to go on at school and what we’ll forbid.”
“You have that kind of power?” I asked in surprise.
“Of course,” Tina said.
“Tina has a lot of influence over Mr. Talbert,” Jamey Fitzhughston informed me, “so he has to do whatever she tells him . . . or else.”
That sounded ominous. “So, you probably told him not to say anything about Chrystal’s disappearance, huh?” I guessed. I had been wondering why an announcement hadn’t been made to the student body.
“Exactly,” Tina said. “We don’t want word to get out too quickly. The basketball boys have got to be behind the whole thing. I’m sure Lien Hua told you how they were harassing Chrystal. One of them must have found out about our secret ceremonies to Athena and Ares. Religious prejudice is an ugly thing, Jendra. It turns ordinary people into monsters.”
“Ares?” I repeated in confusion. Then I said, “Wait a minute. Let me guess. That’s the name of the other pompon.”
Tina nodded, and Jamey Fitzhughston added, “Named for the Greek god of war.”
“So where is this Ares?” I wondered. “Does he have his own pompon case, or what?”
A hush fell over the room, and I got the feeling that I’d said the wrong thing.
Finally Tina pulled out a tiny piece of pompon and informed me gravely, “This is all that’s left of him.”
“Wait a minute!” I cried in recognition. “That’s the piece of pompon I found stuck to the bottom of Mr. Talbert’s shoe. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jamey Fitzhughston cut in sharply. Sounding very menacing, she concluded, “Somehow the basketball boys must have stolen the pompon and then destroyed it because it’s completely gone. It’s nowhere. You can’t trust them. You can’t trust any of them. They’re out to get us, and now that you’re one of us, they’re out to get you, too.”
“Me?” I squeaked in terror.
“You will help us, won’t you, Jendra?” Tina said. She sounded a little unsure of herself, but even I had sense enough to know that it was probably a big act. “Without you we’ll be doomed.”
“Doomed?” That sounded eerie. “Why?”
“Because if our squad doesn’t have a mascot,” Lien Hua chirped, “we won’t be able to participate in the Pompon Follies.”
Somehow, that was anticlimactic.
“What’s the Pompon Follies?” I wondered.
“Only the biggest cheerleading competition in the entire universe,” Jamey Fitzhughston said. She added darkly, “And this year we’re going to win.”
“Athena will give us the power,” noted Vanessa, one of the girls who hardly ever talked. As I stared into her gray eyes, she added, “You want to be part of our victory, don’t you?”
Just then Tina’s gray eyes flashed in the lamplight, and I suddenly became aware of something. “Hey! All of you guys have gray eyes!”
“You finally noticed,” said Tina. “They’re contacts. Our sacred eye gear. I’ll pick you up a pair before school tomorrow. You can hardly even feel them.”
“But I don’t need contacts,” I protested.
“Of course you do,” said Lien Hua. “Your eyes are blue, which is close, but no cigar.”
“So,” I said. “Now that I’m a member of your conclave and everything, what happens? I mean, do I get some kind of mystical power or something?”
“Yes,” Tina told me. “As a matter of fact, you do. We all have a special gift, thanks to the goddess gray-eyed.”
Mine is telepathy! thought Lien Hua. And Jamey Fitzhughston can breach the interdimensional gap!
“Will you cut that out!” I complained.
“Is she communicating telepathically again?” Tina asked with a sigh. “Lien Hua can be so annoying when she does that. And I get sick of seeing her smiling all the time, too. That charges her powers, you know. The movement of her facial muscles releases a special chemical into her brain. If I felt like it, I could use telepathy, too. But I can’t stand smiling so much.”
“What about everybody else?” I asked.
“Deidre has the gift of prophecy,” said Tina. “Vanessa can hypnotize people, especially teachers. Amber can talk to birds, and LaKaisha can make herself invisible. Both Jennifers can fly but only during daylight. Kyla and Erica can see into the sixth dimension but only after dark. Mitzi can zap stuff with her eyes, and Leigh can do those really high kind of kicks where you do the Chinese splits at the end.”
“Hey, yeah,” I said, “I was wondering how you did those.”
“It’s nothing,” said Leigh modestly. “Do you want another cookie? Mitzi can always zap some more dough with her eyes.”
“No, thanks,” I said, “but what about Tina? What’s her special gift?”
“Tina has all gifts,” said Jamey Fitzhughston mysteriously.
She can do whatever she wants, added Lien Hua. Then she realized she was doing it again, so she wrinkled her nose and went, “Oh, sorry!”
“So what’s my gift?”
The cheerleaders all stared at me for a minute. Then they stood up and got in a big huddle and whispered, so I couldn’t hear them.
Finally Tina pulled back and informed me with a smile. “Jendra, we have decided to give you the gift of dance.”
“Dance?” I repeated.
“Right,” she said. “Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t dance? Well”—she fixed her gray eyes on mine and finished—“now you can.”
13
More Bad News
“What’s with your hair, Jendra? You look like a poodle.” That was the first thing Leah said to me Friday morning in algebra.
I just shrugged. “I got a haircut,” I said. “Kind of unexpectedly. I wanted to look like Jennifer Aniston. This is the way she’s wearing her hair now.”
Leah rolled her eyes and batted her eyelashes a few times for good measure. “Sure,” she said. “Right.”
“It’s true,” I lied. “I read it in Seventeen.” But, fortunately, Leah wasn’t interested in my hair anymore.
“Jendra, I’m worried about Mrs. O’Donnahee,” she said. “She hasn’t been to school for two days now, and it’s not like her to be absent.”
“Maybe she’s sick,” I said.
“Jen, she never gets sick.”
I shrugged. I wished Leah would shut up. I had a lot on my mind. “Well,” I said, “maybe one of her kids is sick.”
“Jendra, she doesn’t have any kids.”
I tried again. I like to keep Leah happy, and she doesn’t make it very easy. “Okay. Then maybe her dog is sick.”
“Her dog? Jen, she doesn’t have a dog.”
“Well, fine,” I snapped. “Maybe she bought a dog and then it got sick, okay? Gosh, Leah, how in the heck am I supposed to know? I’m just guessing here.”
Just then an office aide slipped into the room. When I looked up, I noticed that it was Lien Hua.
Hi, Jendra, she said as she continued to smile. Can you come here a minute?
“Stop doing that!” I snapped.
“Stop doing what?” Leah whined. “Jendra, you are acting really weird today.”
I looked to see what Leah was doing. “Stop writing your name on your paper,” I said, trying to sound irritated. “I hate it when you do that.”
“What?”
“Excuse me,” I told her, heading for the door in a hurry. As soon as I got there, Lien Hua grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the hall.
“Bad news,” she said aloud. “Mr. Talbert is dead.”
14
Gray Eyes
I followed Lien Hua to the principal’s office. “So what are we doing now?” I asked. “Calling the police?”
“Nah,” Lien Hua said, sticking out her tongue for some reason. “Tina doesn’t like the police to get involved. We’ll probably handle it ourselves.”
“Ourselves?” I squeaked. “What do you mean—handle it? Handle what? Did he just die? Did he die here at school?”
“I think so,” Lien Hua said coolly, like it was no big deal at all. “We can handle it, though. We always have before.”
“Before?” I was sort of shocked.
“Yeah,” she said, continuing to smile. “Remember when the band director ran off to Wyoming last year?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
Lien Hua shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said with a knowing wink. “Wyoming? I don’t think so. Maybe the cemetery in Wyoming,” she said, yanking me into the rest room.
“What are we doing in here?” I asked as she practically threw me against the sink.
Lien Hua continued to smile. She seemed really happy for some reason, despite the fact that Mr. Talbert was mysteriously dead. “Here,” she said. “We got you a present.” She reached into her chain-mail purse and pulled out a tiny little box. I knew right away it had to be my gray contacts.
“Put them on,” Lien Hua urged. “They’ll look great on you.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I humored her anyway. I thought that was best. Actually, since my eyes are already blue, the gray contacts didn’t make a real huge difference. I just looked sort of washed out, that’s all, like in a bad picture.
“Oh, you look great!” Lien Hua chirped in delight, clapping her hands and jumping up and down. “Okay. Now we have to get to the office. Tina’s waiting for us.”
15
Emery Board of Doom
As a matter of fact, Tina was waiting for us. And under the circumstances she seemed relatively calm.
“I suppose Lien Hua told you about Mr. Talbert,” she said, running an emery board across a perfectly manicured nail. “By the way, those gray contacts look great on you.”
“How did Mr. Talbert die?” I asked, feeling nervous.
“The light above his desk fell on his head,” Tina told me.
I winced in horror. “What?” I wailed. “Oh, no! That’s terrible. How on earth did something like that happen?”
Tina shrugged. “Beats me,” she said with a laugh. “You know the architecture in these new buildings. It’s so shoddy!” Like she was trying to prove it, she leaned against Mr. Talbert’s office door, and it fell over with a huge bang. I looked at the hinges and saw that they had snapped in half.
“It was probably built in the sixties,” Lien Hua said with a casual smile. “All the doors at my house do the same thing.”
“They do?” I said flatly. That sounded weird to me.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think it’s because they’re made of aluminum instead of steel. Right, Tina?”
“Most likely,” she agreed.
Suddenly Mrs. Ellis, one of the secretaries in the office, yelled, “Is everything okay back there, sir?”
“Of course,” Tina called sweetly in a deep masculine voice, that didn’t sound like it could possibly have come out of her body. In fact, she sounded exactly like Mr. Talbert. I was stunned.
“How did you do that?” I squeaked.
“Tina has all gifts,” Lien Hua reminded me.
“It’s great fun,” Tina said with a laugh. “I used to make tons of money at summer camp doing impressions of the counselors.”
Suddenly, though, things weren’t so funny. I turned and saw that Mrs. Ellis had gotten up from her desk and was now making her way toward Mr. Talbert’s door.
“Oh, no!” I shrieked, pointing at her. “Look!”
“Oh, her?” said Tina, not batting an eyelash. I watched in amazement as she stuck out her emery board and pointed it at Mrs. Ellis. A green and black zigzag, like skinny lightning, shot out of the end of the emery board and zapped poor old Mrs. Ellis right between the eyes. She fell down and started twitching, as if she had been struck by lightning or eaten the cafeteria meat loaf or something.
“Mrs. Ellis!” I cried in horror, dropping to my knees. “Tina, what did you do to her?”
