Beautiful Demons

10. My Best Attempt

"You have to wear blue and black." Agnes poked her head into my room and made a face at me in the mirror. "Demon pride!"

She was wearing a demon tattoo on her face like all the cheerleaders at school. She held one out to me and asked if I wanted help putting it on, but I stuck my tongue out at her. There was no way I was going to wear a blue demon on my face.

"Fine," she said. "You don't have to wear the demon, but you can at least put on a blue t-shirt."

I bit my lip and stared into my sparsely populated closet. Besides the pink tee I was currently wearing, I had a total of twelve shirts. None of them were blue. "How about black?"

She shrugged. "I guess that'll work."

"Why do we have to go to this stupid game anyway?"

"It's tradition," she said. "It's like a family outing during football season. Mrs. Shadowford never goes for obvious reasons, but Ella Mae likes the games. I think she used to be a cheerleader when she was in school."

I rolled my eyes. Cheerleaders. It was like I couldn't get away from them in this town.

"I'm going to try out for the cheerleading squad next year again," she said. She fell backward onto my bed and sighed. "I'm already nervous about it and tryouts aren't even until June."

"Why would you want to be a cheerleader?" I asked, thinking about how mean Tori and her friends were.

"Who wouldn't want to be part of that crowd?" she said. "They're the most beautiful girls in school." Agnes stood up and started leafing through my notebook of drawings that lay open on the end of the bed.

"Yeah, but just because you become a cheerleader doesn't mean you'll suddenly become beautiful," I said.

"Ouch. That was totally mean."

I spun around, black tank top in hand. "Oh, Agnes, I didn't mean it like that. You're adorable."

She sighed. "I know I'm not ugly or anything, but you just don't understand. When a girl makes the squad, she... changes."

"How?"

"You wouldn't understand," Agnes said. "It's like a makeover in a way. Take Allison, for example. A few years ago, she was kind of an ugly duckling. Then, she made it onto the cheerleading squad at the end of her eighth grade year. When we came back as Freshman, it was like she was totally transformed. Like some kind of summer miracle."

I changed into the black tank and searched through my stash of colorful ribbons for something demon blue. I found a royal blue silk ribbon and handed it to Agnes. She tied it around my wrist. "What's up with all the ribbons?" she asked.

"One of my foster moms worked at a crafts store. She always used to bring home tons of leftover ribbons," I said, feeling lame. "I don't know, I just like to wear them for color."

"Do you have another blue one?" she asked.

I smiled. "Sure," I said, and helped her fasten a matching blue ribbon around her ponytail."These are really good you know." She pointed to the drawings in my notebook. "Are you going to be an artist or something?"

"Probably not. I kind of suck." The truth was that I yearned to take art classes. Unfortunately, most of the public schools I'd been to had really crappy art programs, and there was no way I could afford to take classes anywhere else. I didn't like to talk about my art too much though. In my experience, sharing too much about your dreams and goals with someone was pretty much just giving them fuel to hurt you later. "It's really just for fun anyway."

"Okay, girls," Ella Mae called from downstairs. "I've got the van out front. You've got five minutes to get downstairs!"

Agnes took off running, but I hung back to see which picture she had been staring at with such intensity. The book was open to a pencil drawing I'd done of my mother. She gave me up for adoption when I was born, but I found a picture of her in my adopted parents' files once. They took it away from me and hid it somewhere, but I spent weeks after that trying to recreate it with my pencils. The drawing Agnes had been staring at was my best attempt.

"Harper," Ella Mae called. "Everybody's waiting for you, honey. Let's go."

I ran my finger across the drawing of the pendant my mother wore around her neck, then closed the notebook with a snap.

"Coming," I yelled, then headed down the stairs to join the group.