The Giving Quilt (21 page)

With that, the coach and judges left the gym.

Candidates and audience members spilled from the bleachers and met on the gym floor. Michaela exchanged hugs with fellow candidates and a few friends who had come to watch, but after a while she searched out Emma in the crowd.

“You were wonderful,” Michaela said, hugging her.

“Thanks. You were even more wonderful.”

“Where should we wait for the scores? It'll be hours until they're ready. Should we get something to eat?”

Emma pressed a hand to her stomach and winced. “I don't think I could.”

“Me neither.”

They left the gymnasium and went down the hall to wait in the concourse, where soon nearly all of their competitors and the audience joined them.

At first the atmosphere was loud and animated, as candidates and spectators alike chatted excitedly and some of the candidates began walking through their original routines. As one hour turned into two, then dragged out to three, their enthusiasm waned. Most of the audience had left long ago, and even many of the candidates had headed out, although they soon returned with bags from fast-food restaurants.

Emma was a nervous wreck. “What's taking the judges so long?” she asked. “What's so hard about adding up a few points?”

“Maybe their calculators broke,” Michaela suggested. “Maybe there's a tie.”

Emma wrung her hands and paced.

At ten o'clock, one of the senior cheerleaders dashed in. The candidates immediately gathered around as she taped two sheets of paper to the wall. “Finalists' names are listed in numerical order,” she said, raising her voice to be heard, and then she hurried off before she was mobbed.

Emma and Michaela were at the back of the crowd, and they waited impatiently as people near the front found their names on the lists and shouted with joy or slunk off, dejected.

“What are you worried about?” Number Fifty-eight asked Michaela, grinning as he passed her on his way back from finding his own name on the list. “You know you made it.”

Michaela smiled back but kept inching her way forward to see the list for herself.

Finally she pushed her way to the front, close enough to see that one list was for men and the other for women. She went to the latter with Emma close behind. Quickly she ran her eyes over the list. Emma found her own name, shrieked, grabbed Michaela's arm, and jumped up and down. Michaela paused to hug her before Emma ran off to celebrate, and then she turned back to the list.

The gap between six and eleven was still there.

She read the list a third time.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and forced herself to look again at the list, reading each letter of each name to be sure she wasn't mistaken.

She wasn't.

In a daze she returned to her seat. Emma was pulling on her coat. “I can't believe it,” she exclaimed. “Isn't this great? Let's go back to your place and practice our original routines.”

“I don't have to practice my original routine,” Michaela said, numb.

“Well, of course you don't, but I need all the practice I can get. You can help me with mine.”

“Okay.” Mechanically, Michaela rose and began putting on her coat.

Emma gave her an odd look. “What's wrong?”

“I didn't make the cut,” Michaela forced herself to say, still not believing it.

“What? That's impossible.”

Michaela shrugged and fumbled with her coat buttons.

“I don't believe it. You're serious.”

She nodded.

“I didn't know. I stopped reading at number three.” Emma's face was stricken. “Michaela, when I said you didn't need to practice your original routine, I meant—”

“I know.” Michaela headed for the door, longing to put the celebration of the better candidates behind her. “I'm sorry, but—I need to go home.”

She trudged back to the dorm alone.

As she undressed and climbed into bed, two thoughts kept returning to her. All that hard work for so many months, and nothing to show for it. All that confidence and certainty transformed into profound humiliation.

She'd thought she would make the team. Everyone who had seen her practice had told her she would make it. And she didn't even make it past the first cut.

What had gone wrong?

She fell asleep without figuring out the answer.

The next day she slept until noon, then lay in bed for another hour wondering how to spend the weekend and the rest of her college years now that she no longer had cheerleading. At half past one, her phone sang out Bob Dylan. The times were a-changin', all right.

Michaela rolled onto her side and put her pillow over her head.

Five minutes later, her mother called again, and this time Michaela answered. In a voice like lead, she told her what had happened. “Oh, baby angel,” her mother said, sighing. “I'm so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“I'm sure you did your best.”

“I did, but I wasn't flawless.”

“I doubt anyone was flawless,” her mother said. “You know, there's always next year.”

“Oh, please.” Michaela flung an arm over her eyes. “I did the absolute best I could. If I wasn't good enough this year, I won't be good enough next year.”

“That's the wrong attitude.”

“Oh, really? Then what's the right attitude?”

“Why don't you contact the athletic department and ask to go over your scores? Find out your weaknesses and fix them.”

“I didn't think I had any weaknesses.” She had remembered the Hell Dance, her tumbling run was perfect, the stunts were solid—she had run through her performance countless times in her mind, and she still couldn't figure out why she hadn't at least made the finals.

“All the more reason to find out why the judges ruled as they did, don't you think? Maybe it was something silly like—I don't know—your music choice, or your tumbling run went out of bounds, or some other technicality.”

“Tracking down a technicality won't get me on the team.”

“Hiding in bed for the rest of your life won't get you on the team, either.”

Maybe her mother had a point. Michaela had done her best, but admittedly, she hadn't given a perfect performance; no one had. By asking the coach to help her improve for next year, she would prove how dedicated and determined she truly was.

“I'll do it.” She kicked off the bed covers and put on her robe and slippers, suddenly famished. “I'll call her first thing tomorrow morning before she has a chance to throw out the judging forms. Wait. Maybe I should call and leave a message on her answering machine.”

“You could go see her in person tonight at tryouts.”

“You're kidding,” Michaela said. “You must be completely out of your mind. I can't face them, not after yesterday.”

“Why not? You don't have anything to be ashamed of. So you didn't make first cuts. So what? You tried your best and you never gave up. Surely they'll respect that.”

“That's not the way it works.” Michaela wasn't sure how to explain it to someone who had never been a cheerleader. “They made the cut; I didn't. They're—they're at a different level now. No one who fails first cuts ever goes to the second night of tryouts.”

“Not even to sit in the audience and cheer on friends?”

Michaela thought of Emma. “No, not even then.”

“Oh, I see,” her mother said, exasperated. “No mingling of the classes.”

“Exactly,” said Michaela, although her mother made the custom sound silly.

“Michaela, honey, you can't let them scare you away. You're just as good as they are, and I'm not talking about cheerleading skills.”

“I'm not scared.”

“Prove it. Go to the second night of tryouts, if only to see what to expect next year. While you're there, talk to the coach about going over your scores.”

Eventually her mother convinced her. That evening, Michaela went to the auxiliary gym to wish Emma good luck and to apologize for not helping her practice the previous night. Emma seemed so happy to see her that Michaela found herself glad she had come, despite the curious glances of the other finalists. She found the coach and, burying her hurt feelings, forced a confident smile onto her face and made arrangements to go over her scores the following day. She was careful to express that she wasn't contesting the outcome; she merely wanted to be better prepared next year. Then Michaela went to the main gym and took a seat in the bleachers with the audience.

Emma performed well, but so did everyone else, and since the scores were cumulative, the previous night's errors still haunted her. It would be close.

Afterward she waited with Emma for the scores to be posted.

“I knew it,” Emma said flatly when her name was not on the list.

“You did your best,” Michaela said, knowing that it was little comfort. Emma was a junior, and this was her last chance to make the team.

“I know. My best wasn't good enough.” Emma hurried off to the locker room, where she had left her things, and Michaela trailed after her. Before going home, they went to a restaurant on campus and consoled themselves with a large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.

The following afternoon, Michaela met the coach in her office on the second floor of the athletic center. The coach motioned for her to take a seat at a round table in the corner as she dug around in her bag for the score sheets. “I haven't had a chance to go over them yet,” she said. “It's been so crazy lately.”

“I can imagine,” Michaela said politely. She took her binder and pen out of her backpack and prepared to take notes. Whatever the coach told her to fix, she would.

“Here they are.” The coach pulled a manila folder from her bag and brought it to the table. When she opened it, Michaela saw two stacks of scoring sheets with rubber bands wrapped around them. These two groups were further subdivided into smaller piles fastened with paper clips. The coach took the smaller of the two rubber-banded piles and set it aside. “These are from the second night,” she explained with a little laugh. “We won't be needing these.”

Michaela managed a smile. “No, I guess not.”

The coach removed the rubber bands from the first pile and took the first paper-clipped stack from the top. The score sheets were organized by event rather than by candidate, so they would have to go through each pile to find Michaela's scores. This would give them a chance to see how Michaela compared with the other candidates.

“First we have the Crusader Cheer.” The coach threw Michaela a sympathetic glance as she leafed through the stack. “Most people did pretty well on this, so any mistake would count heavily against you. See here? Out of twenty points, your competitors received a seventeen, a twelve, a fifteen, whoops, here's a five . . .” She flipped through the sheets until she found the average for Number Eight. Then she stopped.

“What is it?” Michaela asked.

“Well, you got a nineteen. So the Crusader Cheer wasn't the problem.”

Michaela nodded, not surprised. “Actually, I thought I did well on that.” The Hell Dance had to have been her undoing. She was sure of it.

Next they went through the tumbling run scores, which ranged widely. The lowest score Michaela saw for other candidates was a two, and the highest was an eighteen. “Tumbling's difficult,” the coach said, still sympathetic. “A back handspring is the absolute minimum for cheerleading at this level.”

“I have a back handspring.” She had dozens. She found it disconcerting that the coach didn't remember.

The coach found Michaela's sheets, then hesitated and bit her lip. “I gave you a twenty,” she murmured, then gave Michaela a quizzical look. “Now I remember you. You're the one who did all those back handsprings across the floor, right?”

Michaela nodded.

The coach pursed her lips and continued through Michaela's tumbling scores. The others were similarly high, except for one. That judge had given her a two and, in the line for comments, had written, “Show-off.”

“But you told us to do the best we could,” Michaela protested.

“I know I did, and you should have.”

Without making eye contact, the coach plowed through the rest of the scores. The pattern repeated itself for both stunts and the Hell Dance, where all the scores were in the high teens except for those from one judge. Even so, Michaela received the highest score overall for tumbling and the second-highest for the Hell Dance. She wasn't a math major, but she was sure that should have been enough to get her through first cuts.

Then the coach came to the last category: appearance. She chewed her lower lip before reluctantly showing Michaela her average.

“A four?” Michaela said, astonished. “I'm a four?”

“Maybe you were marked down for being over the weight limit.” She looked Michaela up and down, concealing the score sheets with her arm. “Although . . . that doesn't seem to be a problem.”

Michaela rolled her eyes. “Hardly.” She leaned forward and peeked at the score sheets, only to discover that one of the judges had given her a zero. “What?” she cried, snatching up the page. She read the comment aloud. “‘Arrogant, should be sweeter.' Are you kidding me? Who wrote that?”

“I can't tell you.” The coach shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “But it wasn't me.”

“I don't believe this.”

“Maybe it was your clothes. What did you wear?”

“Dress shorts and a polo top.” Most of the candidates had worn T-shirts and gym shorts.

“Maybe . . .” The coach seemed to fumble for an excuse. “Maybe next time you could dress up a bit more.”

Michaela shot her a look of disbelief, picturing herself doing a tumbling run in a sequined evening gown and high heels. “So the verdict is that I'm an ugly show-off.”

“Well—”