Chapter Two #2
“President no longer. And I don’t know about changing the world.
” I’d been elected student body president of Lakeside Green last year and didn’t run again this year.
It was impressive to accomplish as a junior theoretically, but it’d also been a role that essentially meant nothing other than boosting my resume.
University administrators only allowed me to accomplish so much, which had taken away any vigor I’d gone into the position with.
But I was a textbook overachiever, always looking for a new goal to fixate on, so I did it and spent the entire time wondering why I was doing it.
It was a predictable pattern that I should’ve seen coming.
“You could’ve been our Elle Woods.” Reese sighed playfully.
“I’m sure my parents would love that,” I said, even though it was hard to imagine them truly loving anything I did.
“Yeah, well, fuck our parents. We can figure this shit out on our own,” Reese said, knocking her cup against mine in a mock cheers.
Reese and I had gotten close last year after she’d made a joke about her mom that sounded scarily similar to some of my own experiences. Despite growing up differently, we understood each other better than most people I’d met at Lakeside Green.
Unlike me, Reese was born and raised in a small, rural town in Colorado.
She’d gone here because they were able to offer her a full-ride scholarship.
It was a double win—she’d graduate debt-free, and she could stay close enough to home to help out with her dad, who couldn’t work after getting permanently disabled during a shift.
Her mom, like mine, was a piece of work who only ever said the wrong thing.
Seemingly from a completely different planet, I’d grown up just outside of San Diego.
Both of my parents were working professionals who cared too much about appeasing their HOA and country club friends to give a genuine fuck about my sister or me.
They made it clear they preferred Mags over me, but that definitely had to do with her having drive and direction over our personalities, something I’d always struggled with.
I was objectively nicer and easier to be around than Mags, but she was at least born to be a basketball player; I’d spent my entire life throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. So far, nothing had.
“Well, now that you’re not busy running the school on your own, you have time to come to one of my classes.” She smirked, and my eyes widened.
“Wait, you got the job?” I squealed, and Reese nodded, absolutely radiating joy. “Oh my god, Reese! That’s amazing! Congratulations!”
“Thank you, thank you. Only took several years and really learning how to smile without hurting my cheeks, but it’s been so worth it.”
Even though Reese wasn’t a cheerleader, she still understood us as a lifelong dancer.
A lot of us in our friend group had come up in dance, cheer, or both, and bonded over the very specific experiences that came with that.
Mostly, it was a lot of feeling weird about our bodies and the pressures that tended to stereotypically come from the kinds of parents who encouraged competitive dance.
Reese had been taking classes through the Lakeside Green student gym for years and had finally worked up the nerve to apply to be one of their teachers. It was a highly coveted job for a niche population, and she’d been stressing over it for months.
“Are you teaching contemporary?”
Reese nodded. “Of course. I always get what I want.”
I snorted. “I’m so proud of you.”
“You still haven’t answered my question—are you coming to one of my classes? Or should I say, since you are coming to one of my classes because I demand it—which one do you want to come to?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I drew out the words. “You know, this time of year, it’s busy—”
And it was true—the cheerleaders were brought out for every women’s basketball, men’s basketball, and football game.
But that also wasn’t saying a lot when it came to Lakeside Green.
Other than women’s basketball, our programs were historically really bad for D1 and were typically not funded well because of that.
The school budget included cheerleading, but we didn’t travel, and we were more of a club than an actual powerhouse cheering squad seen at the bigger schools.
The hope was that it would change eventually, but it wasn’t going to happen while I was a student here.
“I literally don’t want to hear it from you. You’re basically superwoman and have more hours in the day than anyone I’ve ever met.” Reese nudged me. “It’ll be fun, I promise.”
I sighed a little bit. “You know how it is. I haven’t danced in a long time—”
“Right, and dance is stressful, and you can’t do it casually, and you haven’t properly danced since high school and blah-blah-blah.”
“Alright, alright,” I said, laughing. “You’re not technically wrong, but I don’t like feeling so exposed.”
“We’ve all been there. I had to remember why I wanted to do it in the first place and allow myself to enjoy it again. The hardest part is remembering that you did it because you loved it.”
“Or because my mom told me I had to and would be so mad at me if I’d told her I didn’t want to go.”
“No, that’s other people. You specifically loved dance. You talk about it like it’s the one who got away.”
I rolled my eyes at her good-naturedly. Reese was right about a lot of things—I didn’t join the dance team or even take casual dance classes because I didn’t know how to do it in a normal way.
It was too stressful, too hard, too weird.
There was so much pressure to make sure I was doing it right.
I found it hard to even just dance when I was alone; I was too aware of what I was doing to just let go.
But the one thing Reese didn’t get right was my love for dance. I’d always liked it, and the physical activity felt good, but if I really loved dance, I would’ve kept doing it in college rather than opting for cheer.
Cheering felt like a perfect middle-ground—it kept me busy, it introduced me to amazing friends, it looked good on a resume, and the Lakeside Green cheer program didn’t cheer competitively.
I could’ve theoretically quit at any point—especially when it became obvious my parents weren’t impressed and the whole reason I’d pursued it was for their approval—but I had no interest in leaving.
“Anyway.” I brushed off her comment. “Have you run into Ainsley yet?”
“Yeah, nice job with changing the subject.” Reese snorted. “But no. And she better hope we don’t run into each other. I don’t want to see her here. This is my spot.”
“I still can’t believe you guys broke up,” I said.
That was another thing Reese and I had bonded over—we’d both recently gone through some kind of heartbreak, albeit mine much more minor.
There was nothing that could turn a casual friendship into a suddenly very close one like processing our singlehood in real-time together.
“I thought you were going to be together forever.”
Reese shrugged. “Wasn’t meant to be. Stay away from the athletes, especially the volleyball players.”
“Noted.”
She brought her drink to her lips and I looked around the room to see who else I recognized—and if anyone was worth attempting to take home.
I knew a lot of the faces in passing because I’d seen them around, but I wasn’t confident with everyone’s names.
Maybe that was a good thing and exactly what I needed, but it was hard to know. My heart wasn’t in it either way.
My sister and her teammates then walked through the door, loud and rowdy as usual.
They’d had their start-of-the-season banquet earlier in the evening, and all of them were still dressed from it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d left the dinner, stayed together to sneak a few swigs from a flask, and then wandered over this way.
The same deeply agitated feeling that I experienced every time Mags was in the general vicinity washed over me.
We’d just gotten into an argument earlier today because she was insistent that I was loading the dishwasher the wrong way.
It was just the cherry on top that during our FaceTime with our parents last week, they’d spent the entire time talking to and about Mags, like I wasn’t even there.
And Mags, as usual, didn’t even realize.
Fortunately, she and I tended to ignore each other at these things whenever we saw each other. It was mostly to avoid the bickering that seemed to follow us everywhere, including to our shared apartment.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her.
My heart fell to my feet, my heart rate shooting up. “Fuck,” I whispered.
“What?” Reese asked, looking around to see what I’d just spotted.
“Kai is here,” I said, averting my eyes so Kai wouldn’t know I was looking over at her.
But there was no question it was her. I knew that hair, those tattoos, the sleepy look to her eyes.
I kept stealing glances back into the corner where she’d positioned herself, sitting on the edge of the couch with her arm wrapped around the waist of some other girl.
There were friends circled around them, all of them the cool artist type with tattoos and moody expressions and vapes in their hands.
Everything about it was so not me. I was an Elle Woods—I was pink and bubbly and spent too much money on my hair and nails.
I could try my best to cosplay as the type who preferred dive bars and drank cheap beer and wanted to get high and listen to Pink Floyd, but it wasn’t me.
I knew it. Kai definitely knew it, even if she’d never said it out loud.
But still, I felt this desire to prove myself to her and her friends.
I wanted to be accepted, prove myself as the chill girl I’d never been able to be.
“Oh, shit,” Reese said sympathetically, looking over that way.
Reese and I were close, but we weren’t as close as Soph and me.
Soph was the friend who picked up the pieces and told me to get my shit together; Reese was the friend who offered a listening ear and told me that it was okay to be obsessed with someone who couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day, even when it wasn’t.
I ducked my head, probably bringing more attention to myself than if I’d just stayed in place.
“Fuck,” I whispered again. I’d prepared myself emotionally for this exact moment for weeks, but nothing compared to the real thing—the realization that someone else had been picked over me, the crushing weight of seeing someone who was so painfully, annoyingly hot that I knew I’d never have.
None of the feelings swirling in me were heartbreak, but I was sick to my stomach all the same.
Reese pushed me toward the packed kitchen, taking me out of Kai's line of view. I didn’t know if that was for my benefit, so I’d stop staring, or Kai’s benefit, to save them before I did something stupid. I was too embarrassed to ask.
We settled in an empty spot against a wall. People moved around us, unbothered by my obvious freakout. This was about par for the course at The 151; everyone cried, and everyone threw up.
“Okay, so, you’re handling this better than I expected,” Reese said.
“Am I?” I asked through heavy breaths. “My palms are sweaty.”
Reese waved it off. “That’s okay.”
Soph pushed through the crowd of bodies dancing and talking like her best friend in distress alarm had just gone off. “What happened?” she asked.
“Kai is here,” I said, keeping my voice low.
I wasn’t sure Soph would even be able to hear me over the music, but I wasn’t going to get myself into something by saying it any louder.
The last thing I needed was for word to spread that I was obviously unwell, and it was because of Kai.
The only thing more embarrassing than my hurt feelings getting around the party was that Soph had been right about Kai—pretty much every other gay girl here had also been done dirty by her.
I wasn’t the only one. I should’ve known better, but I never did.
“Oh, shit.” Soph turned her head, looking around. “What do you want to do? Head home? Or it’s early enough that we can probably still go to the bar.”
I considered the comfort of leaving. I wouldn’t spend the entire night aware of Kai in the other room, tuned into the fact that she was here and acting like nothing had happened between us.
I also wouldn’t have to spend the entire time I was here pretending I wasn’t distracted by how Kai was definitely going to take her date home.
I fought off a sigh. At least I knew the sex would be mediocre.
“No, I have to stay,” I insisted. As much as it sucked to be here, it was just as embarrassing to leave so suddenly with my tail between my legs. If Kai hadn’t already seen me, she would definitely see me leaving shortly after she’d arrived. It wasn’t particularly subtle.
“Are you sure?” Soph asked. “Really sure?”
“We can sneak you out back,” Reese offered.
I considered it, thinking over the options in front of me. My gut was telling me to leave, but the prideful part of me was telling me to stay and stick it out.
I bit my lip, and as I brought my eyes back up to look at my friends, I landed on GJ instead.
She was standing across the room with a few friends—my sister nowhere to be seen—looking as hot as she always did.
The creamsicle-orange linen she was wearing contrasted beautifully with her dark skin.
Her smile was bright and easy, her confidence radiating so far off of her that I could feel it all the way over here. And her arms…
GJ’s words from this summer echoed in my ear. You know how to reach me if you need me.
I briefly considered the consequences, just tipsy enough to think they couldn’t possibly be that bad.
Mags was always clear on the rules, and I knew she’d hate it if I went after one of her teammates.
But my entire family had rules for me and never seemed particularly grateful I’d spent my entire life doing everything I could to follow them.
It couldn’t hurt to break one of them just once.
And, I mean—she’d have to find out about me and GJ in order for it to become an issue.
Things suddenly clicked into place for me. It was a universal truth—going home with someone was the best way to prove to an ex that you weren’t still hung up on them.
GJ was right that I knew how to reach her. And I was starting to realize that, just maybe, I needed her after all.