Chapter 3
ONE WEEK LATER
The Top Tier didn’t have any secrets from each other.
Really, most of our secrets were public, anyway. The girl who ran the school’s gossip site always seemed to snuff the truth out—whether on her own or from people sending in tips.
But each person in the Top Tier had something that the other students at Brentwood High were totally oblivious about—a secret that would ruin them if found out.
For Connor and Jade, their secret wasn’t just small—it was that they’d actually broken up over the summer, yet still planned to show up as the It Couple when school started. I sometimes wondered what would’ve happened if they’d stayed broken up. If optics wasn’t a word in the Top Tier vocabulary.
But that was the thing about popularity—you did things you didn’t want to just to keep up the image.
Freshman year, Ashton, Kyle, and Landon beat up a kid walking home—and then spun it so it looked like he’d jumped them.
Everyone at school bought into their sob story, and the bruised boy was deemed a violent outcast from that day on.
People even went as far to label him The Grim Reaper for being able to take on three guys at once.
Riley’s secret was that she frequently cheated on her boyfriend—a secret she was barely keeping at this point.
Reed… well. I was half convinced he was only in the Top Tier because last year’s seniors were obsessed with him.
And then there was my secret. At night when I couldn’t fall asleep, I’d think about it. During practice, when I messed up a cheer, I’d think about it. In the hallways, when my gaze found one in particular, I’d think about it.
I’d humiliated my childhood best friend, all for a spot on the cheer squad.
“I swear to God, if you don’t fix your stance, Riley, I’ll shove your pom-pom where the sun doesn’t shine.”
It wasn’t a day at cheer practice if someone didn’t threaten to shove pom-poms somewhere.
It’d been hotter today than it’d been all summer, with temps peaking in the mid-nineties.
Olivia rubbed a piece of ice from her water bottle along her neck.
Jen’s red face hinted that if she didn’t sit down soon, her body would be doing it for her.
Riley, who had missed formation for the third time now, looked on the verge of throwing in the towel. Or throwing up.
If Coach Chelsea were here, we probably would’ve called it quits a half hour ago. But since she was out of town for Labor Day weekend, and Jade, being the drill sergeant she was, refused to take the holiday off. Coach left practice up to the discretion of Jade and me.
“Is practice over, girls?” Jade’s voice reached shrill levels. “I don’t think so! Let’s go, let’s go!”
Or, really, practice was up to the discretion of Jade. There was only ever one girl who could maintain her fierce tone even when it was hot enough to melt into a puddle, and that was Jade Dyer.
I clapped my hands like I were rousing a dull crowd. “One last cheer, girls, and then we’ll break for the day.”
Everyone except for Jade groaned. Her eyes sliced to mine.
I took my spot at the opening beside her, tightening my ponytail.
The routines hadn’t changed much over the years, which made them near muscle memory now.
Though the main objective of the Brentwood Babes was to do small chants on the sidelines at games, to pump up the student section, there were routines we performed during halftime while the band played.
And we needed to nail those, because the band geeks really didn’t pull their weight in the performance department.
Despite the heat, the girls snapped to attention, and we powered through the rhythmic choreography.
“B-R-E-N-T, Bobcats bring the energy!”
On the “B,” our arms shot up in a sharp high V, fists tight, shoulders squared. Each letter was a clean motion—right diagonal, left diagonal, down to a T, then back up into the high V again—snapping with each shout like the crack of a whip.
“W-O-O-D, Bobcats bring the victory!”
The back row popped up with spirit fingers overhead while the front row sank low into a crouch.
“Fight! Win! Never back down—”
Jen, Riley, and I locked hands just as Jade stepped into our basket, and with a silent three-count, we thrust her into a trophy pose to round out the cheer.
“Blue and gold will take this town!”
My arms strained with more effort than normal, fighting to keep Jade balanced as she stuck out her arms above us. Someone wasn’t holding correctly, and if it was any judge from the puff of Riley’s cheeks, it was her.
A second later, Riley’s hand slipped on Jade’s ankle, and no amount of straining from any of us would balance her out again. Our leader dropped to the ground gracefully, but when she whirled on Riley, her gaze was filled with fire. “Are you trying to break my leg?”
“Sure, blame me and not the fact that Jen was putting in, like, zero effort.” Riley shot the other cheerleader a glare.
Jen’s round mouth morphed into a furious O. “As if!”
“I don’t know why you’re blaming each other when we’re all on the same team,” I said in a firm voice.
“Take a look at your own performance. Riley, you didn’t find your firm hold before the lift.
” I turned to the other girl. “Jen, you put your hand too close to mine. It threw the balance off. So instead of pointing fingers, maybe see where you could’ve done things differently, yeah? ”
Neither girl made eye contact. Jade watched me, but I didn’t return her look, too afraid to try and find the praise in her stare—too afraid it wouldn’t be there.
Coach Chelsea had told me last week, after our first practice as co-captains: “You are on the same level as Jade. Don’t go looking at her for approval.”
Which was almost impossible, because I looked to Jade for approval on everything.
“Let’s start cool-downs,” Jade announced, clapping her hands. “And then let’s get out of this heat.”
No one protested. Jade and I took our places at the front of the squad, facing rows of girls who mirrored our movements as we eased into the cooldown—reaching for our toes, elongating our legs, drawing in deep breaths.
This was always one of my favorite parts of practice.
The noise faded, and all that remained was the quiet ache of muscles well-used and the heat pulsing beneath my skin. A good kind of tired.
“You’re so much better at being the peacekeeper,” Jade said once we finished.
The majority of the girls hit the water cooler, passing around ice cubes and pulling out plastic bottles of water.
Jade sat in the grass with her arms planted behind her.
“You know exactly what to say when to calm everyone down. I’m not good at that at all. ”
I sat across from her, with Riley at our side.
Our extended legs created half of a star.
“You’re good at it,” I reassured her, but in reality, I could’ve sighed with relief.
Jade had like the way I had handled things earlier.
There was praise in her eyes. “Everyone was just touchy today from the heat. Besides, you’re so much better at keeping everyone on task than me. That’s why we’re the perfect team.”
Jade knocked her tennis shoe against mine. “Right.”
“You should’ve taken my side, though,” Riley grumbled, plucking up patches of grass.
My smile instantly faded. “You both made a mistake.”
“But you could’ve said something to me after the fact. Not in front of Jen. Now she’ll think she’s better than me.”
She didn’t point out that Jade had also yelled at her, of course, and with far less fairness than I had. But whatever.
Nina brought over a bottle of water for both Jade and me, sitting down and crossing her legs, and a few other girls joined our gaggle.
Our half star turned into a full constellation.
Even in the heat, they wanted to stay behind and get a glimpse of the Top Tier. No doubt it’d end up on Babble later.
I sat up straighter in case anyone snapped a picture.
“Ugh, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Riley huffed, but she turned so it was clear she was talking to everyone. “About my love life. I mean, Nate’s great and all, but he’s, like, a junior. The optics of me dating someone younger aren’t great.”
The cheerleaders, surrounding her like churchgoers at a sermon, all nodded reverently.
“And Ashton is interested, interested,” Riley went on, pulling up more grass. She had a mound in front of her and a bald spot in the out-of-bounds line. “You should just see the texts he sent me over the weekend.”
“Then show us,” Jade said, calling her bluff.
Riley wilted under our leader’s command. “Well, I deleted them already. I didn’t want Nate seeing them.”
The words sounded like a lie to me, paired with the avoided eye contact, but over the years, it’d become second nature to assume that every single word out of someone’s mouth was a lie.
Especially Riley’s. It’d become easy to hear it.
When someone didn’t make eye contact while talking, when the narrative began to get a bit too embellished, and anything proceeding the line “I swear to God.”
“Ashton said that if I wasn’t dating Nate, he’d take me out in a heartbeat—swear to God,” Riley said.
She was flaunting the attention of one of the biggest players at Brentwood High like it meant more than it did.
If it were Connor Bray she’d been talking about, then it’d be news.
“He wants to hang out tomorrow after the game… I don’t know what to do. ”
Throughout all the oohs and ahs and sounds of sympathy the other cheerleaders gave, I remained silent, wordlessly absorbing each line.
I didn’t doubt that Ashton pried for her attention, given the fact that he’d basically worked his way through the cheer squad over the three years of high school—with a very low success rate.
If I were a meaner person, I’d tell Riley that the second she dropped her boyfriend, Ashton would move onto the next.
“He’ll lose interest as soon as you dump Nate,” Jade said, practically reading my mind.