Page 42 of Hell's Kitten

I spendthe next several days in a dream, floating around in my own happy little bubble. Nothing can touch me. When I arrived in Paddle Creek, I thought my life had crumbled around my ankles and that there would be no way to recover. Now I have a stable home, I’m thriving at school, I’m cheering again, and I’ve got the most incredible, wonderful, sexy Daddy a kitten could ever ask for.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Half the time, cheer training is more stressful than it is productive. The team just doesn’t have a lot of experience, and although plenty of them are quite talented dancers and gymnasts, there’s just a lack of cohesion when it comes to stunting.

It’s not hard to understand why. Lakelyn is a terrific performer in her own right and has a great attitude, but sadly she’s a bit too nice and doesn’t yell at people when they’re being disrespectful. She’s only been captain since the start of this semester, so she’s still cutting her teeth in. I know she’s going to be awesome once she finds her feet. But the squad itself isn’t very disciplined.

Tara, on the other hand, doesn’t have any trouble chewing people out, especially when they don’t deserve it.

For a while, I just kept my head down and tried to fix things from within by coaching my own stunt group. But the funny thing about having a calm (albeit cat-filled) home and the devotion of a good man is that suddenly I’ve got about a hundred percent more energy than I’ve been operating with throughout the duration of my mom’s illness. Not to mention a hundred percent less tolerance for bullshit since the crap Parker pulled with me.

I don’t like bullies.

Today’s training session isn’t going well. It’s supposed to be a game-day practice, but our competition routine is in such a shambles that Lakelyn is using the last half an hour to try and work on our pyramid. The Snowdown is only a month away now, and we’re so not ready.

It just so happens that my base partner couldn’t make it today, so Alannah is stepping in as a substitute. This is why we’re friends. No matter how crushed she was not to make the comp squad, she’s always the first to training and gives a thousand percent, no matter what.

The trouble is that you and your stunt group can be as brilliant as you like. If the flyer next to you in the formation is determined to drag your girl down every time she goes up, everyone’s face-planting on the mat.

“Get it together, Connick!” Tara shrieks at Alannah. “You can’t bitch about not making the team if you can’t even put up a decent liberty extension!”

Lakelyn waves her hands. “Come on, everyone, that’s not productive. Why don’t we…um…?”

But seeing Alannah close to tears makes me snap. I know Lakelyn is just trying to keep the harmony for the whole squad, but Tara shouldn’t be allowed to crush people’s spirits just because she’s somehow managed to weasel her way onto the committee.

“There are four people in our stunt group and our lib is solid,” I say firmly, glaring at Tara. “Perhaps we should go over timings as a team to make sure the whole formation is secure?”

I don’t want to throw our neighboring group under the bus. But I’m also not willing to take the blame for something that isn’t our fault either.

“Oh,” Tara says in a dangerously fake nice tone. “You’re on the coaching team now, are you, Garras? Well, if you know everything, why don’t you just come over here and?—”

“Tara, enough!” Lakelyn cries in a rare display of frustration and annoyance. The entire room goes quiet. “I’m the captain, and I think drilling timings might actually help us.”

“I think so, too!” Professor Ulman pipes up from the bleachers, raising her hand. “Remember my ‘no ER’ rule, people.”

Tara gives Lakelyn a tight smile as she crosses her arms. “Fine,” she snips, then shoots me a glare before marching off to join her gang of lemmings that all give me the stink eye as well.

It’s nice to be popular.

Despite the tense atmosphere, we start marking the pyramid with our flyers standing on the ground in front of us as we practice the arm movements. It becomes obvious very quickly that some people are unsure or, worse, are confidently getting the motions wrong. But by the end of the session, we’ve got it pretty solid and even manage to do a shaky run-through of the sequence where no one falls to the ground.

I call that a win.

“Thanks, Jessie,” Lakelyn says warmly to me as we’re packing up our gear.

I shake my head. “You killed it, babe,” I tell her.

She grins and walks off, an extra spring in her step.

I deliberately don’t look around to see Tara’s or her gang’s reaction. Instead, I wait until Alannah is ready to head out, thenloop my arm through hers. “You also killed it today, you know,” I tell her.

She sighs and shrugs. “Maybe? Thank you. I just wish it was enough.”

We’ve talked at length about how she doesn’t want me to feel guilty for getting a spot when she didn’t, so I simply hold space for her to be sad. It isn’t fair. There are definitely people on the comp squad only because they’re friends with Tara and the other popular girls. I really thought we’d left all that shit in high school.

When you’ve held the hand of someone fighting for their life, that kind of petty politics is so astronomically unimportant.

“Just keep being you and they have no choice but to promote you when a spot becomes available,” I assure her. “Besides, Tara’s leaving next year, so fuck her.”

“No thanks,” Alannah says as her standard retort, grinning.

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