The Champions

Chapter One

The list is up.

I haven’t seen it, but there’s no other explanation for the sounds coming from the end of the hall—­squeals of joy, gasps. And crying.

There’s been a lot of crying this morning.

I’ve been parked outside homeroom for the past ten minutes, with my back to my locker. I’m at school way before the first bell because my bus driver picked us up too early. I have a driver’s license but no car, so most days I ride my bike. But this morning it’s storming, so badly that the sound of rain pelting the roof woke me up before my alarm.

I check my phone: seven minutes to the first bell. Since the front doors opened, there’s been a steady stream of dance team hopefuls flowing down the hall, chins lifted, making their pilgrimages to the bulletin board outside the auditorium.

There are a lot of hopefuls this year. Sunnybrook’s dance team took home three first-­place trophies in Orlando last spring, a record for any high school at a single national competition. I heard so many people tried out for the team last week that they held auditions over three days instead of the usual two, and the athletic director finally hired an assistant coach.

Sobs draw my attention from my newspaper notebook, where I’ve been scrawling idly. Down the hall, between the vending machines, a girl, definitely a freshman, is crying into her phone.

I hug my knees to my chest, wishing I could disappear. It feels wrong being a voyeur to her devastation. At the same time, I want to go to her and tell her it’s not the end of the world she didn’t make dance team, that nothing that happens within these halls really matters.

That’s a lie, though, isn’t it? Every disappointment, every win, every slight that occurs in this building feels like the end of the world because this is our world. We spend most of our waking hours here, making sure we’re the necessary level of involved. Padding our college résumés, forging alliances, gaining favor with the teachers who write the best recommendations. All for the vague promise that something better waits beyond these walls.

I don’t get the chance to say any of this to the freshman, of course. The first warning bell rings and she’s gone, along with the rest of the girls. None of them noticed me here at all.

_____

Homeroom is swarming with pirates.

My classmates are wearing hats, eye patches, bandanas. Gavin Steiger has traded in his usual outfit of gym shorts and a Sunnybrook Football tee for a Jack Sparrow costume.

“You got a mirror?” he asks me, even though we’ve never spoken before.

I shake my head, but the habitually silent girl seated next to me is already handing Gavin a compact mirror. He examines the smudge of black on his lower lash lines and grins at his reflection, prompting the girl to giggle at the tinfoil he’s strategically placed over some of his teeth.

At my old school, a straight guy tidying his eyeliner in homeroom would be mocked into oblivion, but Gavin is a six-­foot-­three football player, so no one says shit to him.

The coordinated effort to dress up on an eighty-­degree day in the middle of September has to be a football thing. The Sunnybrook Tigers—­formerly the Warriors—­won two consecutive state championships, and with a potential third win on the table, it seems like no one is immune from football fever.

It’s near impossible to get tickets to games, and every business on Main Street has a proud supporter of ­sunnybrook football poster in their front window. Last year, a record number of football players signed with D1 colleges, and all anyone can talk about is where this year’s seniors will end up.

Some shrieking outside the classroom pulls my attention away from my homeroom teacher, who is trying to secure a stuffed parrot to the shoulder of his polo with a safety pin. The noise startles Mr. Fiorella into dropping his safety pin.

The shrieking is happy. I can’t see the source, but I picture a gaggle of dance team girls, holding each other by the forearms, jumping up and down. We made it!

Mr. Fiorella sets the parrot on his desk and makes his way to the door. He lets out an exasperated “Ladies, please, the bell is about to ring” before returning to his desk, crouching in search of the dropped safety pin.

While I wait for the bell, I occupy myself with my newspaper notebook. The first meeting of the year is this afternoon, and I’ve been compiling a list of articles to pitch. I slip my pen from the binding and absently scrawl pirates? while the desks in the room fill.

I don’t look up until I hear the thud of a backpack hitting the chair in front of me.

“Hey, Hadley.” Alix Maroney smiles at me. She’s wearing her Sunnybrook Dance Team sweatpants and a white tank top, the thickness of the straps carefully calibrated to avoid a dress code infraction. Her golden-­brown waves are held back by a red-­and-­black-­striped pirate’s bandana, and she’s wearing big hoop earrings.

It’s not fair to look that gorgeous at seven-­fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. Alix also has the nerve to be genuinely, unfailingly nice, in a way that makes you feel like a spotlight has beamed on you, exposing just how not nice you actually are to anyone who might be paying attention.

And people here don’t really pay attention to me, even though my mother is the superintendent of schools. Mom and I have different last names, which keeps me somewhat under the radar, but Alix lives across the street from us. When we moved in a year ago, her parents had us over for a barbecue, and Alix snuck me up to her room, where she had a bottle of prosecco hidden away. We tipsily pored over her yearbook together, Alix giving me the rundown on which teachers to avoid.

Alix has made it a point to be friendly to me ever since that day. I return her wave and lift my pen, use it to gesture around the room. “What’s with all—­”

“It’s Tyler,” Alix says. “He committed to East Carolina.”

She can only mean Tyler Curtin, running back, Sunny­brook’s best player. I suspect Alix herself is behind the coordinated effort to celebrate a Tiger signing with a Division 1 college.

Alix is one of the captains of the dance team. In addition to being nationally ranked, the girls are basically Sunnybrook’s cheerleaders—­they dance at every football game, and the night before, they decorate the players’ cars and gym lockers for good luck.

Being captain of the dance team is a big deal in itself, but Alix is also dating Cameron Burnham, the quarterback. The Burnhams are basically the Manning family of high school football. Cameron’s dad was Sunnybrook’s head coach until he died of pancreatic cancer ten years ago. Burnham Senior played football at Wake Forest, and so have Cameron’s three older brothers. None of them have made it to the NFL—­yet—­but Cameron’s oldest brother, Dylan, is currently the head coach of the Sunny­brook ­Tigers and the reason they won two consecutive champion­ships, to hear everyone talk about him.

The final bell rings, and Mr. Fiorella corrals the stragglers into the classroom as music crackles through the PA system. Judging from the whooping and the chants of Tyler’s name, I assume it’s the East Carolina fight song.

When it’s finished, I join in on the dutiful clapping for Tyler, then flip back to the list in my notebook. Changes to the SAT exam, new security initiatives. It’s probably pathetic to care about a school newspaper as much as I do, but Ms. Kirk, the advisor, promised to pick a new editor in chief soon, and I want it so badly that thinking about it makes me feel like I’m going to puke.

My early action application to Columbia is due in a few weeks. I have a 4.0, and my SAT scores are above average. But there’s no shortage of above-­average students applying to one of the best schools in the country for journalism.

Mom keeps telling me it doesn’t matter where I get my bachelor’s degree, but the evidence says otherwise. Jodi Kantor went to Columbia. Bob Woodward went to Yale, and Katharine Graham went to the University of Chicago.

I’ve dreamed of being a journalist since I was a kid, sneaking away pages of my dad’s copy of the New York Times, memorizing the names in the bylines. If I want to write for the biggest paper in the world someday, I need to be better than above average now.

I don’t want editor in chief. I need it.

And Peter Carlino is the only thing standing in my way.