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.