"Ya'll Don't Know Me": How I Became a Cheerleader

Despite having the world's most encouraging parents, I have always been most inspired when people tell me that I'd be terrible at something. The most unfortunate turn of events to precipitate from such a statement was the saga of how I became a cheerleader in high school. I hate it when people describe what kind of person they were in high school so I'll try my hardest to refrain - we all know that you are editing reality so don't try. But one thing of which I can assure you with complete certainty is that I was not at all the type of person that should have become a cheerleader. I was not needlessly happy, I woke up at noon on most days and school spirit was only celebrated when I could dress up as something hilarious at school or show up profoundly drunk or stoned to football games. Spirit assemblies were only good excuses to get out of class. And on top of that, I had no idea what the rules of football were. Cheerleading (the computer is telling me that this is not a real word and I tend to agree) was not my shit... at least it shouldn't have been.

I hung out with two different groups of people, generally. First, there was the type who were apt to become cheerleaders and seemed to like me anyway. Then there were my friends Tom and Julia. Thy were, and still are, the type of people who like music that you have never hard of. They dress impeccably everywhere they go and have never seen a Will Ferrell movie. While the rest of us were listening to Ja Rule and Aaron Carter and drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade like water, they were busying themselves with seeing people like Pearl Jam and Radiohead live and drinking Bombay Sapphire. We ate lunch together every day in the Spanish portable with a girl who, for some reason, thought that we liked her. Her name was Jacqui. She was big, she was incredibly mean, and she was generally very unpleasant. I was joking about following my friend Ellery to cheer try outs. Ellery seriously bled blue and gold during our entire tenure in high school and was definitely the cheerleading type. Jacqui pipes up and says "You'd make the world's shittiest cheerleader." Tom and Julia, knowing my "fuck you, I do what I want" nature, must have been making that certain throat slashing motion behind my back that is the international signal for "Shut up, you dumb bitch, you'll make her do it!" And I did just that.

I remember my mom, ever the optimist, telling me that I'd make a great cheerleader and that I should go for it; while my slightly more realistic father shot food out his nose laughing and gasping. "You can't be serious! Ohhh... you're funny kiddo. That's tooooo funny. Wait til your aunts hear about this..." As he wiped the laughter induced tears from his eyes and hooted loudly, I became even more determined.

I showed up for try outs every morning at 6am in my black eyeliner and snarky screen-print t-shirts and did an Oscar-worthy job of making it look like I wanted to be there - all because I had to prove stupid Jacqui wrong. The early mornings knocked Ellery out of the race within a few weeks and strangely enough it was me and her lesbian sister Essex who ended up, to my horror, making the squad. I have always been fairly certain that Essex tried out under similar circumstances to my own, but we've never discussed it. It's like 'Nam to us. Her reaction to seeing her name on the roster must have been similar to mine "Oh shit... they actually thought we were serious." But ever the determined, snot-nosed little brats that we still are, we decided to see it though cheer camp.

Incidentally, and not in the way you'd imagine, cheer camp was host to one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. Our bus was halted half-way through the trip and we were informed that someone left a bag back at the place the bus picked us up and we had to wait for someone's mom to catch up with us and deliver the bag. (I'm pretty sure you can see where this is going.) I happily joined in with everyone else who was clowning on whoever it was whose mom had to come rescue them... and just then, my mom jogged up along side the bus to deliver my retainer case... I love my mom and she is pretty much wicked awesome, but I could have died seeing her that day... because I was of course, running my mouth the loudest speculating about what kind of loser needs their mom to run out their luggage to the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere.

My reward for not dying of embarrassment, heat exhaustion and general annoyance with chanting was a full week of "cheerobics" at 6am every god-forsaken morning in the sweltering central-Washington summer and systematically dropping every girl in our squad on her head during pyramids. At 135 pounds I was one of the two largest girls on the squad and was politely passed over as a choice to participate in the "flying" layer of these Clinics in Abject Failure. After sharing bunks with most of these girls, I wanted to feel bad about their inevitable concussions at my own hands, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I was starving, sunburnt, overstimulated and completely out of my element. I feared that this was actually a glimpse of Hell and it kept me from committing constipation-induced homicide, in which I would brain everyone in my sight. That wasn't worth suffering this shit again.

My reward for surviving THAT was of course more summer practices. These were at least more entertaining because my boyfriend would come pick me up. He was 15 and had prison tattoos. He was just the "fuck you" I needed to separate me from the pack. "I'm not like YOU people with your jock boyfriends... MY boyfriend has been to juvie and knows how to make a bong out of an apple. Fuuuuuuck you guys." This was but a small consolation when sports season started and I had to actually get legit.

We performed during games and assemblies. Everyone else saw these events as a chance to prove to people that our routines didn't actually look like 3-minute long games of grab-ass set to music like "I Like It When You Call Me Big Papa" by Notorious BIG. I'm not kidding. You don't know how much I wish that I was. We had PRACTICED. We were DEDICATED. We had spirit... yes we did... It was always a hot load of fresh Fail. We were terrible. It didn't help that Essex and I were on JV, which was basically the worst of the worst. Had I actually cared, I might have wanted to go home and drink bleach, but luckily once basketball season started, the tides were starting to turn. I was having trouble keeping up the charade. Morning practices made my soul bend toward the violent. The dark twisted corners of my mind where all my terrible thoughts go to live was becoming my mental playhouse. I didn't have my super-ironic boyfriend anymore. The football players actually started to look attractive to me. And worst of all, Varsity was exercising what little authority they had to point out what a bunch of idiots we looked like. I was about to get benched for not showing up to practices.

Here's how that "high school hindsight" would like you to believe my last practice as a cheerleader went down: I'd had enough of those varsity clowns and turned into a wolverine in the middle of practice. Yeah, a real fucking wolverine. In my pom-pom fueled rage I was somehow able to bellow through my pointed, blood soaked teeth that I was quitting this bitch and that every one of those fucking assholes could eat my shit and die in a fiery inferno. I then ate them all, went to their houses and ate all their pets and then shat them out in their lockers. But in the end, I just threw down my pompoms, stormed out of the gym, and cried some of those really desperate angry tears that you cry when a fat, ugly, mean girl was right about you in the first place.

Later that day, I won an award for passing all 4 parts of the WASL test and I did it in my cheer uniform. I was the only person up there in a cheer uniform and it made me feel vindicated. "Yeeeah... this academic award right here... that's why I can't be a cheerleader. I'm too SMART." I didn't look back. I didn't go to any more assemblies or games that year and I let my boyfriends brother wear my cheer uniform for spirit day. This was a huge no-no, but they had no power over me now, those empty shells of whore. HAAAAAAHHAHA!

However there were people on the squad, that I'm glad to still know, who can talk shit with me. There is of course Essex who is available to reminisce with me when she's not busy convincing girls who play roller derby to let her touch their boobs. There's Jill, my fellow "pyramid bottom" with the Invader Zim tattoo that seemed like as much of an outsider as I did. And Kristen, who I usually forget was a cheerleader because she's a decent person who has a job and waited until she was 24 to have a baby.

It was worth it, however, just to see the look of shock on people's faces when I tell them I was a cheerleader in high school. I take it as a compliment. I can watch them paint a little picture of high school Cait as a blonde, peppy team player with an eating disorder that has since been cured and then some. "Wow," they must think, "she really seems to have become grown up and normal against all odds!" But I get even more satisfaction from knowing that I was the same cynical bitch then that I am now... just with more determination and a better tolerance for the fake broads in short skirts. And a better stomach for "Devil-Hour:30" physical activity. If someone tried to wake me up at 6am these days to do anything but pee I would probably find a way to place a pox upon their entire family.

Now I just wish that Jacqui would have told me I would make a shitty pediatrician or astronaut or something...