Free A Step Toward Falling by Cammie McGovern Page B

away—but I didn’t. Two days later, as we readied for the parade, I heard the news that four cheerleaders had been kicked off the squad for drinking violations. I couldn’t get over it. Those cheerleaders would now have a record. I could have stopped it and I hadn’t because I was afraid. A half hour later as I marched along in the parade, distracted and preoccupied with my own cowardice, I accidentally walked my flag into the bass drum in front of me. Kenton, the drummer, fell awkwardly, dislocating his elbow. The parade came to a grinding halt while an ambulance was called.
    That night, Shannon, the flag-team captain, called me at home and said that even though no one blamed me for what happened, I should probably quit the team. “Out of respect for Kenton,” she said.
    I wanted to tell her the truth—I know what I did was bad, but Darla and Sue did something even worse—but it was too late for that. Though Darla and Sue eventually got caught, it wasn’t thanks to any bravery on my part. In fact,that whole episode left me the opposite of brave. I never returned to practice and or the flag-team lunch table. I never spoke to anyone on the flag team again. Instead I hid in the library before school and at lunch.
    Richard appeared in December, after six lonely weeks of eating by myself. We had French together, with a teacher who walked up and down the aisle speaking French so quickly I sometimes thought she was intentionally trying not to be understood. Richard had a funny way of bending his head down, trying not to get called on. When she did call on him, he always spoke in the same high, frightened voice. “Répétez, s’il vous plait?”
    At a time when nothing else made me laugh, his desperate stabs at French did.
    One lunch period I found him, alone like me, in the library, and I told him, “You’re pretty funny in French.”
    He smirked and said, “The sad part is, I’m not trying to be. I’m trying to do my mind control tactics where I will her not to call on me and it’s never once worked. I have no ability to control anyone’s mind.”
    Please, I thought, trying my own version of mind control on him. Talk to me for the rest of this lunch period .
    He did. He wasn’t in the library to study, he said. He came because his usual lunch crowd were all in orchestra and they were playing a lunch concert at the middle school. I nodded and thought, He’ll probably be my one-day friend. Then he added, “Mostly they’re geeks, so I don’t mind taking a break and talking to you.”
    I laughed and the next day he invited me to join them.They weren’t all geeks; they were people like Richard, academically smart but interested in spending their high school days doing more than just getting good grades.
    As I look back on it now, I wonder if I loved Richard from the start because he was brave in ways that I’d never been. The third time we talked, he told me he was gay, which seemed like a daring thing for a ninth grader to say, mostly because it meant admitting he sometimes thought about sex. Because we were getting to be better friends, I asked if there was a gay-straight alliance we could join together. A few days later he told me he’d asked around and there actually wasn’t a club like that, which shocked him. “There’s no club at the school to support any youth activism, can you believe that?” He wanted to start one, he said, not just for gay students but to raise awareness of other issues, too. “Want to do it with me?” he asked. “Now that you’ve got your afternoons free?”
    A week later, we filed papers to form the Youth Action Coalition. From the beginning, I loved being politically active, even though Richard has been the president for three years and does most of the speaking. I do the background, administrative work—xeroxing, poster-making, circulating