jamie

one of the girls on my pee wee cheerleading squad, jamie, and i became good friends right from the start. first of all, we were the only fat kids on the squad. she was smaller than me but still had a pudgy little freckly face and dark brown hair, cut to her chin with bangs. to be honest, she reminded me a lot of libby, only she giggled less and wasn't as imaginative. jamie and i bonded over our lack of cheerleading prowess and ended up being best friends from the time we were six until third grade when i moved away from montgomery. i don't know why, but i'll always remember that jamie's birthday is february 25th and i think of her on her birthday ever year, even though it's probably been 16 years since i spoke to her.

part of jamie's appeal was that she had a big family. i only had one brother and he and i have never been close so i always envied anyone who had a lot of siblings, especially sisters. and jamie had three sisters and one brother, so i loved going to her house. her two oldest siblings were twin girls, jennifer and jessica. then there was jordan who was two years older than us and looked exactly like jamie. then there was jamie. then there was joel, the lone boy in a sea of sisters. i wish i'd been able to see what the twins looked like once they got to high school, because when i knew them they were at the height of their awkward years. they had really bad, frizzy hair, horrible big glasses with plastic frames, braces. they hadn't quite developed any sense of style yet (they were probably about 12 or 13 at the oldest, so who can blame them?) and they were just generally in that middle-of-puberty, where-did-these-boobs-come-from phase. jordan and jamie were closer in age and always got along really well. i was so jealous of their relationship and wished that jordan was my older sister. i never really got to know much about joel because he was a lot younger than us. but he had a pretty awesome mullet. i do remember that.

aside from the fact that i was jealous of jamie's siblings, i was jealous of the way her family got along. they did things together. they enjoyed each other's company. they were always rooting for each other and looking out for each other and supporting each other. my memories of the time i spent with her family are just sort of short flashes in my mind but all of them come with a warm, comforting feeling like a bowl of hot soup when it's snowing outside. playing barbies with jamie and her sisters and laughing at their arguments over who got to play with which barbie. going swimming in their backyard pool until our fingers looked like prunes and jamies nose got so tan that her freckles connected. eating popsicles on their front porch and watching jamie drip sugary grape-flavored juice all over her tshirt while i remained perfectly spotless. jumping rope and falling down and laughing at ourselves. drawing pictures in sidewalk chalk on her driveway. playing this card game called "spoons" that her grandmother taught us around their kitchen table with her whole family and a bowl of ice cream sandwiches. pretending to like playing with dolls because she loved it so much. life was more relaxed at jamie's house and i'm glad that i knew her then and that i got to know her family and see how different they were from my own family. and even though i was so jealous of the closeness they shared, i was also incredibly happy for her that she was surrounded by so many people that loved her and thought she could do no wrong.

we lost touch after my family left montgomery. i wrote her a few letters from our new home in birmingham, but she never responded so i gave up. sometimes i wish we'd stayed in contact, but i think we would've eventually grown out of each other, so to speak. we always got along really well but we were really different. i think it was sort of an example of things ending when they need to and running their course.

cheerleading. and hope.

in one of my mom's million attempts to turn me into the girly princess daughter she always wanted, she signed me up for pee wee cheerleading when i was about six years old. i was not cut out for cheerleading by any stretch of the imagination. i was a fat kid. i had a round face, pudgy belly, big ham legs, and flabby arms. fat kids are not very nimble. but there were no tryouts for pee wee cheerleading, so i was a cheerleader but only in the loosest definition possible. the pee wee football teams were named after whatever local business sponsored them and the team i cheered for was "k & b sports." this is not a team name that rolls off the tongue naturally like "the lions" or "the hornets". we were a mess. we wore white shorts, purple and gold t-shirts with the k & b logo on them, and gold hair bows with little gold footballs hot-glued to them. my mom insisted on hiking my shorts up far above my bellybutton and tucking my t-shirt in as tightly as possible. as you might imagine, this was not a very flattering silhouette for a fat kid. in addition to this beautiful ensemble, we had gigantic gold and purple pom poms that were at least twice the size of my big, round head.
i have never known anything about football. all i can gather is that there's a ball and two teams and they run back and forth and sometimes they kick the ball and sometimes they tackle each other and there's a lot of stopping and starting. this was (and still is) the extent of my football knowledge as a six-year-old cheerleader. somehow the rest of the cheerleaders on the squad knew how the game actually worked, so they would cheer and jump up and down and shake their enormous pom poms at the appropriate moments. i, on the other hand, was clueless. so i would watch the best cheerleader, hope, like a hawk. if hope started jumping and cheering, i jumped and cheered. if hope booed at the referee, i booed too. i wanted to be hope. she was beautiful. she had long, graceful limbs and beautiful, silky brown hair that fell halfway down her perfectly poised back. not only did hope know the rules of football, but she could dance. and she was a gymnast. at our rag-tag cheerleading squad practices, the rest of us stood, staring, amazed, with our little mouths hanging wide open while hope would do cartwheels and twirls and ONE-HANDED FRONT WALKOVERS. i was really impressed the first time i saw her do a front walkover with both hands, but when i saw her do it with only one hand, i literally thought that i might as well give up on life before i reached my seventh birthday because there was no way i could ever be that cool.