JENNIE

My pulse raced as we made our way back towards the bleachers. I kept looking around like I was afraid someone was going to see us and realize I was trying to find someplace private to have a chat with my best friend about whether or not we were going to be more than best friends.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to Lisa when I’d approached her. I’d felt the same feelings hitting me as the first time I approached a guy at a middle school dance all those years ago, only they were way more intense with Lisa.

My feelings had always been way more intense with Lisa. It’s like she was the only one for me and I’d known that all along, but I’d also been terrified of what those feelings meant.

Well it was time for me to stop being terrified. It was time for me to stop doing stupid things because I was afraid of what other people might think.

Even if I was still looking around terrified of what everyone was thinking when they looked at me. I was sure they knew what was going through my head and they were judging me.

Not fun.

“Where are we going?” Lisa asked.

“Someplace with some privacy,” I said.

Lisa barked out a laugh and I cringed. Laughing would make people look at us because they wanted to know what the joke was. The last thing I needed was people looking at us. Maybe figuring out what was going on.

Damn it. Why did I have to be so crazy?

“Follow me,” I said.

I ducked behind the bleachers. There was a chain link fence there to keep people from getting under the bleachers, but it was a well known secret that the fence hadn’t been repaired in ages. It was pitted and rusted in places and that rust had created a pretty big hole.

Big enough that people could sneak under there for a little privacy.

I wondered if the school knew about it and didn’t care, or if it was a case of the maintenance people being too lazy to fix it. Either way it worked to my advantage now.

I wiggled through the small opening, careful to avoid the grasping bits of jagged metal. I was pretty sure I’d had a tetanus shot recently, but I figured better safe than sorry.

Besides, Coach Anderson would kill me if I got rust stains on my bright white cheerleading uniform. Not to mention that might lead Joy to get a little suspicious about what I was doing tonight.

Everyone knew what it meant if someone had the tell-tale rust lines of the old chain link fence on their clothes. I just hoped no one had the same idea as me tonight and decided to sneak down here.

Probably not. It was crowded enough during a football game that someone would have to be crazy to come down here.

Crazy like me.

I took a few steps into the odd twilight under the bleachers. Light filtered from above through slits in the seats.

I took a couple of steps before realizing I was all alone. I turned and saw Lisa standing at the edge staring in and looking more than a little unsure of herself.

I opened my mouth to yell at her to come in and remembered, almost too late, exactly where I was.

Yeah, that would’ve been embarrassing. Talk about letting everyone sitting above us know exactly what was going on.

“What are you waiting for?” I hissed.

“What are you doing?” Lisa hissed right back at me. “What is this place?”

I looked around and then back to her like she’d just asked the stupidest question in the world. In a way she really had.

“It’s under the bleachers, duh,” I said.

“Well yeah, but why are we going down here?” she asked.

Oh boy was that a loaded question. I could think of a lot of reasons, and most of them made me blush. Luckily she couldn’t see that in the poor light.

“Because I wanted to talk to you in private and this is the closest I’m going to get to private!” I hissed back.

I had to be careful to keep my voice to a whisper. The last thing I wanted was to give us away.

“Would you just get in here?” I hissed. “I don’t want…”

She crossed her arms and I could sense I was about to say something that was absolutely the worst thing I could possibly say. I knew I’d feel like if someone was sneaking around acting like I was a secret that needed to be hidden from the world.

But oh what a secret this was. The cheerleader and the band geek falling for each other? The small town rumor mill would still be talking about that one thirty years from now.

“Look,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t terrified that at any moment someone might walk past and see the two of us here and wonder what we were doing. Or, even worse, figure out exactly what we were doing.

I took a deep breath. Forced myself to calm down. As much as I could.

“Could you please just come in here so we can have some privacy? The only other way we’re getting any of that is walking to the school and that