Stepping Off The Path Of Hate

Wednesday, March 14, 2001

Well, last week, I (along with Claire, Chelsea, Mary, and Mariah) was forced to join the Lochland High School cheer squad. To make matters worse, the squad is being run by Kelsey Davies, who is the head cheerleader. (It is also known that Kelsey's entire family had been the head cheerleader of Lochland High School since the school was first built, yet Caitlyn Davies had turned her back on that tradition when she joined the boys' basketball team. That betrayal had led to Elizabeth Sutton being head cheerleader and the Lochland High School basketball team's worst performance in years.)

And before you ask, Kelsey was the head cheerleader of Lochland Middle School while I was there. But let's not start on that.

Anyway, Chesley (who recently enrolled in Lochland High School as a student) had been teaching the cheer squad how to be the most popular girls in school. Also, Chelsea had had a premonition where our group (the Magical Secret Society) was working with the League of Mean (which was what we called Kelsey's group).

At first, I thought that she was crazy, but then again, Chelsea's story was part of a saga that began when Joanna Norwood had to remove Claire Evans from her uncle David Gilliam and his partner Anthony Roberts and send her to stay with her grandmother Katherine Moonfire. Plus, there was that one op-ed in the New York Times where a college student had written about how her autistic sister was killed by a creepy female neighbor who had been spying on the family for the last few months. That op-ed led to that murder trial that almost everyone in the Society had attended. It ended with Chelsea being outed as Anthony's daughter and revealing some damning secrets about her family (secrets that none of us knew about until recently), which sent David to his execution and Anthony to an early grave.

Anyway, since last Monday, Chesley had been making us not only dress the part of the squad (which is all but impossible for me to do since the uniforms are smaller than my old dresses) and instead of learning the cheers, we learned to be rotten to those rich kids. (To be fair though, most of them are a bunch of spoiled brats, so there you have it.)

Plus, the former cheer squad suffered from a crapton of abuse provided by Kelsey; she called them all cowards for ditching the squad because Larissa Meyer had designed a cheer outfit so offensive, not even the most well-dressed girls in the school would wear them. At the same time, I was free to finally hit back at Jem's old friends for the torment that they had inflicted on me since we were six years old.

So, there was that.

While this was happening, Clay and the other boys were being given the "we have no choice but to get out there and redeem ourselves" lecture from Coach Jordan. Or as Clay had said, "The coach is cracking down on anti-school semantics..."

Jed: "I know, right? The last few years have been a headache, especially for the basketball team."

Clay: "Well, I remember hearing about how Caitlyn Davies had screwed up the team; Kelsey was the most affected."

Jed: "No wonder she became a bully and a spoiled brat."

Clay: "And she was the head cheerleader when we were in middle school."

Jed: "Well, I did overhear her mother saying that she's glad that Kelsey is keeping with the family's tradition of being the head cheerleader..."

Clay: "Exactly. Just another reason why Kelsey is a spoiled brat. She just HAD to be the head cheerleader, didn't she?"

Jed: "Well, I have to deal with her, and you don't, so there's your answer."

Clay: Touché.

Anyway, with that being said, Clay tells me that Milton suddenly had a burst of energy, as if he's already accepted the reality of his impending death and wants to go out with a bang. I'm surprised by how casual Milton seems to be going about things. One minute, he's sad because he's going to die, but now he's accepting it. Like he doesn't want to fight this cancer that's quickly destroying him. I don't know why.

To that, Claire said, "Well, Milton has gone through the five stages of grief, which means that we've got to prepare ourselves for his inevitable death. If we don't, well..."

"I'm not sure about that," I said. "If Milton dies before we can get justice for him..."

"I'm already covering that story," Chelsea said as she came to join us. "This story will hopefully blow up on my blog, if nothing else will."

I already knew that many people have started to read Chelsea's blog, but I had no idea that those people had decided to invest themselves into knowing who Chelsea was and why she was the way she was. At least some people are finally starting to talk about how much bullying she was forced to endure when she was a kid, and how that bullying turned her into what she was today. Chelsea claimed that she had started her blog in the seventh grade when her computer class was learning to use LiveJournal. (The rest of us still had no concept of blogging at all.)

Chelsea then said, "Well, I'll interview Milton for his story, but I would be careful when dealing with Julian Palmer. Layla is his older sister."

I frowned, knowing that Julian was in my science class, but then again, Julian was the shy, silent type while his sister was loud. Yet, his sister had hurt Milton, and he's feeling ashamed for being related to her.

At cheer practice, however, Chesley said to us, "OK, guys, you've all improved significantly since we first got started, but we have to keep it up..."

"Whatever are you talking about?" said Lucy. "My group has already been going after those so-called "normal" losers since before this began, so what are you hoping to accomplish?"

"You girls need to step it up in terms of bitchiness," said Chesley. "If you are a bully, people won't like you; but if you play hard-to-get, well, you'll have them eating out of your hands in no time."

"Good," said Kelsey.

"Then again, you girls need to claw your way to the top and stop letting those rich kids push the rest of the school around," said Chesley. "In case you haven't noticed, the days of being pretty and popular are over; the age of the nerd has arrived. And it's time for the high schools (as well as the rest of society) to embrace the nerd instead of bullying them."

"Indeed," I muttered.

"So, what do we do?" said Mary.

"Oh, it's so easy," said Chesley. "All you have to do is to be nice to the nerds and the shy people and send those popular kids packing. Don't forget, it's not those who are popular that should own the school, it's the cheerleaders. And the sooner everyone else in the school knows that, the better we will all be."

Of course, Chesley's lessons consist of us making up scenarios of us destroying bullies, rich kids, and entitled students while helping nerds, shy people, and losers. That, and learning to wear the cheerleader outfits. (Well, I'm having a fun time dealing with outfits that are way too small for me, but that's another story.)

At the same time, the basketball team is being pushed to practice harder and longer than the cheer squad. Plus, Larissa managed to piss the team off with a uniform that was so bad that a number of the team quit in protest. (This was why Kaprice, Adrian, Dorian, Ansel, and Jaimeson were recruited to join the team.)

Speaking of which, Adrian and Dorian are complaining that they have to deal with Lucy every day, as she had been giving them the mother of all bitch-outs whenever she saw them. Yet we all knew that no matter how loud Lucy screamed, Adrian and Dorian Johanssen were never coming back home. And it was time for her to accept that.

Between learning about the other side of cheerleading, Milton's cancer, and other things, it was no big surprise that the Magical Secret Society learned the meaning of what was happening...