Free Crash by Jerry Spinelli

stop laughing.
    I keep picturing Webb doing his butt slide across the floor, and the look on Jane Forbes’s warthog face. I’ll tell you, it was worth every minute of the three-day, in-school suspension I got for it, and the one-week grounding when my parents got the letter from the vice-principal. Hey, with Scooter around, I hardly noticed.
    I’m so popular I could probably be school president. I’d get the vote of everybody who was glad to see Little Miss(ter) Cheerleader get dumped by a real man. My hand still hurts from all the high fives I got the Monday after the dance.
    It gets better.
    Guess who got kicked off cheerleading?
    It all had to do with that mall business. It seems that Webb and Forbes started missing cheerleading practices and meetings. Then they started missing actual games, like field hockey and soccer.
    What they were doing, they were spending all their free time selling those stupid T-shirts and parading their signsaround and wallowing in the mud over on Route 31, where the mall is going to be.
    The cheerleading coach told them, Okay, enough is enough. You want to be cheerleaders or you want to be crusaders, it’s up to you. But if you want to keep being cheerleaders, just don’t miss any more games. And especially don’t miss any football games.
    So yesterday we played Upper Milford. Rotten day. Never stopped raining. The whole game long you hear these rain-drops like on a roof, except they’re landing on your helmet (which I guess
is
your roof, right?).
    Anyway, all the cheerleaders were there, including the two mall-stallers. In fact, the cheerleaders outnumbered the spectators. There were exactly four people in the stands. One of them was Scooter, of course. A little water never bothered the old swabbie. And the cheerleading coach and two others. But not Webb’s parents. That should have been a clue.
    The cheerleaders had on these little see-through plastic raincoats with hoods. Webb looked just adorable in his.
    I’m sure they all (except Scooter) wished the game would be called off. Football isn’t for fruitcakes. Football doesn’t take any crap from the weather.
    I have to admit, though, it was hard to play right. Slipping, sliding all over the place. Passing, forget it. Fumbles galore. Even I fumbled once. The first half ended with no score. When we came out for the second half, there were two less cheerleaders. Webb and Forbes were gone.
    Late in the fourth quarter, on a third-and-ten from our own eleven yard line, we sprang a double reverse, and I took it all the way for an eighty-nine-yarder. That was the game, 6-0. But afterwards, nobody was talking about me. They were talking about Webb and Forbes and how the cheerleading coach fired them on the spot for leaving at halftime.
    It gets better.

26
    Where they were was over at Route 31, at the mall place, which is just a big old weed field now. Somebody had found out the bulldozers were coming, so the naughty cheerleaders stayed for half the game and rushed over.
    That’s all I knew at the time. Scooter was waiting outside with two umbrellas. We walked home.
    Fast-forward to six o’ clock. Scooter and I are eating. Abby comes bursting in, streaking for the den, yelling, “TV!”
    By the time we get in there, she’s got the TV on, punching buttons, muttering, “Channel Ten…Channel Ten…”She turns up the volume. She sits cross-legged on the floor, her face an inch from the screen. She’s panting like a dog. She’s totally drenched and muddy all over.
    Scooter gets a throw rug and some newspapers and makes her sit on them. He pulls off her shoes and socks. “You’re wetter than a wharf rat,” he says, but she just mutters, “Keep watching…keep watching…”
    After the first commercial, we see. They show the Route 31 mall location. They show the bulldozers coming down the pikein flatbed trucks. And then they show the looneytunes: Webb and Forbes, a couple of other students, a couple grown-ups, and (“There I am!