“Glue!”
“Then let’s stick together and play some football!”
And with that Alex led the kickoff team out onto the field where the referee was waiting for him, tucking his yellow flag back into his belt.
“So was it worth it, son, was it worth fifteen yards?”
Alex turned toward Tom Banks, now cradling the game ball in his lap.
“Absolutely,” he said to the ref. “No question about it.”
2
GO, TEAM, GO!
“SO, SAMANTHA,” CARA, THE head cheerleader, said to Sam Dixon after the Wildcats had gone up seventeen to ten in the second quarter, “you make up your mind yet?”
“Yes, call me Sam.”
Cara rolled her eyes. “That’s a boy’s name.”
“It’s been a boy’s name for the whole twelve years we’ve been in school together,” Sam told her. “And it’s what you’ve always called me until, like, yesterday.”
Cara rolled her eyes again. “Really? Fine. Whatever. Just tell me if you’re going to help us out or not.”
Sam was spared an answer when the upcoming kickoff forced Cara back to the rest of her squad.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she yelled over her shoulder above the cheering crowd, smiling. “I know you won’t disappoint the CatPack. We’re your friends.”
Sam lifted her backpack from the concrete and laid it on the bleacher seat next to her in the very front row. Earlier in the day, Cara had stuffed Monday’s AP bio exam, pilfered over the Internet somehow, into one of the backpack’s side pockets after a request, more of a demand, that Sam provide the answers over the weekend. The cheer squad liked calling themselves the “CatPack.” But Sam preferred to think of them, less affectionately, as “Cara and her Clones.” And now they wanted to be spared the bother of studying for a test none of them stood any chance at all of acing, maybe not even passing. They didn’t even belong in AP bio and Sam had no idea how they’d managed to qualify, wanted to tell Cara maybe the CatPack should just transfer into a different class.
But she hadn’t and now the test for which Sam was supposed to provide the answers made a slight bulge in that side pocket of her backpack, overstuffed to the point of being stretched at the seams.
You make up your mind yet?
The truth was she hadn’t, and Sam turned back to the game to distract herself. She understood the concept of football. She just wasn’t sure that she liked the game. It was everyone trying to get the ball over the goal line—and willing to crunch, bang, and shove one another to do so.
But Alex played football, and while Cara (of course) was dating Alex, it didn’t stop Sam from admiring him from a distance. In Sam’s code of honor—perhaps a foolish one at times—friends didn’t betray friends. In this group, she’d seen a lot of cheating and lying, and she kept her mouth shut when someone had said something in confidence. She wasn’t sure that paid, really.
Sam was sitting down low in the stands, in the closest seats to the field, the only reserved ones, because Cara had secured the ticket for her. A nice gesture, Sam thought, until Cara had stuck the stolen test into her backpack along with the ticket.
“We’re counting on you, girl.” Cara winked and bounced off with her tumbling hair glimmering over her shoulders in her prissy cheer uniform.
Sam hadn’t had any intentions at all of going to the school’s first playoff game in fifteen years, but now she had a ticket and, well, her own reasons for going. All of which were spelled A-L-E-X.
The thing was, Sam liked being friends with Cara, even though they weren’t friends anymore, not really. Sam holding on to what they used to have because some part of her still craved it, and Cara holding on for reasons akin to the test now stuffed in Sam’s backpack to claim her expert scientific eye. That must’ve been the main reason Cara seemed so happy when Sam landed the internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center, home to the Astrobiology Institute, located down in Silicon Valley. She should’ve just said she wasn’t about to answer the exam questions ahead of time and chance being caught as a cheater herself. Risk maybe her whole future, because she didn’t want to be the outcast she often felt like, because she was afraid of running afoul of Cara and the Clones, who could make her life a living high school hell.
Well, screw the CatPack.
Easier said than done, of course. The school belonged to this group, who loved parading about in their clingy uniforms, the halls lacking only red carpets rolled out ahead of their strut.
Yeah, screw them.
The cheer ended and Sam watched Cara shoot her a look that stopped just short of a smile, more a warning than a glance. Help us or else. Sam always helped because she didn’t want to find out what “or else” entailed.