Page 5 of The Handoff

“I’m getting two cans and drinking them like a junkie!”

Tanya laughed. “You make me laugh. Don’t drink them too fast. You’ll be doing your backflip and then end up puking all over Fiona.”

We both stopped walking and laughed as the vision hit us. We weren’t thinking of the past anymore but talking about getting on the squad and making a stamp on the cheerleading team.

***

It was time to face the music. We left the cafeteria after not only drinking one Coke, but two. As we headed to the gym for tryouts, a couple of girls walked in front of us and stopped.

“You’re Lisa, right?”

I nodded, knowing that if they stopped us from getting to the tryouts, then we would be late and our chances of competing were out.

“Yes.” I walked past them, but they fell into step beside us.

“It’s just that we heard what happened yesterday. I’m Lacey, and this is Sandra. We want to say that you’re our hero… well, you both are.”

“Say what?” Tanya asked.

“Yeah, we’ve been trying to get onto the cheerleading team for years. It’s a bit late now since we’re seniors, but Fiona’s been here since the beginning and has stopped us from trying out every year. She stopped many people from trying out. But how you stood up to her yesterday… it was unreal,” Lacey said.

“We weren’t there, but we heard about it. Look on Instagram. You have a lot of followers. #LisaandTanya #UCLAcheer,” Sandra said.

“We’ll check it out later. We need to run, we’re going to be late,” Tanya said.

I found myself speechless once again, not because they had said those kind words, but because someone put my photo on Instagram. Someone, somewhere, had videoed me doing the backflip, and I was on social media—something everyone in my family told me to avoid like the plague. Yet, I’d managed to not do that, and I hadn’t even been here for a month yet. What a mess. Maybe getting on the team wasn’t a good idea. I could get on the team and then within days, my cover could be blown. Not only would I lose the one friend that I had in a short time, but they could force me to leave. Only one person on campus knew my true identity, and that was the dean. He wasn’t someone I was going to bump into or even be seen with on campus.

I had to get rid of the video. It wouldn’t take long for everyone to put two and two together and figure out my real identity. A wave of panic went through my body. I had to get rid of it.

The question was, how?

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