Secrets of the Sisterhood (The Cinderella Society, Episode 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Crasher to my long list of vile, Lexy-inspired nicknames, I tried to head off another fiasco. “So, will everyone be there?” I asked when the conversation hit a lull. Maybe I’d blend in okay if it was a cheer team thing.
    I thought of Lexy’s rumor. Or maybe not.
    Kyra turned around and looked at me in the back seat. “Everyone who?”
    “The whole team?”
    “The cheer team? A few people. Not everyone.”
    I took a deep breath. Better to get my concerns out in the open than descend on a surprised and potentially unthrilled Cassandra. “Shouldn’t I really be invited by Cassandra?”
    Sarah Jane glanced up at me in the rearview mirror. “Have you met Cass?”
    “No.”
    “Then how would she know to invite you?”
    How could my distress be completely lost on both of them? “I don’t want to crash her plans,” I said, hoping for casual but delivering more on the side of lame and self-conscious.
    “It’s no big, Jess,” Kyra said. “It’s kind of a tradition, not a formal party or anything.”
    “More like a standing invitation,” Sarah Jane added. “I’m not even sure who all’s gonna be there. We never know until we get there.”
    That’s how it is with the In crowd. If they hear about a party, they just assume they can hang. Not so for the rest of the world. Most of us have to be outright invited or we run the risk of ridicule and banishment.
    When Sarah Jane turned off the engine in front of my house and they started unbuckling their seat belts, I panicked.
    “Be right back,” I said, bolting out of the car. I didn’t have a packing plan yet, didn’t want them to see my room in hurricane mode, and definitely didn’t want them to meet Mom in her current hormonal state. My life was ridiculous enough all on its own.
    I nearly ran over Mom when I blew through the door. “Got invited to a sleepover,” I called, taking the stairs two at a time. “I’m just grabbing my stuff.”
    I yanked my cheer duffel off the back of my closet door, tossed my ruined tee and bra in the trash, then remembered the pin and snagged it. I threw on my pink cheer chick tank and surveyed the heap of clothing on my bed. In the time it took Mom to waddle up the stairs to question me, I’d already thrown in shorts, yoga pants, and a couple of tees, and was pulling out whatever I had clean in my underwear drawer.
    “Were you planning to ask?” Mom eased herself down onto my bed, huffing after hauling forty extra pounds of baby stomach up the stairs.
    “Sorry,” I said, guiltily. “Got a little ahead of myself. Can I go?”
    “Whose house are you going to?” she asked, trying to slow down her breathing from the stair climb. She put her hand on her lower back and winced. “Will her parents be home?”
    “It’s one of the girls who used to cheer here,” I said, not liking the direction this was going. “Two of the other cheerleaders invited me to a sleepover they always have at her house.”
    I ran across the hall and stuffed my skin-care and makeup bin—what Dad calls my tackle box—into the bag and hoped I could make Mom see reason. For a woman who’d pretty much let me fend for myself since I was twelve, she’d turned into Super Mom of the Billion Questions since we’d moved to Georgia. Quitting her job as a big-shot auditor to stay home with the twins once they were born left her with a void of needing to grill people for a living. Lucky me.
    Mom sat perched on the edge of my bed, rubbing her lower back and contemplating my story. Finally, she came to her senses. “It’s a cheerleading sleepover?”
    “I’m not sure who all will be there, but Sarah Jane said some of them will. She’s our co-captain,” I added for good measure. Captains were responsible, right? That had to help my case.
    Mom nodded, somehow comforted by the idea of me spending the night with complete strangers whose parents may or may not be home as long as it was sports-related. Whatever.
    “We need to get started on the nursery