Chapter Text
The world had turned absolutely upside down on its axis. The polar ice caps were going to melt, pigs were about to take flight – Mandy Wiles was not inviting her, Beatrice Trudeau, to come cheer. Beatrice could read the disdain on her face while she did so, and thus, by her calculations, this was nothing more than some awful prank. How committed was she to making Beatrice look like a fool in front of … well, there was no one around right now, but still. Yes, how committed?
That was the question, right?
Committed enough that she had slid her backpack off of her shoulder, and was unpacking a cheer uniform from it. One that looked suspiciously close to Beatrice’s size, and all at once, she felt her cheeks heat up. She really needed to start showering only when certain there was no possibility for an audience. Or at least, in the shower with a completely obstructed view.
Especially if there was a possibility the viewer could be Mandy.
“Please?” Mandy repeated, and if she was deadpan, then Beatrice might not feel her skin crawl. But she seemed as serious as a deadly disease. “There’s no one else, Beatrice. You don’t even have to do any stunts. All you have to do is wave the pom-pom up and down and kick on rhythm. You can do that, right?”
“No!” Beatrice replied, and then amended, “I mean, yes I could do it, but no, I’m not going to! And I don’t know what on earth would make you think that I would want to cheer! Especially if it means doing you, the one person who has made my life miserable at this academy, anything that remotely resembles a favor! Even if helping you meant saving someone I loved, I would never even dare! I’m not an idiot, I know this is some sort of … prank or bet! And I won’t fall for it!”
She wanted Mandy to cry. Or beg – begging would do. But instead, Mandy just stood tongue in cheek, giving her head the smallest of shakes, before she asked: “You done?”
That snatched all the wind out of Beatrice’s sails. Meekly, she edged onto her mattress and crossed her hands in her lap, like she had just had an outburst in a Sunday service. “Yes,” she confirmed. But she saw Mandy gearing up for a second attack.
“Just shut up for a sec, okay?” Mandy held up the uniform, “This isn’t, like, my favorite idea either. You weren’t first choice. You weren’t even tenth. But I have an entire cheer team running to the bathroom to either throw up, or worse. I’m sure you’ve heard about the fucking plague hitting half the school.”
She had. “Yes, but … it’s affecting everyone at the same time?”
“Yeah.” It was short. Agitated.
“How is the entire cheer team sick, but conveniently not you or I?”
“You’re a smart girl; isn’t that your thing? How about you guess?” The eyebrow Mandy quirked made Beatrice want to singe it off her face with a bunsen burner.
Instead, she cast a glance downward at her folded hands, to begin puzzling. By her calculations, there was only one thing that her and Mandy had in common, though it was for different reasons. Everyone in the entire school knew that Mandy didn’t eat meat because she deduced it would destroy the figure that made her popular. Beatrice herself refused it because the institutions that raised animals specifically for consumption were cruel and uncivilized.
“Oh,” she finally replied. “The meat.”
“Yeah. And pretty much everyone else in the lunchroom was gobbling down Edna’s sloppy joes at lunch today. Except the football team and, I don’t know, maybe Petey Kowalski? If you won’t put on this fucking uniform, I guess I could try for him next.”
Beatrice lifted her gaze to the skirt and top in Mandy’s hand. Even looking at them made her feel anxious; it was the uniform of every arch nemesis she’d ever had since entering this school. But maybe it could be something so much more useful – leverage. The shoe was curiously on the other foot now, and bravery made a sudden experience, pushing Bea back off the mattress.
“What do I get in return if I do this for you?” She reached up and took her glasses by the arm, readjusting them to emphasize her superiority in this situation. “You need me so badly right now that you should be willing to give me something that’s worth the hassle.”
Mandy rolled her eyes so hard, her entire body went along with it. “Um, I don’t fucking know, what does a weirdo like you even want that I can give? You want, like, a date with Ted or something?”
“No!” She shot it down, repulsed. “I want … immunity. Like when someone testifies against their accomplice in a court of law.”
“Immunity from what?”
“From you and all your friends treating me like mud on their shoes all the time.” She stood firm. “No more stealing things from me, or drawing on my student of the month picture in the library, or calling me names.”
“That’s all?”
Mandy’s attitude caught her off guard. Doubt crept in. “Yes?”
“Don’t you wanna negotiate the same treatment for your little rat-faced friends, too?” And before they were even done hashing it out, she was handing over the cheer outfit loner, like there was no doubt Bea had already agreed.
“Um,” she said bashfully, “Does it matter? You don’t really bother them much, do you?”
“I mean, I don’t,” Mandy continued. “But yeah. Sure. I’ll leave you alone or whatever, just hurry up and put this on.”
She didn’t even leave Beatrice alone to change, only turned her back and began examining her nails. Her incessant foot tapping made Bea’s heart start racing in her ears. She was shaking while unbuttoning her jumper, which made doing that part exceedingly difficult. As if Mandy was a predator and Bea herself was a wounded gazelle, she had eyes on her the entire time, from the mirror. When would the camera appear? When would she throw banana peels on her, produced from the very same backpack that the uniform had been stashed in?
To make sure the uniform hadn’t been riding around in there with something disguting, Beatrice gave the outfit a small sniff. It smelled … clean. Like washing powder. Covering her bases, she also gave it a shake, to break loose any itching powder that may have been stashed inside. When nothing but a single red hair fell out, Beatrice paused to really examine Mandy’s reflection, back still turned.
Was this real?
“Why are you taking so long?” Mandy suddenly asked, and it spooked Bea into a hussle.
“Sorry,” she murmured, while she went about shimmying into the cheer skirt, and stretching her arms through the top. One quick glance in the mirror and … yes, her stomach suddenly felt like it was going to drop out of her. There was so much skin showing, and she had cleavage, and her legs seemed far too long for her body. Nothing looked anatomically correct, though maybe that had something to do with the fact that Beatrice hadn’t seen her body, not like this, in years.
She swallowed so thickly that she knew she was making extra mucus.
“It fits,” Mandy told her, and Beatrice threw the look of a cornered animal over her shoulder to see her nemesis looking her up and down. “Good,” she continued, “I figured you for a medium, but sometimes they run a little small. Probably because Burton likes them that way.”
“He – what? What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Come on,” Mandy motioned for her to follow. “We’re already late. We only have like, an hour to teach you to have a little bit of fucking rhythm before we go out there and cheer our asses off.”
The first thing Beatrice suspected was that Mandy might force her to take her glasses off, and when Bea was the one who brought it up, Mandy told her no, not yet. You need to be able to see for now.
Which all in all was a good point, but Beatrice had seen so many movies where a girl like her gets a make-over, and the first thing to go was the eyewear. Though, Mandy also didn’t ask her to change her hair or hide the fact that she had braces, either. It was just forty-five minutes of her (Mandy that was) knuckling down and working hard on getting Beatrice to understand how to move her body.
The frustration was visible for the entirety of it.
Beatrice wanted to quit after six tries with no progress – how is it that you don’t understand how to make an L with your body, it’s not rocket science, Trudeau. Yes, until Mandy had said that . Wound up by all her nerves, Beatrice had simply wailed, well maybe if it was rocket science, it would be easier for me! In that specific moment, the atmosphere around the pair of them was so heated that she saw tension rock Mandy’s body, like she was about to turn around and backhand her.
Beatrice not only flinched, but took a step back, turning her one shoulder towards Mandy, to protect herself from the incoming assault.
That wasn’t it at all, though. It wasn’t the aggression that Bea had grown accustomed to from this girl, rather, a fiery sudden confidence. In those moments, Mandy had cooked up an idea, bringing together something Beatrice hated, and loved, to create a symbiosis that was … alright, she would admit to it.
Smart .
“You’re into anatomy because you’re in pre-pre-med, right?”
That Mandy actually knew something like that about her made Bea feel exposed. Still, “Yes, that’s true. Studies of the human body are very interesting to me. For instance, did you know that a person will produce, on average, forty-thousand liters of saliva in one entire lifetime? That is, if the average lifetime is seventy to seventy-five years –”
“ Thrilling ,” she brushed it away; Bea felt her cheeks light up in embarrassment. “So, I’m gonna try something. Instead of trying to match the rhythm or do what I’m telling you to do, why don’t you just watch. Pay attention to my anatomy.”
“Won’t that be odd for you? Me looking like you’re a medical cadaver I’m examining?” Beatrice argued, though she wasn’t too terribly worried, if she were honest.
Mandy exhaled a laugh that sounded strangely old. “Girl, the whole school looks at me like I’m just a body all the time. And I don’t really care, as long as I’m performing good. That makes me feel awesome. So get over it, and watch.”
Beatrice knew better than to look away a second time. Mandy had a temper, and she was a bitch, but at least for the moment, she was talking to her like a semi-neutral person, instead of an enemy or, indeed, a friend. If this were class, and she were really learning about Mandy’s anatomy, she would sketch and take notes.
Reaching down, Mandy took the tight hem of her cheer top, then tugged it all the way up to bunch underneath her breasts, showing off her entire midsection. Bea supposed she didn’t know what she had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been rock solid muscle underneath. Mandy’s inhales were lungfuls of long and steady breath, making her diaphragm expand completely, then contract in a way that was almost hypnotizing. It was like pure power and steadfastness.
Almost dangerous . In. Out.
“Your core does all the heavy lifting in anything you do in cheer,” she explained. “When you kick, when you move, when you balance, this area right here,” she drew a circle around her belly button. “It does everything for you.”
“It’s the center of gravity for the whole body,” Beatrice agreed.
There was a nod, but Beatrice could still sense it was dismissive. Her inflection, though, was less so. “Yeah. Sure, that makes sense. C’mere,” she reached out and took Bea by her arms, and for the briefest of interludes, Beatrice was almost certain Mandy was going to throw her down and to finally start her assault.
When all she did was move a tense Beatrice to one side of her, then take a thin, trembling hand in hers, the world whirled topsy-turvy again.
She rested Beatrice’s palm on that taught, almost mean slab of muscle. “Here, feel what happens,” she commanded, then released Beatrice to throw a kick out in front of herself, into the space Bea had been standing in just a moment ago. Along with it, she pumped her opposite fist into the air. Underneath Beatrice’s touch, her abdomen felt like it went even tougher . Impossibly so; every stretch of it was stone.
It felt … not so unlike the clandestine touches Beatrice had with Jimmy Hopkins, brushing past him in the hallway and reaching out for one quick feel of his muscular arm. She had always thought, for such a small man, he had an impressive body, if he felt that way all over.
Was Mandy the same? Taught everywhere, but just leaner?
“I see,” she finally responded, and, seemingly encouraged by her response, Mandy repeated the motion, but on the opposite side.
“Keep your hand there, but follow me,” Mandy demanded. In a motion that was powerful, and surprisingly graceful as well, she sidestepped, rolling her arms in front of her like a wheel.
Beatrice felt a rhythm slide through her torso like a snake; it reverberated from all the way up by her pectoral major, down through her rectus abdominis. It was like … she was working her machine in ways Beatrice could only study about.
After she sidestepped back to her original spot, Mandy was suddenly close enough to Bea that they were against one another. They exchanged inhales in the same space. Hers: high-strung. Mandy’s: self-assured. Beatrice absorbed several details about Mandy through what felt like an osmosis – her scent, which was pleasant. Her warmth, which was growing with her physical activity. The side profile of her face, illuminated from behind by Bullworth’s cheap gymnasium lights.
“Easy,” Mandy said, as if she could convince Bea of that just by suggesting it. “Now we switch. You do what I just did,” she reached out to gather Beatrice’s shirt and well, of course, Beatrice shot away from her a step, but Mandy only followed her. “C’mon Beatrice, we have, like, fifteen minutes until pre-game, and this is the one step I’m gonna ask you to do. Cross my heart, I’m not gonna try and kick your ass.”
“I don’t want you touching my bare abdomen!” Beatrice refused to budge, shooting a glare full of sharp disdain.
“Okay! Jesus, can I touch you over the shirt, then?” How many times had that been asked of Mandy herself? Beatrice was starting to feel this sticky feeling in her gut, and she hypothesized it was sympathy, because something about Mandy seemed exhausted, now that she wasn’t attacking.
So, Beatrice reluctantly nodded. So long as it made Mandy stop looking at her like that.
“Okay. I’m just gonna put my hand right here, on your belly,” she slid her open palm, fingers all splayed, onto Beatrice’s mid-section. It was a gentle touch, one that tricked Bea’s skin into pulling tight to form goosebumps. “When I say go, tighten up in here, kick your right leg out, and throw your left arm up as high as you can. Ready?”
“Yes,” Bea murmured.
“Three … two … one … KICK!”
And although it annoyed her that Mandy insinuated she was going to say go as the signal, but then said kick instead, somehow, Beatrice caught her meaning. Listened to her, and felt stricken with an unfamiliar strength when she kicked up high. The fist-pump followed. Her body’s response was purely physical; without Mandy’s urging, she changed sides and then did it again, adding a little hop, like she’d seen Mandy do before.
Not that she was ever really paying attention to Mandy’s body before. If she had done so, it was purely out of hatred, the way someone who was arachnophobic might stare blankly at a hoard of spiders running over the floor.
“You fucking got it,” strange, how good it felt to be praised by someone who previously only ever put Beatrice down. But that was Mandy’s special skill – she was a team leader, so it had been said by so many of the teachers here at Bullworth. “See? Not that hard. Now try the sidestep,” she encouraged, giving Bea’s belly a little bit of a pat, before motioning to the right with a nod. “One step that way, and then back.”
These were, at the base of things, the simplest of the moves that Mandy could teach her, and Beatrice was not under any delusion that sidestepping and high kicking only halfway up her height was proof she could do any better than this. However, the physical response she was experiencing, which she was certain would be uncomfortable, what with the sweat and all that, suddenly created an adrenaline response in her. How curious!
It was a sensation that she felt coursing through her veins still, when Mandy was dragging the pair of them out onto the field. The stands were full of Bullworth citizens. People Beatrice was both familiar and unfamiliar with. People who, undoubtedly, would have quite a lot to say come Monday.
For once, however, Beatrice was not planning ahead. It was Friday night football. Her vision was awful anyhow, and thus she couldn’t see how many people were watching with scrutiny. Because yes, Mandy had eventually asked her to take off her glasses, for fear that she’d send them flinging off her face as they did their last minute routine.
For their audience, it may have been an incredibly dull showing, watching her do the same high kick and sidestep for the entire game. But for Bea, and she was loath to admit this, it was the most exciting moment she’d had since receiving a report card decorated with a full house of A’s