Rah Rah Rah Chapter 2

2 Cash on the Barrelhead

That's a saying Dad uses sometimes, which means having cash right there ready.  And that was when Mom first started really regretting me getting into cheerleading.  Fund-raising!  See, for years our peewee football team in Snowden has been called the Snowden Steelers because, well, everybody around here is a Steelers fan except for a few weirdoes (no, not Weirdo, weirdoes!) who like the Ravens or the Eagles or the Redskins.  Well, I guess it's okay to like the Redskins now that Weirdo's friend Abbie's brother Travis plays for them, but that's different.  But anyway, now that we have Darius Allen High they decided to change the name of the peewee football team, and since the school's colors are red, blue, and white, they decided to change the name of the team to Patriots and make the team's colors the same as the school's colors.  And that meant the cheerleaders needed new uniforms too, so guess what?  Fund-raising!

That usually doesn't bother Mom, because she's done fundraising for my soccer team and my Little League team and for Girl Scouts and for our dance school too (me and Weirdo and Snotface all do dance classes, the one really girly thing Mom has no problem with), and for our school class's big field trip every year.  The thing is, she never had to do fundraising with the other cheerleader parents before!  And you know something?  You ever see that TV show about the little kids who do beauty pageants like when they're four years old and stuff?  Well, cheerleading moms are kind of like those moms!  It's like it's not enough that their kid is in cheerleading, they have to make sure their kid is better than the others!  I mean, even at our first practice that summer before school started, there were some of the girls actually wearing makeup to practice!  Makeup, and hair extensions that were like totally obvious because I know like almost all  of them and their hair isn't nearly that long in real life, and of course they wear all the best-label stuff, and run around with their noses in the air like they're better than everybody else.  I showed up just in a pair of white running shorts and a little aquamarine tank top and the pair of Keds Mom bought me for camp, and my hair in my usual pigtails, and those snippy little witches acted like I was a homeless person!  I know for a fact that Dad makes more money than most of their whole families, not to mention Mom being a published professor, and there they were acting like I was just trash to them!

I would have just walked right out except for a couple things.  The first one, well, you already know I was doing it for Clinton, and I couldn't quit on him!  The other, well, I wasn't about to let those snippy little prisses make me look like a wimp!  And, well, I wasn't alone.  See, Jillian Burton's been a cheerleader for—well, for as long as Colton Walters has played football!  Yeah, I know how stupid I was back when I like-liked him along with Jill, but I didn't take it as crazy as Jill did!  But I was happy to have her there now, because she knew about the routines and practiced with me before the first practice, and most of all because she was a real friend and not snippy like the other snippy little prisses.  And as far as those prisses who think they're just like all that, Jill's just as cute as they are, especially with her new hairstyle, sort of flipped down over one side that makes her look like a real diva, well, except for her glasses!  And ever since I sort of fell for Clinton and stopped worrying about Colton, it's like Jill and me are even better friends now because we're not after the same boy (but I'm still going to beat her at Accelerated Reader this year!).

And then, surprise of surprises, Merri Howland came out for cheerleading!  I know, she's kind of fat for it, but she's not really that fat, and she's really cheerful like a real cheerleader should be, and not prissy like those other little witches!    And she got her hair cut very cute, too, all fluffed out around her shoulders, so I don't care what those other little prisses think, Merri deserved to be there!  I asked her why she came out when she showed up at the middle school practice field, and she said her new friend was going out and talked her into it.  Well, I knew who she was talking about, this girl who joined our class right at the end of last year and then went to Camp Evergreen with us.  Her name is Sheri Price, and she lives with her mom in a big old house across the university campus that used to be part of old Henschel's Farm where Weirdo and Joey go to make out sometimes when they think nobody notices (and probably play tie-up too, but hey!).  They have like all sorts of pets, and Merri said they even own a horse, and since Merri just loves animals she and Sheri were like instant friends!  I don't mind that, especially since I spend so much time with Clinton now, and actually Sheri's pretty nice.  You can tell she has money too, but she doesn't act all snippy like a lot of the other girls do, just sort of quiet but friendly, especially with Merri.  Plus I had my own new camp friend to join with me.  You guys know Alyssa Anthony, don't you?  She's kind of tall and skinny like me, but with sort of red, strawberry blonde hair, and she moved to Snowden with her mom and her dad and is in my class this year.  Trust me, it's good to have friends when you have to be around all those other prissy witches!

Well, we had all sorts of paperwork for our moms to fill out, of course, and after that was when Mrs. Simpson gave us her big fund-raising speech about how we needed new uniforms and would have to raise the money to buy them for the whole squad.  We were going to be selling pizzas, and candy, and cookie dough, and having car-washes and bake sales.  She showed us the choice of uniforms the moms had picked out for us to choose from, and ended up asking for parent volunteers to help with the fund-raising, which is when Mrs. (or should it be Ms. because she's divorced?) Price volunteered to handle some of the fundraising stuff.

Big mistake!  See, the one thing I saw right away about all those cheerleader moms is that they don't like new people coming in and taking over any of their stuff, and Ms. Price was getting all sorts of nasty looks from some of the other moms when she jumped up and volunteered.  And you know, it didn't help that Sheri is like the prettiest girl in the whole squad (except for me, of course, ha ha!  I'm just kidding!), which had them jealous already.  She's got long brown hair that's wavy and shiny, and big blue eyes and a kind of baby-doll face, and that's naturally, without any makeup or hair extensions or any of that stupid stuff.  It was bad enough for her when it was just at school or at camp, but now that she was cheerleading you could just tell it was going to get worse!  Well, actually, a whole lot of things got way worse in a big hurry!

Well, you probably already know how it all started.  Yeah, stupid rumors.  That's always the way it is with us girls and moms, you know.  People start saying things, and pretty soon stuff shows up on like Facebook (which I'm not allowed to have one yet, or Weirdo either, and even Snotface has to let Mom see everything she puts up on her wall), and it's usually nasty stuff like about how Ms. Price did bad stuff like cheat on Mr. Price which was why she lived apart from him, and about how Mr. Price wasn't Sheri's real father and stuff, and other stupid stuff like that.  It's all so stupid!  And it hurt Sheri's feelings real bad, which of course is sort of the point of doing it.  You could tell there were kids and moms trying to get Sheri to quit the squad, just like some of them were trying to get me to quit the squad!  But it was different in my case, they were just jealous because I do better in school than them, and I'm more athletic and I figured out the routines just as quick as they did (well, sort of thanks to Jill for that).  And yeah, like Weirdo says, I can do the mean-girl stuff just as good as they do, but Sheri really can't, and I really mean can't!  She's sort of like a little puppy you have to protect all the time!  

The worst one of the bunch—well, come on, after all the other stories Snotface and her other Snoop friends have told you, are you surprised?—was that snotty little total witch Cassidy Simpson!  You remember her from that "evil Easter egg" mystery we had?  The one those two guys were going to kidnap and a whole bunch of us got kidnapped trying to rescue her and she was like totally ungrateful for it?  Yeah, that Cassidy Simpson!  She's a couple years younger than me, but she thinks she's just the hottest thing there is, sort of exactly like her mom and just about every Simpson girl I've ever heard of!  Well, she and her mom, in charge of the cheerleaders, just wouldn't quit on either Sheri or Ms. Price!  Cassidy kept telling Sheri she was doing everything wrong and that she wasn't any good as a cheerleader, and Mrs. Simpson always got on Ms. Price's case about the fundraising, doing the same thing Cassidy did to Sheri about saying she was doing everything wrong and didn't she know anything and a whole lot of stuff like that.  And then it got even worse!

See, Mrs. Simpson let Ms. Price be in charge of the pizza fundraiser, which was our first one of the year, but she wouldn't let her use the checking account the cheer squad has for our money.  I know this because Mom got over me being a football cheerleader enough to start taking me to practice, which was good because Snotface was getting so into that big perv Mitchell Danielson that she didn't have time to take me to practice, and Mom would complain after every practice about how everybody was treating everybody else.  She figured Ms. Price got the pizza fundraiser because those big pizza kits are so clumsy and hard to keep cold like they're supposed to be and Mrs. Simpson didn't want bothered by it.  

Well anyway, Ms. Price collected all the money from us one practice to check it against our order sheets (I sold more than anybody except Cassidy Simpson and Merri Howland, who by the way was getting picked on so bad because of her weight that I wanted to bash a few people!), and then put it in a big envelope that she put in her car.  I saw the money, in one of those big plastic envelopes that zipper on top, sitting in Ms. Price's SUV (it had the name Outback on the back, but I don't know all that much more about cars, so it didn't matter much to me), and she kept it locked up in her car until the end of practice when Mrs. Simpson was going to start us on the cookie dough fundraiser.  Well, practice went pretty much like usual, with the prissy little witches prancing around like they were the greatest things in the world while the rest of us concentrated on practicing our routines with most of the moms gathered around in little bunches talking.  We took a break because it was so hot that day, then Ms. Price came up from the parking lot looking like she was in a total panic, and she yelled out that the money was gone!  

Some of the moms, but not Mrs. Simpson, went with her back to the parking lot to check around again, but they couldn't find it!  I went down when it looked like we weren't going to keep practicing, and saw Mom with Ms. Price rooting around in her Outback like they were looking for the money.  "Did somebody break into your car, Ms. Price?" I asked, wondering how somebody could have gotten into her car when it was locked up, and the only thing I could figure was that somebody broke a window or something to get at the envelope of money.  But I didn't see any broken windows!

"I don't know how, honey, but they did!" Ms. Price said, so upset that it looked like she wanted to start crying!  Well, if I'd lost a thousand or so dollars, I'd want to start crying too!  Sheri must have heard her, because she and Merri were right there in a minute, trying to help, but then Mrs. Simpson said something that made me so mad I wanted to hit something!

"You can stop pretending to look for that money, Ellen (Ms. Price's first name, by the way)!  We know you stole it!"  Ooh, I just wanted to hit her as hard as I could!