Pennybaker School Is Revolting, стр. 32

There was a muffled boom of music starting, and the girls all jumped into frantic motion.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” one of them chanted while pushing past us.

“New girls! Just try to keep up!” shouted the one shoving us toward the door.

“Ready? Okay!” they screamed in unison, and then yanked open the door and flooded out, spitting us into the bright lights of the field house.

They rushed into four neat lines. I tripped forward as each one raced past me, pom-poms on hips, bonnet ties bouncing on their backs.

“Get in line,” one spat through clenched teeth and a forced smile.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, turning to Chip—only Chip wasn’t there. I spun in a circle. There he was, lined up with the girls, holding his pom-poms proudly.

I barely had time to register what he was doing when the line shifted, and I got shoved forward.

“Step ball change,” the clenched-teeth girl growled. “Kick, kick, kick, drop.”

I stood awkwardly as all the girls—and Chip, who was a surprisingly fast learner—step-ball-changed and kicked and dropped around me. The music changed, and so did the formation, the lines closing in to form three big circles. The lights dimmed as I stutter-stepped, trying to keep up, certain that I would actually drop dead of embarrassment.

“Chip,” I tried every time I passed him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Chip!”

“This way,” the clenched-teeth girl said, pushing my shoulder toward the middle of a circle. “You’re the smallest, so you’re going to cupie.”

“I’m going to what?”

“Cupie,” she repeated, but I didn’t even have time to ask what that was before I was grabbed and lifted up by the waist. Two girls palmed the soles of my feet and hoisted me to shoulder height.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I shouted, grabbing at their shoulders with my hands.

“Just relax. You’re messing it up,” the girl shouted into my ear. “Straighten your legs.”

“No way.”

“Let. Go. Of. Them. And. Straighten.”

I whimpered.

“Look. Your friend is doing it.”

I looked to my right and, sure enough, there was Chip, standing high and proud atop his cluster of cheerleaders, his arms in the air victoriously. Seriously, did the kid even have cupie socks?

“Do it!” the girl growled, and moved her hands from my waist to my ankles. She counted—“Five, six, seven, eight”—and the next thing I knew, I was teetering so high above the hard field house floor I might as well have been in an airplane. My arms wheeled out to my sides as I desperately tried to keep upright.

“Smile,” the girl shouted.

Nope. No way. Who smiles on their way to certain death?

“Okay, five, six, seven, eight!” she cried, and the next thing I knew, I was being launched into the air. “Pike, pike!” she was shouting.

But I didn’t pike. Instead, I flailed. And screamed. And apparently, flailing and screaming throws off a cupie formation. In fact, when you flail and scream the specific words “I’m gonna puke!” it causes all the other girls in your formation to take two steps back. And instead of landing safely cradled in their arms—as I saw Chip do out of the corner of my eye—you land on the floor, on your back and on your bruised tailbone, so hard it knocks the wind out of you. Again. And you’re so busy rolling around on the floor in agony, you don’t even realize your dress has billowed up over your head, showing off your rolled-up boy jeans and your sweat socks poking out of a pair of old-fashioned lace-up boots.

When I finally got my breath back, I realized that the entire gym had gone quiet. I clawed my way out from under my dress and opened my eyes to find a circle of angry cheerleaders standing above me. And Chip. He leaned down so his face was sort of close to mine and whispered, “Technically, a pike is—”

“I know what a pike is,” I snapped, sitting up. My back felt like it had been slapped. By a floor.

“You’re a boy,” one of the cheerleaders said, pointing out the obvious. I ripped off my bonnet and tossed it to the side. There was an audible gasp from the crowd. “You’re both boys.”

“They were in the girls’ locker room,” another cheerleader said, her voice coming way too close to a shriek for my comfort.

“We weren’t trying to be,” I said. “We were looking for someone.”

A referee parted the circle and crouched over me. “You all right, son?” he asked. I nodded. He picked me up by my elbow. “Good. It’s time for you to leave. You, too, Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Technically, I’m wearing a bonnet, not a hood. And also my dress is pink, not red. And I’m not on my way to deliver baked goods to my grandmother. You should possibly consider brushing up on your fairy tales.”

“Okay, Little Pink Riding Bonnet, how about you take your baked goods on out of here,” the referee said, leading us across the field house floor.

“I don’t have any baked goods,” Chip said, and the referee might have thought he was being smart with him, but that was the kind of thing that really did mess with Chip. You were accurate or you were inaccurate. There wasn’t a lot of in between.

We were deposited on the front walk of the school. I shrugged out of my dress and bonnet and tossed them on the ground next to my feet. Chip stayed in his, primly smoothing his skirt over his knees.

“Dresses are quite comfortable, don’t you agree, Thomas?”

I stared at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Seriously? You have to ask what? We were just kicked out of a high school basketball game, but not before making sure we completely humiliated ourselves. And we didn’t even get anywhere close to Mr. Faboo.”

“Oh. That.” He thought for a moment, and then brightened. “I know what we can do.”

“What?”

“Well, my mom won’t be here until after the game is over. And the referee said we