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Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?
the fever / MEGAN ABBOTT
Aileen Minyard had never pretended not to know that cheerleading was the only thing keeping her from slipping between the cracks and straight into an early grave. She knows it, and everyone else knows it too. — There is always someone waiting with a knowing look, a tired sigh, a half-hearted warning she won't listen to. The story they have written for her is simple: self-destructive, reckless, fucked up beyond repair. A girl who throws herself into every bad decision like she's looking for something sharp enough to cut her down for good. They don't say it, but she can hear it in the way they talk about her in past tense, like she's already gone.
But there was a time when there hadn't been a reason for her to pretend or not pretend. It was long ago, before Rachel, her adoptive mother, slipped between the cracks herself. Before all of the doctor appointments and the rattling orange bottles waiting for Ali every morning, the ones with the label scraped off. Her life had been good then, when everything revolved around cheerleading in an uncomplicated way, when Rachel's brain hadn't yet split in half between the loving mother and the selfish and demanding woman who was totally fine with breaking her daughter apart for her own ambitions.
Back then, the world beyond cheerleading (and, by extension, her mother) seemed distant and unfamiliar—a realm where desires outside the confines of the mat held little allure or clarity. Her whole life rested inside a glass jar, and, much like Ali herself, it was untouchable until it broke.
That was when she found out there was a different life waiting for her across the country. A life in which she was one third of a set of triplets. A life in which her biological mother was just as torn apart as Rachel had been, like the world had been trying to remind her that it had no place for people like Ali. These were the cracks, opening up right beneath her feet — the things she loves don't love her back, but that's okay. The alcohol loves her back. The parties love her back.
