“You know,” he says, “here’s why I don’t like your mother: when I had her for English way back when, she made us read fairy tales. One time she asked us, why do all the little girls in the fairy tales have golden hair? I said, because gold is the color of money.” He laughs, then he takes a lock of my hair and tucks it behind my ear. “I’ll never forget the look of shock on your mother’s face. She thought I was pretty dumb.”

He points at me and winks. “But I might be smarter than you think. So don’t underestimate me.”

I meet his gaze and challenge. “I don’t estimate you at all,” I tell him, “one way or the other.”

He puts the key in the ignition and starts the car. “Maybe you should. Maybe I’m giving you fair warning not to start what you can’t finish.”

“Is your father on disability?” I ask. “With the back injury?”

“Not him. He’s got too much pride to coast on the government.”

“So what’s he do now?” I ask again.

“You really want to know?” he asks. I nod.

“I’ll give you a hint,” he says. “Then you can think about it in your little blond head. You walk all over his work, every day. But you don’t see it.”

“A farmer?”

“You see him every day,” he says again. “But you look right through him.”

Then he backs up and drives away.

At the next practice, there’s another problem we have to deal with: Nanci Lee has an issue with Grimshaw’s dance innovations to the squad. She wants to know where the “cheer” came from at the pep rally, which had nothing to do with the football team, or Colchis. She doesn’t care if the crowd liked it. It’s not up to the crowd what teams do.

“We’ve kind of made her a tri-captain,” Rack explains to Nanci Lee.

“Yeah,” chimes in Angel. “She knows a lot more about it than we do.”

“Ummm …” Nanci Lee smiles. “That’s not really your choice, is it?”

“But you said at the beginning that this was our team, not yours.”

“Yeah, that we needed to take ownership of it, remember? That we ‘needed to put our big-girl pants on’?”

“It is your team”—Nanci Lee concedes—“but we have two cheerleaders that aren’t even qualified to be on the squad, and you’re making them captains now? That might be owning something, but it’s not the team.”

So instead of letting us get more dance-y and choreographed, Nanci Lee, out of spite, is going super traditional, humiliating us with the dumbest cheers ever.

Ricker-racker, ricker-racker, sis-boom-bah

Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny, rah-rah-rah.

We talk about it the next morning at the graveyard.

“If we do those cheers,” says Grimshaw, “they’ll throw a lot more than Dixie cups at us.”