Dear Me,
Pep squad honestly isn’t that great. The striped, pleated skirt might not really be worth it, for all the Sailor Moon-ness it exudes.
Your sponsor will be mean to you. She’ll snap at you when you’re supposed to be excused from practice, when everything hurts when you move because of fluid in your breast, and she’ll put you at the very back of the formation. She’ll narrow her eyes at you in the hallway, just waiting to write you up for some violation. She doesn’t like the Gifted and Talented kids; you’ve had teachers like that. And even though you follow every rule exactly always, you’ll still be afraid of her.
The other girls won’t be nice. You think this will be some kind of equalizer or magical transformation—that when you put on that skirt and the top that matches, when you start waving around the red and blue pom-poms with their secret inner handles, you’ll suddenly belong to something. But the truth is, you won’t want to belong to this. You’re hoping for something like instant confidence, and that’s just not how it works. You’re hoping that middle school will be better, that somehow the girls who weren’t interested in playing with you on the playground or in your neighborhood will now think you’re cool and interesting. But if you think about it, they’re not nearly as cool or interesting as you’re hoping they are, either. You’ve been learning over the last year that no one likes the things you like, that their churches are even teaching that those things are evil—Pokemon, Harry Potter, and somehow even Sailor Moon.
If anything, pep squad will give you a frame of reference the day you both cheer and play your snare drum at the top of the stands. In spite of all the bullying you get on the bus for carrying around your snare drum, you’re going to feel infinitely more capable and—to be honest—cooler when you get to show off that you are a drummer. There’s a reason for that; don’t forget it.
The other thing pep squad will give you is the sunset and clouds of bug spray at a football game on September 11, 2001. You’ll think of it and still taste the spray in your mouth, still hear the voices of other girls around you asking, “Did you hear?” in a way that will make you laugh (darkly) years later—because all day your teachers kept it from you, from the whole school, and you only found out when you got home. And while you won’t be quite as scared as your mother assumes when she reads—and writes in—your notebook on the day you learn the word “terrorism,” the idea of “saving the world” is going to get a lot more complicated. I know that’s not what you really want; you’re more interested in Tuxedo Mask, the idea of finally having a boyfriend. But no one in seventh grade is good enough for you—or eighth, or ninth, or all the way up until college, and even then there’s going to come a day when you learn what was really going on is that you were too busy waiting to be rescued to be the heroine of your own story.
You’re not wrong, wanting what you want right now. Just remember—it doesn’t usually happen the way it does on TV. Your body will go through transformations, the body you already hate, and you won’t have time to learn to love it before the transformations continue. You’ll find your belonging, but it’ll take some time, and you’ll learn that even that can shift. And you’ll wear that pleated skirt, but it won’t give you powers.
You already have powers. In time, you’ll learn how to use them.
Love,
Me
Margaret Emma Brandl's novella Tuscaloosa (Or, In April, Harpies) was published by Bridge Eight Press in 2021. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and video essays have appeared in magazines such as Gulf Coast, Yalobusha Review, River Teeth, and Moon City Review. She teaches creative writing and other English courses at Austin College in Sherman, TX.
