Free The Secret Language of Girls by Frances O'Roark Dowell

stillhanging upside down on the jungle gym. “Don’t you think she sort of looks like a bat, hanging that way?”
    Marylin giggled. She was going to be a cheerleader. That would show old Ashley the Bat.

    Kate was against the whole idea.
    “You’ll become the sort of person who only cares about her hair,” Kate warned, standing on one foot in the middle of the kitchen and balancing a stack of her sister’s Seventeen magazines on top of her head in an effort to improve her posture. “I’ve seen it happen a million times.”
    “You’re only eleven,” Marylin said. “You’re too young to have seen anything a million times.”
    “I’ll be twelve in two months,” Kate reminded Marylin. “Which means I’m older than you are, and therefore wiser. And I know what being a cheerleader does to people, believe me.”
    Marylin began crumbling a chocolate-chip cookie into little pieces on the kitchen table. It was true that Kate had some experience with cheerleaders. Kate’s sister, Tracie, had enjoyed a brief cheerleading career in seventh grade before she made a D in world history and her parents yanked her off the squad. Still, Tracie and Marylin were two completely different people. Marylin had never gotten a D in anything in her life.
    “Besides,” Kate added, collecting the magazines, which had spilled off her head onto the floor, “do you really think Mr. Kertzner is the type of person who would marry a cheerleader? He’s a man of science and reason, don’t forget.”
    Kate was the second and only other person besides Aunt Tish to whom Marylin had told about her feelings for Mr. Kertzner. For all of Kate’s drawbacks, like her refusal to pierce her ears, or the way she was always hangingaround with little kids like Courtney, Marylin knew she could trust Kate with a secret.
    “You don’t know, though,” Marylin argued with Kate. “Maybe Mr. Kertzner’s favorite sister was a cheerleader. Maybe he’s crazy about people who are cheerleaders.”
    Kate shook her head. “All I’m saying is you’re taking a big risk. But,” she concluded, popping a cookie into her mouth, “it’s your life, so go ahead and ruin it if you want to.”
    All of a sudden Marylin felt like changing the subject. “Hey, let’s go sneak into Tracie’s room and check out her clothes,” she suggested. Tracie had very grown-up taste in clothes, Marylin thought. Most days she looked at least eighteen. Plus sometimes she dated football players. Although Marylin would never admit it to Kate, Tracie was one of her idols.
    Kate stared at her, her mouth falling open. “Are you nuts? For one thing, she’d kill us if she caught us. For another thing, the hairsprayand cologne perfumes will automatically suffocate you the minute you walk through the door. And for even another thing, who wants to look at Tracie’s clothes? Could you have an even more boring idea?”
    “It was just a suggestion,” Marylin mumbled. She stood up. “I guess I should go home anyway.”
    “No offense,” Kate called after her. “About Tracie’s clothes and everything.”
    Marylin walked home from Kate’s the back way, cutting through Mrs. Larch’s backyard and following a leafy path through the woods to her house. Flannery’s house was smack in the middle between Kate’s and Marylin’s, and Marylin wasn’t in the mood to run into Flannery that afternoon. She’d probably want to practice cheerleading, and right now Marylin’s heart just wasn’t in it.
    It wasn’t that Marylin agreed with Kate that she had to choose between cheerleading andMr. Kertzner. By the time Marylin was old enough to marry Mr. Kertzner, her cheerleading days would be a thing of the past. By then she’d probably be a world-famous expert on the gypsy moth and Mr. Kertzner would be too stunned by the shining constellation of Marylin’s brilliance to care whether or not she’d ever pushed a pom-pom.
    But Marylin knew that if she tried out for middle school cheerleading and