Major Crush(2)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I turned my back on Drew. We weren’t through with our discussion, but we weren’t going to solve anything by trading insults. A nd I wanted to make sure all A llison’s cubic zirconia were in place.

I was glad about the quasi-catfight. I was glad Drew had reprimanded me too. Now I was pissed with the band and with Drew, instead of mortified at myself for being such a bad drum major on my first try.

A nd it was nice to find out that Drew knew I existed, after all.

“I hate this town, I hate this town, I hate this town,” A llison chanted for a few minutes after we sat down in the stands. I sent Walter to fetch her makeup case from her car, knowing that makeup could distract her from anything. She would feel better when she was back to looking like her usual self.

Walter held up her mirror while she primped in the bleachers, since the bathroom was off-limits for the time being. She looked perfect again, dolled up in her glittering majorette costume, hair sculpted and curled around her tiara, eyes smoky, maroon lipstick perfect. A s if she hadn’t been about to kick the Evil Twin’s ass only five minutes before.

Walter offered to brave the concession stand for us. The entire band was there, and I didn’t want to deal with a hundred and fifty people who hated my guts. Twenty girls and one drum major had been enough.

Walter galloped down the stairs, and A llison turned to me. “You look like death. Let me put some makeup on you for once.”

I laughed. “I can’t wear your makeup. I’d really look like death in your Rum Raisin lipstick.”

A llison’s dad and my dad were business partners, and we lived next door to each other. So even though she was a year older than me, we’d always been inseparable. That is, until I quit the beauty pageant circuit. We’d grown apart in the past couple of years. But I needed to be a good friend to her because I was her only good friend.

Everybody liked A llison, but nobody wanted to get close to her. She came from the richest A frican-A merican family in town. Black kids made fun of her and called her snooty when we were in grade school. On the other hand, her family was one of only three A frican-A merican families in the country club on the lake that catered mostly to wealthy families vacationing from Montgomery or Birmingham. She didn’t like to play tennis with me there because she thought people were looking at her funny.

We both knew, and her parents kept telling her, that when she got to college, everything would be different. She was smart and beautiful, and it wouldn’t matter anymore that she was a rich A frican-A merican girl from a tiny town in A labama. The only sad thing was that she wouldn’t leave for college for another year. A year was a long, long time for her to tread water.

But Walter had escaped already. He’d just started boarding at the State School for Fine A rts in Birmingham, and he was home for Labor Day weekend. I was happy for him, because his home life wasn’t great—he lived with his mother in a bus at a campground. A nd because the State School for Fine A rts was one of the best high schools in A labama.

I was also happy for me. I’d spent practically the whole summer hanging out with him while A llison was at pageants, and I’d missed him for the week he’d been gone. But it was also a relief, because I was pretty sure he liked me as more than a friend. Walter was adorable, with big green eyes and an interesting sense of fashion that he’d developed from having to shop at the Goodwill store. But he wasn’t for me.

Maybe part of what made me so uncomfortable with him was that I understood completely how he’d developed a crush on me. I was a year older than he was, and I’d been his drum section leader in the band for the past year. He looked up to me. It was natural that he would have a crush on me.

Like I had one on Drew.

A llison leaned closer and said quietly, “You don’t want him to know you’re upset.”

Then, like the dorks we were, we both turned around and looked at Drew, who sat with his dad at the top of the football stadium. Grouped on the rows between us and Drew, several trumpet players and saxophone players glared at me like they wanted to pitch me off the top railing. In fact, Drew and his dad probably would have been glad to help me over.

I felt a pang of jealousy. Drew was close to his dad. I could tell the conversation Drew and his dad were having at the moment wasn’t pleasant, but at least they were having one. I hardly talked to my dad anymore.

“Foul!” Walter jeered at the game, startling me and making A llison jump on my other side. “Dom Perignon?” he asked in his normal voice as he slid onto the metal bench and handed a Coke to A llison and one to me.

I drained the Coke. The night was way too hot for a wool band uniform.

Walter watched me. “I put Drew’s band shoes back in his truck, like we found them.”

“Thanks.” Drew made me mad playing Mr. Perfect all the time. I had thought it would make me feel better to hide his lovingly polished band shoes so he had to wear his Vans with his band uniform. It hadn’t.

“So, what happened in the halftime show?” Walter asked. “It reminded me of the A labama Symphony Orchestra, but not in a good way. You know, before they start playing together, when they’re tuning up.”

A llison nodded. “There’s a point in the majorette routine when I’m supposed to throw the baton on one and turn on two. I looked up at Drew and thought, Is he on one? No, two. A nd then I looked over at you, and you were on, like, thirty-seven.”

I just shook my head. I was afraid that if I tried to talk about it right now, the pissed feeling would fade, the mortified feeling would come back, and I’d start bawling in front of the tuba players.

Walter slid his arm around my waist, and A llison draped her arm around my shoulders from the other side. I tried to feel better, not just sweatier. They were the two best possible friends.

But instead of appreciating their support, I was thinking what a bizarre trio of misfits we must have made from Drew’s high view. A llison, looking as glamorous as possible in her majorette uniform. Me, looking as unglamorous as possible in my masculine drum major uniform.

A nd Walter, a fifteen-year-old boy who’d finally made it out of the bus.

Someone slid onto the bench beside Walter. Oh no, Luther Washington or one of Drew’s other smart-ass trombone friends coming to rub it in. Or worse, the Evil Twin. I peered around Walter.

It was the new band director, Mr. Rush. Before I’d seen him today, I’d hoped that getting a new band director might help my predicament as queen band geek. Mr. O’Toole, who’d been band director for as long as I could remember, had gotten us into this mess by deciding we’d have two drum majors this year.