Winning Team Read online

  “Well, that’s exciting,” Grandma said.

  That was the buzzword of the day, apparently. “Yeah.”

  She looked at me for a moment; the skin around her eyes didn’t crinkle like it usually did. “Where were we?” she asked quietly.

  It wasn’t as if I had short-term memory loss. I knew exactly where we’d left off. I just didn’t feel like pursuing it, in case Grandma wanted me to project myself into my mother’s skin or something.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to go to gym in, like, half an hour. Can’t we move on to social studies?”

  I half expected her to protest, but she nodded. “Fine,” she said. “Open your American History book where we left off, about the industrial revolution.”

  I did as she told me, sliding To Kill a Mockingbird under the coffee table. If she’d insisted, I could definitely have answered her question before my mom came home. What do you think Jessie needs right now?

  I thought Jessie needed a friend like Atticus Finch, someone who could be strong and do what was right, no matter what the consequences. But then I remembered the promise I’d made to Jessie, and the one glaring thing I’d neglected to tell my grandmother. I wondered if I was up to the task.

  That afternoon at practice, I tried to find a way to bring up the painting, but I couldn’t seem to find a good time. It didn’t help that I was still conflicted about the answer I was hoping for. I dreaded their saying yes; I also feared their saying no.

  As it turned out, Christina approached me first, at the water fountain during a break. “Look,” she said. “I’m not happy about this, so I’m just going to say it.”

  I waited, too stunned to speak.

  She rolled her eyes. “WillyoucometomysleepoverSaturday?”

  “What?”

  I saw her clench her jaw. She obviously thought I was just being difficult. “Will. You. Come. To. My. Sleepover. Saturday.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’d love to.”

  I was pretty impressed with how cool I’d been about the whole thing. I leaned down to get a sip of water, but Christina’s hand shot out to cover the water fountain button.

  “You know that my mom is making me ask you, right? It was supposed to be just me, Noelle, and Jessie.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But—” Christina shook her head. “Then why would you agree to come? Wouldn’t you just feel… unwelcome?”

  “I know you’ll try to make me feel unwelcome,” I said, “but the sleepover sounds like fun, and I’m happy to be invited. So, thank you. Yes, I’ll be there.”

  She continued to stare at me until I gently reached under her hand to depress the button, sending a clear stream of water shooting toward my mouth. It tasted more refreshing than any water I remembered drinking.

  “So, Saturday night,” I said, when I’d filled my water bottle and was heading back to the floor, “should be fun. And Sunday, my mom asked if we could help her paint her new day care, so this will be perfect—we can all just head over there together.”

  “Sounds…perfect,” Christina said. She looked as if she’d hit her head on the balance beam.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “We’ll have a blast.”

  Of course, that night I had to call Dionne and try to hash out what I should wear and what I should bring and how I should act. I was asking her whether I should bring my Twister game when Dionne cleared her throat.

  “What?” I asked, aware that she’d been silent for a while.

  “It’s just that…Do you remember when we played Twister at my birthday party last year?”

  “Uh, yeah.” That was why I was thinking about bringing it this time. Nothing got more competitive or more hilarious than a group of gymnasts in contortions trying to touch right hands to green and left legs to yellow. It had been the hit of Dionne’s party.

  “Well, I shouldn’t say ‘we.’” Dionne paused, as though she was carefully considering before deciding to go ahead. “I didn’t really participate. In fact, I spent most of the night reading a book on my bed while you guys played.”

  I remembered now. I had thought it was really weird that Dionne would be so antisocial when it was her party. If she hadn’t felt like playing Twister for any reason, she could always have offered to operate the spinner to see what configuration we’d have to get into next.

  “So, what’s your point?”

  “You still don’t know?” Dionne said. “Britt, it was my party. I wanted to watch movies and paint each other’s nails and talk. Instead, you totally took it over with your game, turning it into this crazy competition.”

  I was stung by her words, especially because they were completely unfair. Dionne’s party had been a dud. If I hadn’t saved it with Twister, everyone would’ve watched some dumb movie about girls who were also mermaids or something and gone to bed by nine. Instead, I got it rocking. Everyone had been laughing and having a great time, gathered around the Twister board, while Dionne had pouted over in the corner. Now, she was saying it was because I somehow “took over” her party, although that was absolutely ridiculous. I’d just given it a much-needed makeover.

  “What’s your point?” I asked again, my voice tight.

  Dionne sighed into the phone. “Look, that was a while ago,” she said. “I’m not still mad. I’m just trying to say that you should watch yourself. Remember that this party is not the Brittany Show.”

  “The Brittany Show?”

  “It’s not—you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do.” And then I pressed talk on the phone to end the call, my finger pounding the spongy button with more force than was really necessary.

  Dionne was the one who’d suggested I try a prank in the first place, and look at how that had turned out. Now she wanted me to play it safe? All because of something I’d done a year ago that had annoyed her and that she hadn’t even told me about at the time?

  It wasn’t as if I made everything about me. It was just that some situations needed to be livened up, and that was kind of my specialty. And if there had ever been a group of girls that could have used my brand of fun, it was the Texas Twisters.

  But then I had a brief flash of Jessie in that bathroom, her knees red from kneeling on the tile, and I wondered if “fun” would be enough. And I wondered if it could be too much, if it could mask something else that was going on—such as the fact that I’d never even noticed that Dionne was mad at her party, or that Jessie might starve herself until she was so thin that she could just slip through the cracks—all because we were too busy having fun to notice.

  Christina’s house had a curvy orange roof and white stucco walls. My mom called it Spanish-style.

  “But Christina’s from Mexico, not Spain,” I said.

  She laughed. “Oh, honey, it’s just a style of architecture. Do you have everything? Your bathing suit?”

  I had probably overpacked, but I wouldn’t have put it past Christina to “forget” to tell me key details of the night, like that you were supposed to bring your own sleeping bag, or that you should have brought a swimsuit, since she had a pool. I didn’t know if she had a pool, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t want to be sitting on a lounge chair talking to Mrs. Flores while everyone else played Marco Polo.

  I gave my mom a kiss good-bye. She tugged at my sleeve before I got out of the car. “You did ask them about painting tomorrow, right? It’s just that I really need to do it on a weekend when none of the little kids are there, and I’d like it to be sooner rather than later.”

  “Yeah, I told Christina. She said it sounded perfect.” It was totally true. I hadn’t asked Christina. I had told her, and that was exactly what she’d said. The only part I left out was that she was so shell-shocked when I said I was actually going to come to her sleepover that I doubted she’d even heard me.

  “Great!” My mom smiled. “Well, have fun.”

  My duffel bag was so heavy I had to drag it up to the front door. Before I could
ring the bell, it swung open to reveal Mrs. Flores, wearing a huge smile and an apron right out of a Betty Crocker commercial. Still, she managed to look stylish.

  “Brittany! Come in, come in.” She made a move to grab the duffel bag, but as soon as she tried to lift it and felt how heavy it was, she withdrew her hand.

  “I would have driven you from gym, you know,” she said as she led me into the kitchen. “All the other girls have been here for a couple of hours.”

  I’d thought about pushing my luck with that, but there were some last-minute things I’d needed to pack, anyway, like a comic book (in case I got bored), several extra changes of clothes (in case whatever I was wearing wasn’t appropriate or got ruined because of some horrible prank), and a bottle of air freshener. I’d been purposely avoiding beans or anything else fart-producing for the past few days, but I didn’t want to take any chances that there’d be some smell I’d want to cover up.

  I’d left Twister at home. Not because I actually put any stock in what Dionne had said, but, you know, just in case.

  As soon as I walked into Christina’s room, everyone got silent. Christina was sitting on a huge, canopy bed with a frilly purple comforter on it, Noelle was at her feet with a forkful of speared shrimp suspended near her mouth, and Jessie sat on an uncomfortable-looking white stool in front of a vanity. I’d never actually seen a vanity in a real-life room before, only in catalogs and on TV. I definitely got the name—when a piece of furniture is basically one gigantic mirror, it’s pretty obvious that its only purpose is to let people stare at themselves and think about how beautiful they are. Perfect for Christina.

  It was hard to believe that in the last week I’d been in both Jessie’s room and Christina’s. I dragged my duffel bag over to a corner and plopped down on the floor next to it.

  “So,” I said, “what’s up?”

  Christina went back to flipping through an issue of International Gymnast, and Noelle chewed slowly, as though she preferred turning the same bite over in her mouth again and again to responding to me. Sometimes I thought Noelle was worse than Christina. Christina actively hated me, but it was hard to tell with Noelle—it seemed as though she was more interested in staying on Christina’s good side than in actually speaking up for herself.

  “Christina was about to start up Rock Band,” Jessie said.

  “Cool,” I said. “I can be the drummer. My grandma thinks music is part of any well-rounded education, so I know all about different time signatures and stuff. My grandma says I can keep a mean beat.”

  “Did your grandma sew your outfit?” Christina asked, her gaze flicking up from the magazine.

  I looked down at my capri pants and my T-shirt with sparkly turquoise polka dots on it. When I’d chosen these clothes to wear, I had thought they seemed cool—effortlessly casual, as if I couldn’t have cared less what I wore but had somehow managed to pull it together anyway. But suddenly it felt like the stupidest outfit ever.

  “My grandmother is an art historian,” I said. “She doesn’t make art, she just critiques it.”

  I thought that was a fitting response, but Christina’s comeback was swift.

  “Who called that art?”

  The room was silent for a few moments. Surprisingly, it was Noelle who spoke up. “Can we not do this tonight?” she said. “Please? I’m all achy from practice, and I just want to chill out.”

  “I’m pretty sore, too,” I said, seizing on that as a neutral conversation starter. Who doesn’t like to compare scars? “Check out my hands. They’re all ripped up.”

  I held out my palms for everyone to see. Weeks of constant friction against the bars and rubbing dry chalk into every crease made them look like parchment. I had a blister on one palm that refused to go away no matter how much cream I put on it.

  Christina shrugged. “That’s what you get for not wearing grips,” she said.

  Grips help support your wrists and have strips of leather that cover the palms of your hands. Some gymnasts use them; some gymnasts don’t. Personally, I like to feel the full contact of the bar beneath my hands, even if it means I pay for it later.

  “I don’t wear grips,” Noelle pointed out. “Neither do the Chinese gymnasts, who are some of the best bar workers in the world.”

  Christina was silent.

  “Come on, let’s play Rock Band,” Jessie said.

  Once we got into the game, it was surprisingly fun. Even Christina seemed to forget that she thought I was the scum of the earth, and we both laughed at Noelle’s singing. As soon as Noelle realized you could get extra points by diva-ing out some parts of the song, she started yodeling and trilling all kinds of weird noises into the microphone. Every time GREAT JOB! flashed across the screen, I just about died.

  “I’m still hungry,” Christina said. “Who wants a Popsicle?”

  Noelle and I both chimed in to say yes. Jessie just shook her head. “I’m okay,” she said.

  After Noelle and Christina left to get the Popsicles from the fridge, I glanced at Jessie. “There aren’t many calories in Popsicles, you know,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “It’s basically flavored water.”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “I just don’t really feel like it.”

  Christina brought back cherry for her, orange for Noelle, and grape for me. I tried to read some significance into the choice of flavors, but I couldn’t. I liked grape, so who cared if somehow it was meant as a slight?

  “I’m sick of Rock Band,” Christina said. “Let’s play something else instead.”

  Noelle stuck her tongue out and caught a drip of orange juice running down her Popsicle stick. “Can we play Super Mario Brothers?” she asked. “We could just take turns.”

  Christina smiled, her eyes sparkling devilishly. “I had something else in mind,” she said. “What about Truth or Dare?”

  I had heard about Truth or Dare before. Dionne said that mostly it was just people asking who you liked or daring you to tell someone’s older brother you liked him. To me, that didn’t sound as fun as Super Mario Brothers or even Twister, but I wasn’t about to say so and look lame.

  “I’m up for it,” I said. “How do we start?”

  “Well, since you seem to want to play so badly, why don’t we start with you?” Christina said. She still had that look in her eyes that made me distrust her.

  “Okay,” I said. “Dare.”

  “Wait, we’re not even doing it right,” Noelle said. “We should all be sitting in a circle on the floor. And, Christina, you should put on some music so that your mom can’t hear.”

  “Like she has nothing better to do than listen at my door,” Christina said.

  Noelle looked at her with raised eyebrows. “What about the time that you said you hated gymnastics and always had, and she burst out crying, until you had to tell her you were just joking?”

  Christina flushed. “God, Noelle, save it for the game, why don’t you?” But she got up and plugged her iPod in to the speakers on her nightstand, turning the volume down until I could just barely make out the sounds of the latest Miley Cyrus single.

  Once we were all sitting cross-legged in a circle, Christina turned to me. “Okay, Britt, so, truth or dare?”

  “Dare,” I repeated.

  “You can’t do that,” Christina said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t pick dare this early on. Nobody picks dare. You have to do a few truths first.”

  That was the dumbest rule I’d ever heard. “Then why call it Truth or Dare? Why not call it Mostly Truth but a Little Dare Toward the End?”

  Noelle giggled.

  “It’s not a rule,” Jessie said. “Britt can pick dare if she wants to.”

  “Whatever. Fine. Let me just think of something.”

  The circle got quiet as they decided my fate. I listened to Miley’s twang over some pulsing electronic beat and realized I’d probably have the song stuck in my head for days.

  “Okay, I’ve got it.” Chri
stina squinted at me. “I dare Britt to…lick the toilet seat.”

  Jessie made a gagging noise. “Gross! Isn’t it supposed to be a dare that you would do yourself?”

  “Who says I wouldn’t?”

  “Would you?” Noelle asked.

  Christina threw up her hands. “All right, you suggest something, then. This is already no fun.”

  I guessed that it wasn’t the time to say that I would totally have licked the toilet seat if that were my dare. I mean, sure, it was disgusting, but I was okay with that. It was a dare. It was supposed to be horrible. And it wasn’t like I couldn’t wash my mouth out right afterward.

  But at the same time, if I could get out of it, why not?

  “What about a toilet-paper shirt?” Jessie said. “Britt has to wrap herself in toilet paper and wear the shirt for the rest of the game.”

  Everyone agreed that that was a way better idea, so we trooped into the bathroom to begin the process of making a toilet-paper shirt. Basically, it consisted of wrapping my torso up like a mummy and then winding the toilet paper around my arms. It was scary how good the shirt ended up looking. That’s what you get with four girls who probably learned how to wrap an Ace bandage at the age of five.

  Christina grabbed her digital camera and snapped some pictures of me as I hammed it up, standing with a hand on my hip and striking a diva pose, then sitting, with my chin resting on my fist, looking pensive. She laughed, but for once it didn’t feel as if it was at me, so I didn’t mind.

  When we were back in the circle, Christina said it was my turn to ask the person next to me a question. Noelle picked truth, and I thought for a few moments, trying to figure out a good one.

  “Why do you like Scott so much?” I asked finally.

  I saw that the tips of Noelle’s ears were turning bright red.

  She picked at some fuzz on the carpet before looking up. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, he’s cute.”

  Christina and Jessie laughed.