Shush

My sound is a hum next to their hoots.

I can’t imagine screaming, “Go Denman!”  What would it sound like to let go in front of all those people?  “Go Denman,” I whisper.  And this hush inside my head seems so far from Normal in the evolving dream inside my skull, it exposes my hiding place in the bleachers.  “Shush!”  Big Sister says.  Even though no one turns to look at me, when I glance down at my outfit, I understand I do not really wear their colors at all.

“Can I go?” Thom asks.  (He asks every week.)  “To watch you twirl?”

I lean down and whisper in his ear.  “They call us the Purple Wave.  Sometimes during our show, we bring a smoke machine down on the field, and sometimes we pretend we’re dragons.”  And now the schedules on the refrigerator change as if my lies are some kind of new energy bar, the sweetest, most guiltless thing my aunt and Don and Grizzly and even Thom have tried in a long while.

I tell them all I am a star baton twirler even though I know nothing about baton twirling and I’ve never even been to a game.  And what I say about twirling is everything I imagine and the things I learn from television and listening to the other Wave girls when they’re at lunch talk about their routines and what they do and the stuff they say about their uniforms.  Sleeveless, short-skirted, tight.

The skirt I pick up from the thrift store makes it easier to get Aunt Ally to buy into this whole idea and purchase me a real baton.  But I can’t twirl and I cannot dance, at least not well.  I practice anyway.  And I imagine I am one of them, like Gitt and Bev, and even Adrianna, though she’s not a Wave girl or even a cheerleader or anything like this at all, but she’s popular and twirls in an altogether different way.  She spins through a room, gliding her hips like she’s some kind of superstar, sucking all the air out of the place with her when she goes, collecting the gasps that follow mostly from other girls angry at their boyfriends for watching her progress. 

I daydream I move the way a Wave girl moves.