Stacy made the junior varsity cheerleader squad when she was in the ninth grade, the year before Dad died. The j.v. squad only cheered at the j.v. games, which were on Thursday afternoon and which no one ever went to except the parents of the players and cheerleaders. I went a couple of times with Mom, and I remember Stacy being kind of awkward and clumsy, but she showed real enthusiasm--and a natural enthusiasm, not one that seemed forced like with most of the other girls. And she got better and better.

Her sophomore year she made the varsity squad. That was the happiest I remember her being. She was always having her cheerleader friends over, like Betty Connors and Tammy Scott. On Friday nights my friends and I would go to the games and sit in the section just below where the cool eighth grade kids sat, at the very top bleachers on the visitors' side, and we'd watch the cheerleaders more than the game--their tight maroon sweaters and short skirts, the way they'd run in place and jump up and down and dance to Janet Jackson songs and pile atop one another to form a period, the cheers they'd chant: "FIRST AND TEN, DO IT AGAIN!!" and "BE AGGRESSIVE, BE-E AGGRESSIVE!!" Eric and Grable would tease me about having such a hot sister. She really was beautiful. Maybe it's just because I'm her brother, but it seemed to me that Stacy stood out. She was the star.

Her junior year Stacy was elected captain, but I could tell things weren't quite right. Before school had even started she was hanging out with those freaks, like Aiden Beard and Tori Engel, the ones with the body piercing and dyed black hair, who hung out behind the driver's ed course and smoked. Betty and Tammy never came over to the house anymore. In fact, Stacy was hardly ever home. But what was strangest was what was happening with the cheerleading. First of all, the girls no longer carried pom poms or megaphones. Stacy designed new uniforms, no more tight sweaters and short skirts. The squad now wore all black: loose-fitting turtle necks and slacks. On the back of each of the twelve girls' sweaters was a different sign of the zodiac. Julie Thomas' mother made her quit after the first game of the season.

There was much less hopping around, cart wheels, and stuff like that. The Janet Jackson songs were gone, replaced first with the Cure and later with Schoenberg, and the music wasn't so much danced to as acted out in pantomime. All of the old cheers were gone too; Stacy was writing her own. At first they were similar to the old ones, snappy and rhyming and encouraging the players to do their best, except much more cynical, expressing doubt that we would win, dwelling mostly on loss. Gradually, the cheers became more and more bizarre. They no longer rhymed, and they usually didn't seem to have anything to do with the game or with football in general.

One by one, every girl on the squad quit, each to be replaced by one of Stacy's weird friends. As the cheerleaders' presentations became more unconventional, the crowds began booing and throwing things at them. Around that time, my friends and I stopped going to the games. I remember asking Stacy "What's with all the changes? I mean, what are you trying to do?"

"Robbie," she said--she was the only one who'd called me Robbie since I was ten--"captain of the cheerleader squad is an important responsibility. Sure, I could feed people the same old fluff, tell them that everything is gonna be great, that all will be right with the world if the Hawks score another touchdown.

Or I could challenge them, allow them to expand their horizons, to think about things."I wanted to tell her that cheerleaders weren't supposed to do anything like that, that they were just supposed to look cute and make people smile, but I didn't.

The last time I saw Stacy cheer (if you could call it that) was one of the last games of that season. Mom had dragged me there, and we sat quietly in the season seats that used to be hers and Dad's. No one in the crowd booed the cheerleaders this time; apparently, the whole thing had just gotten boring, and everyone seemed to ignore them and pay attention to the game. But not me. My eyes were fixed to my sister and her friends. They were scattered about the sideline, each one facing a different direction, their faces the palest white I'd ever seen. They spoke slowly in turn, lines about darkness and exile and a godless universe. Stacy delivered the final line: "Hope eludes us all--until the final escape," and on that cue they all fell to the ground, where they lay motionless until the end of the half. Mom and I left at halftime.

Not surprisingly, a new captain was elected the next year; Stacy didn't even make the squad. She only went to school the first two weeks of her senior year, and then she disappeared. We haven't heard from her since. A poem she wrote was published in the school literary magazine after she'd gone. Like her cheers it didn't rhyme--it talked about a road that stretched beyond the horizon, and how the moon looks the same everywhere.

That same year I started high school. I played tenor sax in the band, so I went to all the games. All the old cheerleaders were back, in their old uniforms doing the old cheers and the cart wheels and the whole bit. The crowds loved it.

For a while, people--teachers mostly--would sometimes ask me if I was related to that weird cheerleader girl. I would usually look like I didn't know what they were talking about and answer, "Not that I know of." But no one ever asks me that anymore.