Dreaming of Cheers (Standing Up to Life Book 3)

Chapter 11:

MONDAY ARRIVED FASTER than I would have liked, and I found myself right back in school. I'd spent most of Sunday doing as little as possible, but I'd still had a lot of homework to finish before I was able to go to bed the night before. As classes went Monday there wasn't anything particularly special. It was a normal day. Normal... except that every few minutes I was double checking that my backpack was in fact still where I'd set it next to my legs.

I was so nervous about the incident from Friday it was ridiculous. Half-way through lunch Amy leaned over to me and whispered, "Tiffany, it's all right, we're not going to let anything happen to you."

I blushed. I didn't know it was that obvious. The problem for me was that I'd had a sort of peace that had built up, and the Friday thing just shattered that. I was back to worrying just as much as I had a month before. It sucked. I kept trying to tell myself that things wouldn't get that bad again, but I knew I was honestly constantly on a tightrope trying to keep myself in the air – one slip and I might fall to the abyss that lay below. Thankfully that day all of me worries seemed for not, as nothing bad happened that day.

After school I went to the girls' locker room and changed in the coaches' office into my clothes for dance practice. Today was going to be the beginning of only having dance practice, no cheerleading practice first! I was excited about that. I mean, I enjoyed the cheer stuff too, but I had definitely found I had a bigger passion for dance. Coach had us gather around on the floor of the small stage that we had in the Cafetorium to talk to us.

"Good afternoon ladies," she said to us with a smile, "today we're going to begin preparation for the competitions were doing in January!"

We all smiled a lot, and I think everyone was genuinely excited to be moving forward.

"Look, I know we had a scary performance last Thursday, but stuff happens sometimes ladies. As long as we keep moving on, we'll be able to look at it and laugh in a few months."

I hoped she was right. I almost wanted to cry now that she'd brought it back up. Why wasn't she chewing us out for it? We deserved it...

"Today I got the official word that we've been accepted into the Dance Nationals in Florida the last weekend of January!"

"Really? We got accepted?" Lindsey asked, kind of surprised.

"Of course! I sent them a copy of the video of our routine from the high school homecoming game. They were really impressed with it ladies. Like I said, I know we had a bad performance last Thursday, but as a whole I believe this squad has a lot of potential." She said that with a smile on her face that I felt was genuine.

"Thanks," I found myself and most of the other girls saying.

"Okay, we have a lot of hard work to do for this competition. I'm entering us into two categories at the junior level. We're going to do jazz and poms."

I nodded, those were my two favorite categories and I thought it was going to be a lot of fun. There are other categories like hip-hop that you could enter, but I really like the styles that she was having us do the best. They were the ones I enjoyed the most. "How many other squads are there?" I found myself asking unexpectedly.

"So far the lady I spoke to said that they've accepted about two-hundred junior high squads into this competition... Of course, there are probably some others that they haven't accepted. You have to be good enough to get in," she added. All of our faces took on a scared look.

"Cool," Kristina said next to me breaking it though.

"Okay, I'm going to put the music on for the two routines now so that you can all listen to it, then we're going to go ahead and start going through the pom-pom routine today." She started the music and I could already feel myself moving to the beats. I was sure that we were going to have two really cool routines when we were done with it all. Every girl on the squad nodded and smiled afterwards, we were sure we could have fun with this! Coach Holt calmed us down and then had us begin working count by count. Practice was supposed to end at five-thirty for the night, but she had us stop early at five. I was already exhausted both physically and mentally by that point though.