Cheerleaders Don't Cry

13

Albert Cooper

It was difficult to avoid several people at once.

It was Monday morning. I was exhausted, - I'd had trouble sleeping all weekend - I had an exam in AP Civics that I was hardly prepared for, and my arm stung from the tattoo removal session I'd had the day prior. The Florida outline had disappeared, but you could still plainly see the "NOLEGE IS POWER" block lettering. On top of that, the two friends that I'd thought I could trust were liars, and would no doubt relentlessly attempt to find me today and offer a bullshit explanation - and I wasn't in the mood for bullshit.

I managed to steer clear of both of them for the first half of the day - in the classes we shared, I sat in the furthest corner from them and avoided eye contact, and was the first one out when the bell rang. During lunch, I hid out in the library, in the 'Foreign Languages' section.

I made a fatal mistake in my 4th hour AP Spanish class, when I took a bathroom break in the middle of the hour. As I was leaving the men's bathroom, who should be posed at the drinking fountain but Kathy Jefferson. A silver chain with a star-shaped charm dangled from her neck, swaying slightly above the filthy water fountain as Kathy leaned over it. Her glasses had slid down her nose; her short blond hair swayed beneath her jawline, not pulled back in its usual ponytail.

Her eyes slid right and she saw me. Startled, she nearly choked, taking a quick step back from the fountain and wiping the water from her lip. The necklace fell back against her collarbone, the chain twisted from the jolt. She looked at me, eyes wide, an explanation waiting at the back of her throat, stifled.

I should've walked away.

I didn't.

"You never wear your hair down," I said. They weren't the angry words I'd been expecting. It was peculiar - at that very second, I felt no anger at all. I was simply confused, because here was Kathy Jefferson, and Kathy Jefferson was wearing her hair down.

She posed to speak, but no words came out. I doubt that was the first sentence she expected me to say. She'd probably been expecting anger too.

"It's Oliver, isn't it?" I asked in the midst of her perpetual silence. Her lips pinched at the sound of his name. "He likes it that way?"

She took a step forward, hands outstretched like she was trying to catch the poor, tattered remnants of our friendship. "It's not what you think - "

I took a step back. "I don't want to hear it." I started walking down the hallway. It was the opposite direction from my class, but it was the only direction that mattered because it was away from Kathy.

"Cooper, wait!" She hurried after me until she was in front of me. "It was ... we were ... I never... " She was flustered, at a loss for words. Kathy sighed, glanced at the pale fluorescent lights - the painful desperation that weaved her expression broke into her voice.

"It just happened," she said helplessly.

I laughed. My chest felt as though somebody had wrapped a million rubber bands around it, tighter and tighter until my heart burst. "That's the excuse you're going with? 'It just happened?'" There it was, the anger, flaming red and burning. "When did it just 'happen'? A month ago? When we were still together? Hell, maybe 'it happened' at the start of our relationship two years ago! Maybe I'm just a blind dumbass!"

Kathy shook her head, arms folded and shoulders hunched. Almost ashamed but not quite. "No no no, I never cheated," She insisted. "You know I'm not that type of person."

"Then what happened?" I remembered the day vividly - Halloween afternoon, meeting up at the coffee shop with my rejection letter and her acceptance letter. Her hair had been, rarely, down that day, but I'd barely noticed. "What was that excuse you gave when you dumped me? That I never listened to you?"