The Pep Rally

Shelly and Jessica attend a prep rally.

Well, the rest of that week went very much the same way. I was haunted by my new, unwanted friend everywhere I went. She took me to my classes, picked me up afterwards and insisted that we have lunch together every, single day. Thankfully, as far as I could tell, the cooks never got around to poisoning our food, but I’m sure it was running around and around in their heads to do so every time they saw us. I couldn’t understand why Jessica would want to eat their food if she found it so distasteful, but she did it anyway. I had tried to talk my parents into letting me take my lunch, but they said that they had already paid for my lunch card for the year, and I was going to use it, so I was stuck with the food. I had no idea if Jessica was in the same situation as me or not. Jessica continued to be a bit of an enigma to me. She acted like the perfect student in homeroom, studying harder than anyone else in the class and always taking her school work seriously, but her attitude towards the teachers was one of defiance. She was difficult to get along with, outspoken to a ridiculous degree and nothing deterred her from stating her opinion, no matter how harsh or cruel that opinion was. My own teachers became very indulgent of her, smiling and greeting her every time they saw her waiting outside the door for me as the other students filed out of the room. If any of them knew of her reputation, none of them let on, and I wondered if they thought that maybe I was being a good influence on her. Boy, were they mistaken on that part. If anything, she was the one being the influence on me, not the other way around. I doubted she had heard half of what I had said to her during the entire time we had known each other, and I would happily bet that she remembered only half of that, if even that much.

The day of the prep rally was upon us before I realized it, and I trudged to homeroom that day with little, actually, no enthusiasm. We would be having the rally during our last class, and I would have much rather been in the pottery room making a bowl out of brown, nasty feeling clay than listening to a bunch of idiots go on about the sports program this year. I had little like of sports, and found it sickening how much of the school budget was spent on a department that only a privileged few would even get to use. I’m not saying I’m jealous of those that got to use the department, or that I wished to be athletically inclined in any way. I was jealous of how much money they were taking from the important things, like the library and classes that actually taught intellectually inclined people.

I got to my seat to find that Jessica was already in hers. A glance at her bag revealed two brightly colored pom-poms settled between her school books.

“I didn’t know you were on the cheerleading squad,” I said, wondering if she had joined them last year. There hadn’t been any tryouts yet this year, and all the cheerleaders were sophomores or higher.

She shook her head. “I’m not.”

“Then what’s with the pom-poms?” I had to know. What sort of evil scheme was she concocting in her demented, little head this time. If it was something to make the prep rally more enjoyable, I wanted in on it. Anything to make this day better than it was turning out to be.

“They’re to show my school spirit. Don’t you have any school spirit?” she asked, as if she didn’t already know the answer to that question, and I was wondering why, all of a sudden, she had developed this sense of school spirit when she had been secretly bad mouthing the establishment the entire week.

“I think you know the answer to that one,” I said as I pulled out my history book. We were still going over the first chapter because some of the kids just weren’t getting it, and I was getting sort of bored waiting for us to go on now. Mrs. Harrison-Gray was just going over the same things over and over again now, and I was hoping to get a head start on the next chapter. I knew once class started Jessica would let me work on my studies while she worked on her own, so there would be no problem there.

“Well, why not?” she wanted to know, a pout on her lips that would have turned the head of any guy who was willing to look at her. “It’s a lot of fun. You should try it. Want a pom-pom?” she asked, shoving one of the silly things in my face.

I pushed it away as gently as I could, and shook my head. “No. Besides, wouldn’t you look silly with only one of them?”

“Not if you had the other one and we moved them in sequence with each other. Wouldn’t that be neat?” she asked with such excitement it was almost terrifying.

“I’m terrible with even acting like I might be coordinated. Why don’t you keep them for now.”

She shrugged and shoved the thing back into her pack. “Okay, whatever you say.”

The rest of the day went as usual. Jessica saw me off to all my classes, and picked me up afterwards. I still hadn’t figured out how the girl could get from her class to mine so quickly, but she always had homework or studying to do in homeroom, so I assumed she at least made it to a few of her classes. Maybe she sat next to the door in each one, and snuck out while the teacher wasn’t looking. Wouldn’t someone like her be missed? You’d have thought so.

We went to lunch, cutting in line as usual, and as usual, Jessica complained about everything they had to serve. I could only give the cooks a sickly smile and shrug my shoulders to indicate that the girl beside me was crazy, and that I didn’t hold with a single word she was saying. We took our usual spot, always the same table near the back of the room. That seemed to just be our spot now, and no one even sat near us unless they were forced to.

Instead of plunging right into the meal she had complained about only moments before, Jessica looked at me with bright, excited eyes, and said, “Man, I can’t wait for this afternoon, can you?”

“I’d rather be throwing pots in art class,” I said through a bite of what I think was meatloaf. One can never be too sure in this sort of area when it came to school. Most of their foods seemed to be some sort of tossed together conglomeration of what had once been actual food, and had now grown into some sort of hideous facsimile of it.

Her face dropped and she gave me the most teary eyed look I had ever seen on her to date. “What? You are not totally excited about the prep rally?”

I could only shake my head. “Not my sort of thing.”

“But it’s going to be so much fun,” she all but whined at me. I had never seen her behave this way, and I had no idea what to think of it.

“You’re really into this prep rally thing, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am,” she chimed out, holding her hands up in the air in an excited gesture that did everything to show how much she as into this. “Who couldn’t be totally into this thing. Man, it’ll be the bomb.”

Did people even use that phrase anymore, I had to wonder. Where was she coming from?

“Well, I guess I could give it a try,” I finally said, just wanting her to stop going over it. It was bad enough that I was being forced to attend, having someone try to shove the glory of it down my throat was just getting irritating. If there had been any way for me to get rid of her right then and there, I definitely would have done it without having a second thought about it. Then again, I had been trying to do that since day one, hadn’t I, and with very little success so far.

“Great. See you after class.”

“Where are you going?” I asked, surprised that she wasn’t going to walk me to my next class. Was I actually going to be free of her for a while?

“I’ve got a few things I need to do before this afternoon. Secret things. See ya.”

I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t help but wonder what these secret things were that she was up to. Well, I could follow her, but to be away from Jessica Welsh for even a short amount of time was now a God send, and I didn’t intend to blow it. I tried to enjoy the rest of my lunch as best I could, considering the quality of the meal, and then took a long and leisurely walk to my next class. That went well enough, but Jessica was waiting for me as soon as it ended with the most cheerful expression on her face. This was starting to get a bit scary. No one enjoyed these things this much.

“It’s about to start. Ready to go?” she asked so cheerfully that I would have thought we were going to the coolest party of the year instead of a prep rally.

Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “Let’s get this over with.”

“That’s the spirit.” She once again latched onto my elbow and dragged me down to the auditorium.

The large, spacious room was already filled to the brim with masses of teenagers, eagerly awaiting the start of the prep rally. I’m sure this would be no more entertaining than I found most sports events, which is uninteresting at all to me. There were several, loud speakers set about the brightly polished floor just for the occasion. I’m sure they were there to play whatever terrible music the cheerleaders had chosen to do one, or more, of their terrible cheers to. I could only hope that their taste in music was better than what I had been hearing on the parking lot all week, but I feared that would just be too much to ask for.

Jessica dragged me up the bleachers, and managed to get a spot where we could both sit together without having too many other people pressing into us. It was loud and rather unpleasant for the first several minutes as the late arrivals trickled into the room, trying to find a place to sit. After a while, it proved that this would be impossible, and several people started lining up against the walls furthest from the speakers and the stand that had been set up for just this day.

After a while, principal Snider showed up, and took his place at the microphone at the stand. He was a short, well dressed, balding, middle aged man with a stern look to his features that never seemed to go away. I swear, if the guy actually smiled, his face would crack into a million, little pieces that would crumble to the floor about him. He harrumphed several times to get our attention, glaring at the entire student body as he did so as if we were all something detestable to look upon, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more. After a while, everyone finally quieted down, and he went into his prearranged speech. I can’t tell you much of what he said, considering I wasn’t really listening. It was all concerning the sports programs for the year, and how we all needed to show our school spirit by backing our teams, blah, blah, blah. You get the picture. Not something I was overly eager to hear about, and couldn’t have cared less about, but he seemed to think that it was the most important thing in the world.

Afterwards, he turned it over to the cheerleaders to get us all into the ‘spirit’ of things. The song that started blasting from the speakers was something about a Barbie girl, and the cheerleaders were dancing and parading their stuff, just as I had suspected they would. It amazed me now much a school would promote girls behaving in such a manner, and then people wonder why there is so much teen pregnancies. Well, maybe if the most important thing to the schools didn’t involve girls shaking around in such skimpy uniforms like that, there wouldn’t be so much after school activities that involved baby making acts.

What I hadn’t expected would happen was just what happened next.

All of a sudden, the song changed, right in the middle of a line. Twisted Sister started blaring from the speakers, and judging from the looks on the cheerleaders’ faces, they had not been the least bit prepared for that. They looked about in hurt bewilderment, as if the entire world had suddenly turned against them just because someone had ruined their cheer. All I could think was thank God for that. I was sort of tired of watching a bunch of well endowed girls bouncing around just to show off their God given attributes. Did they have no dignity at all?

Beside me, Jessica tore open her shirt to reveal a skimpy, tank top under it, and held up her pom-poms as she jumped to her feet. All around the auditorium, other girls started doing the same thing, standing up and waving their pom-poms about in time to the song. They started screaming and cheering to the lyrics, much to the disapproval of every adult there. A couple of them actually managed to do cart-wheels on the bleachers without hurting themselves. There had to be at least a hundred of them or more, cheering and giggling with delight. I could only stare on in shocked amusement as they outdid the cheerleaders with their own antics.

I could barely hear the principal calling for order, and instructing the teachers to go round up the miscreants, who suddenly disappeared from the crowd. Jessica plopped back down next to me, and covered herself with a long, white trench, and I could see that the other girls who had joined in on her little prank were all doing the same thing, although they were all wearing different colored coats, making it next to impossible to tell in the enormous crowd who had been causing problems just a few minutes before and who had not.

I think a grand total of four girls were nabbed for the little stunt, but from what I heard later on, not a single one of them would confess to the identity of who their compatriots were, or who had been the mastermind behind the scheme. I had a pretty good idea who it had been, and all I could do was wonder how she had managed to get all those girls to go along with her, and how she had set up the cd player to change songs like that.

I Honestly believe it was the best prep rally I had ever been to.

Author's Note

First Draft