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with the flow. She and I hadn't ever been
particularly close. It was hard to be friendly with someone who was
better than you in practically every way. The logical thing for her
to do would have been to at least give me a cold shoulder when we
were at school, but if anything she was going out of her way lately
to try and include me.
    I'd
been suspicious at first that she was just trying to get me around
her friends so that they could make my life miserable, but the first
time that one of them had tried, she'd put them in their place so
fast that everyone's jaws had just kind of hit the floor and stayed
there until lunch ended.
    Given
my druthers I would have just avoided the other cheerleaders and
waited for everything to blow over, but Cindi reaching out to me like
that meant that I had to at least make an effort to hang out with her
and her friends. Honestly I couldn't have cared less about the
friends, but I didn't want to let Cindi's peace offering go to waste.
    We'd
had some absolutely spectacular fights in the past. Things got a
little better once we were both in high school, but I still felt a
lot of the time like there was something missing in our relationship.
Sisters should be closer than what we'd managed so far in our lives.
    I'd
never talked to Cindi about that in so many words, but that was how I
felt, which helped explain how I ended up out at the football field
after school, sitting on the tired old metal bleachers at the
fifty-yard line, rather than back home cleaning the house.
    The
cheerleaders were having tryouts tomorrow to fill Janessa's spot,
which meant that Cindi and three other girls were busy leading two
dozen hopefuls through the practice cheers that the tryouts would be
based on.
    It
was actually pretty painful to watch, but not for the reasons that
I'd expected. I'd expected to be bored out of my mind watching a
group of girls perform the same few cheers over, and over, and over
again while I tried to work on my homework.
    Instead
I found myself unable to study for other reasons. The girls trying
out were simply awful. They were obviously trying and Cindi and her
friend were doing their best, but none of the girls seemed to be able
to get the routines down, especially the last one that they were
supposed to be learning.
    It
didn't make any sense. I've never been one of those people who are
able to remember a string of movements well enough to actually
perform anything, but this routine was super easy. I'd already
memorized it despite the fact that I was only halfway paying
attention.
    As
the allotted time for the practice started to wind down I could tell
that a lot of the girls were getting frustrated by their inability to
master the routine. Alice Backman—at least I thought that was
her name—finally threw down her blue and white pompoms and
stalked over in my direction to get her books off of the bleachers.
    Cindi
started in our direction too, obviously wanting to reassure Alice,
but she'd been on the other side of the group so it was going to take
her a minute to get here.
    "I'm
never going to get this last one. It's just too hard. I thought maybe
that I could come and memorize all of them enough that I could
practice them on my own later, but this last one is just too complex.
I can't remember more than just the first five or six movements."
    "I
could write it down for you if you wanted. I mean so that you could
have it to study later tonight."
    Alice
gave me an incredulous look. "Is this your way of making me look
bad? Write down a bunch of random stuff so that I'll go practice the
wrong routine and look like an idiot? Is that why you came today?
Just so you could make someone else's life difficult?"
    I'd
already turned to a blank piece of paper and had written down the
first three parts of the routine, but now my pen stuttered to a halt.
Apparently Alice didn't approve of me getting into it with Janessa.
It was actually a bit odd. Alice was trying out for a spot on the
team that never