Sports movies. I HATED Bend It Like Beckham, and that's about the only one I've seen. I don't know why they wanted to force a seven-year-old to watch a movie made for young adults about a subject they don't care about. I am SO not a sporty person or a sports movies person, but I actually loved this episode. Thanks for reviewing, OmniUIShaggyOverexaggerated, lordgemini, iwashere01 and AnonBrowser.

We did get a break between the next challenge, but Chris promised us the next two would be all for reward.

Courtney finally stopped just shooting glares at me and finally let me have it. "So." she said crossly. "You just waltz in here and steal my boyfriend?"

"Nope." I said, refusing to be fazed. "I just waltz in here and make friends with your boyfriend. That kiss was part of a script. You think Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart dated in real life just because he kissed her in a couple dumb movies? I'm pretty sure he was dating Taylor Swift by that time." (I actually had no idea when the Taylor + Taylor dating happened, but he did have to kiss Stewart in a chick flick and they never dated).

Courtney's scowl deepened. "You kissed him more than once!" she accused. "How do I know you weren't doing more off-camera?"
"'More' was pranking Harold, chatting and swapping stories." I quipped. "Seriously, he's all yours. If you don't believe it, there's not much I can do about it, but you can ask anyone else. They'll all tell you Duncan and I are just friends."

Courtney did ask everyone else apart from Duncan himself, but just as I predicted, they all said variations on the same things. Beth and Lindsay swore blind Duncan and I had never shown any romantic interest in each other. Leshawna just laughed at Courtney at the thought. Harold, while he was annoying, would never have lied, even though he disliked Duncan and didn't adore me. Justin was a little less honest, but I did hear him say that he didn't think I liked guys at all since he hadn't affected me. Whatever, it added up to the same answer.

I still got the feeling Courtney didn't believe any of it. She only believed what she'd already made her mind up about, and that was that I was trying to take Duncan away from her. It wasn't that she thought all the others were lying, just that they were wrong. Duncan had said that Courtney might feel threatened by me, but there was really no reason for her to be. And I certainly wasn't going to stop hanging out with Duncan just because his girlfriend had unfounded suspicions about me. He was still my teammate, for one thing, and for another, our agreement to vote together was still in effect at the merge.

Duncan admitted to me that Courtney had dumped him at those suspicions, which was why they'd been arguing that first night. "But I don't think it'll be too hard to get her back." he said, shrugging. "She may yell at me and hit me, but I can tell she's doing it because she's still way into me."

I smiled and joked "I just hope when I get an actual boyfriend, that won't be the way he shows he's into me."

"Well, I'd rather carve initials and take her on a few adventures." Duncan answered.

"Oh yes, I remember now!" I recalled. "On that episode with the final six, you carved a heart with your initials into the back ot the Courtney head with that totem pole thing. I remember, Chrissy teased you about it. Not that he has any room to talk when he wrote love poetry about Avril Lavigne when she first started out. and he was, like, nineteen. I was only six when he did that, but I kept the papers because I knew I'd want to remember."

Duncan burst out laughing. "Seriously? Does he want to make things complicated with her or something?"

"Ask him that and if I win, I"ll pay bail next time you're in juvie." I bargained.

"I'd do it for nothing, but whatever, I'll take it."

But we were only halfway through the season, long before anyone won. Still, Chris didn't wake us that morning. No, all of us girls woke up to Courtney yelling. She was chasing a sleepwalking Beth out of the trailer, calling "Hey, that's my PDA!"

Beth woke up just as she'd thrown the PDA into the air. She'd been spinning it like her baton and it was just lucky that Courtney caught it.

"I'm so sorry!" Beth gasped. "I must have started sleep-twirling again!"

"Did she say sleep-twirling?" Leshawna questioned.

"More importantly, did she say she'd done it before?" I quipped.

Courtney didn't see things that way, though. "That PDA is my legal right in this game. Touch it again, Beth and prepare to be served!"

I couldn't just let her yell at Beth for something she didn't mean to do. "Whoa, calm down." I said, stepping in. "Beth can't help what she does when she's sleeping. Maybe you should just secure your PDA where she can't get at it by accident. Maybe then she'll take my hairbrush or comb, and I'll be the one who gets to yell at her." (Well, my hair needed all the help it could get – it was tangled enough even when I combed it after brushing, so I had to keep both on hand).

Chris showed up two seconds later as the boys stumbled out of their trailer with a greeting of "Morning, sports fans! Who's ready to put up a good offense?"

For breakfast, we got spaghetti, would you believe it? It was for bulking up, and apparently that was the start of our sports movie challenge. Once we were dressed, we were expected to do a long run. That wasn't too hard, just a bit boring. Then, Chris made us do a bunch of drills. Nothing team-y, which was weird. We were still in teams, but we were doing drills like individuals. I mean, the drills weren't actually too bad. Some of them were harder than others. Using Chef as a football dummy and pushing him the length of the field was just disgusting because he was so sweaty. Even when I wasn't touching him, I had his sweat filling my nostrils. I also didn't appreciate the mousetraps in the tyres we had to run through.

"I have never seen our school football team doing this!" Courtney whined as we crawled through mud underneath barbed wire. Apparently it was a remnant from the war movie day.

And then, it turned out the drills weren't even part of the challenge. "It was just to establish who's playing who for the real contest to follow."

It turned out we'd go one-on-one with someone from the other team, depending on how well they did in the football drills. Chris refused to tell us where we placed until our contest came up, and just let us to the set for the first contest.

We started with boxing. Lindsay was picked to go against...Harold, because they came last in the drills. We'd go from worst to best, and I wasn't shocked that they were considered the worst. They were given marshmallow gloves, and were asked to do it in slow-motion. While Lindsay was probably a better fighter, Harold's slow-motion was so good, I started to wonder if I was seeing it incorrectly. Or hearing. He slowed down his speech, his movements, and even his reactions, no matter how hard Lindsay's punches got.

"Are you seeing this?" I whispered to Duncan. "Maybe this is one of Harold's mad skills that he's always talking about. I don't know if he can beat Lindsay, but he's really good at the slow-mo."

"Never said the little dork didn't have some skills," he whispered back, "But they are weird ones. Still, I guess weird can be good."

Certainly, it was in this case. If it had been a real boxing match, Lindsay would have won hands down. She knocked Harold down, but Chris declared Harold the winner because of his slow-motion. Then he said he had to take points off Lindsay because she'd bitten into one of Harold's gloves. Well, come on, they were marshmallow. But Chris still insisted. "Very unsportsmanlike, Ms Tyson."

Lindsay was pretty cross, calling out "This was fixed! Ref's goin' down!" Her team had to hold her back.

We went on to the next court, where the equipment was waiting. "Hey, it's a miniature tennis racket!" Justin commented. "Where are the miniature tennis balls and how come the net is so stupidly high?"

Chris frowned. 'Because this is a badminton court, Justin."

"There was never a sports movie about badminton." Justin protested. "That would have been seriously lame."

I giggled. "Bad thing to say, Justin. Correct, but not good."

Chris seemed to forget he was on camera for a moment and scowled at me. "It was not lame, Toni! Just because you don't like badminton-"

"And I suppose the critics all hated badminton, too?" I snarked. "Just because you were in a movie about badminton doesn't make it good. It's not like you wrote or directed it, you know. You just acted in it. And yes, guys," I added to the rest of the cast, "That's why Chrissy wants badminton in it. He just wants to reenact his favourite scene from his movie Goodminton. Well, go on, do it!"

To be fair, Chris didn't do it badly. He got into showbiz for a reason. For a second, he really stopped being my older cousin for a few seconds and just desperately wanted the Olympic community to bring badminton into the mix.

But then, he returned to hosting, and announced the people playing. "Beth and Duncan!" I hadn't been sure what to expect, there. I mean, I felt a bit worried. That meant I was playing Courtney or Justin, and I wasn't sure what to think. I almost wished I was the one playing against Beth. But on the other hand, I'd beaten Duncan in the football drills. That felt pretty good, because he got through them solidly. Lindsay and Beth hadn't done as well as he had, which meant that if our teammates were that good, Leshawna and I might also be better than their last two.

As it was, I blame Leshawna for this one. Duncan was playing well, and it looked like he was going to win. At least, that was until Leshawna, in a show of support for Duncan, yelled to Beth "Your chances of winning are just about as real as your boyfriend!" She was all nervous and fumbling before that, but then she suddenly turned into a dynamo and beat Duncan in less than a minute.

Even Courtney was smiling at the win, along with her teammates. Leshawna decided to admit to her wrong with probably the most clumsy thing ever. "You might have game, girl, but you still don't have a boyfriend."

I mean, I didn't believe in Beth's boyfriend either, but was it really any of our business if she wanted to pretend? As it was, it was pretty much the worst thing she could have said.

Beth went pink and said furiously "You just resent me for being a champion baton-twirler! Just like you resent everybody here!"

"Excuse me?" Leshawna said.

"Why don't you admit it?" Beth continued. "Or should we have Courtney play what you said about all of us on her PDA?"

"I told you to stay away from my PDA!"

Beth ignored Courtney. "It's on the Total Drama website, Leshawna! Everything you said about all of us when you went on that spa night!"

There was a pause. I got over it first. "Leshawna, is this true? What did you say about everyone? I already said I didn't care about what you did to get there, but if you went all gossip girl on us, that's different."

Leshawna was starting to blush. More than starting. The fact that I could tell she was blushing was enough to know it was bad. "Um...I might've said a few things, but..."

Courtney didn't want to show us, but when Duncan insisted "C'mon, Courtney, you know you wanna," she relented immediately. Even though they were broken up, she still couldn't refuse him anything.

Okay, she covered it up by saying "Only because you all have the right to know what she said." But I think if anyone but Duncan had said that to her, she would still have refused.

Leshawna was chatting away with her cousin. She wasn't just talking about people left on the season, or even just the ones that were left at the time. She was actually talking about Heather, first. "Just mean for the sake of being mean." Fair enough. Heather did her fair share of trash-talking, although she mostly did it to people's faces. But she'd even lied about Gwen to Trent, and at least this was true. But then, she got onto more things.

"Lindsay has half a brain cell, max, and it's usually gone out shopping!" While this was almost true, there was no need for her to start badmouthing a girl who'd never done a thing to her. Even when she was Heather's sidekick. The worst thing she'd done was get Leshawna's name wrong, and that wasn't on purpose.

It continued on. "Oh, oh, problem with Justin's giant ego!" No comment. I hadn't spent enough time with Justin to say if that was accurate, but it was believable.

"Duncan likes to think he's a bad boy, but when Courtney was there, she basically dragged him around by his eyebrow ring!" That was worse than just calling him whipped. It's true Courtney did try to boss Duncan around a bit, but I didn't think that was necessarily completely true. I mean, they kissed just after they stole snacks from Chef, which was Duncan's idea, and Courtney wasn't sure whether she wanted to do it.

Then, it was my turn to hear it. "Toni's so careless and jokey and she's still bossy with it – it's not hard to believe she's Chris' cousin. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was his sister!" Okay, that was over the line. I was team leader, so of course I was bossy! Didn't I need to keep the peace on this team by giving orders? But just because I liked joking around and having fun with the game, that didn't make me careless. And it was just insulting that she'd said I was just like Chris. I knew this was a while ago and it was possible she didn't think that any more, but she had thought it at one point, enough to laugh and gossip about it. And that hurt.

I didn't even hear the rest of what Leshawna said, although I gathered she said something about Beth, and then even her knight in armour, Harold! The poor guy.

Leshawna did make an attempt to defend herself. "You don't understand! That was outside the game! I didn't know anybody'd see it!"

"So you weren't just joking?" Lindsay asked. "I thought maybe you were joking."

After that, Leshawna tried agreeing with her, but seriously, no one believed her, and that included Lindsay. I'd been able to forgive Leshawna for lying, but not for trash-talking. I didn't plan to trash-talk any of the other contestants when I got home. The tabloids would be doing enough of that. Probably some teen mags would, too. It was a reward challenge, so I couldn't vote her off today. It would all depend on whether she could get my goodwill back by the next elimination challenge.

As it was, I was next. So Chris thought I was the second best in my team at drills, and Leshawna had done better than me. We were currently tied, so I really, really wanted to win this. So who was my opponent?

Let's not pretend we didn't already all know that Chris pitted me against Courtney. Even if she hadn't come second in the drills (which I suspected may be true – how could Justin have beaten her?), Chris would have noticed she hated me.

It gets worse. Our sport was wrestling, and we had to do it in sportsgear that really covered the important things, and not much else. As if that wasn't enough, we had to fight in a kiddie ball pit. I'm sure Chris was making some joke about how "wrestling in balls" also meant naked, but considering neither of us had boy bodies, that didn't really work.

"Now, play ball!"

Courtney and I both dived at each other. I wasn't the best fighter ever, but I wasn't going to go down without a fight.

I managed to get on top first, but Courtney kicked out and hooked her leg around my neck, managing to flip. "What's the matter?" she teased. "Can't swim?"

I managed to get her off by feigning a fall from her weight, but even then, she had barely any trouble getting up. "What's up with you, can't win without talking me to death?" I retorted.

I waited for her to come to me next time, and so I was able to duck her kick and start pulling her under the colourful balls. She twisted free and pulled me into a headlock. I managed to kick her off, but couldn't get hold of her. Then I went for her wrists, but she saw it coming and grabbed mine as I grabbed hers. We kicked at each other, both trying to break each other's grips until she got one hand free and got me into another headlock,, this time trying to strangle me.

It was pretty clear who'd won.

"In your face, boyfriend-stealer!" Courtney cried, her face triumphant. "I am the world champion ball wrestler!"

I just scowled at her, still sore from my loss. "For the last time, I didn't steal anyone's boyfriend, and I don't even want yours as anything but a friend!" I hissed. "So why don't you just quit badgering me about something that never happened and come back when you've grown up and realized that most guys have friends who are girls?"

Yeah, I was mad. I cheered up a little, I would admit, when the last challenge, a creative slam dunk, was won by Leshawna easily. Justin was showy, but got blown totally out of the water. I mean, it was still another win for our team and we were tied again. But again, it was a tie. We hadn't won yet, and I kind of wished it hadn't been Leshawna. I was still mad at her. Seriously, saying I was that much like Chris was a major insult.

For the tiebreaker, Chris started giving us all pom-poms. We had to make up a cheer for someone we thought deserved it.

The Grips went into a huddle immediately. The four of us were at a loss.

"Ooh, ooh! I got it!" Harold suddenly announced. "Let's cheer for Norbert Swinlow!" We all looked at him blankly. "The inventor of the pom-pom. Duh!"

"You think Chris would be impressed by that?" I said flatly. "I'd cheer for Chef before that, and I don't like him at all."

None of us could decide, and Chris still called on us first, when we hadn't even chosen who to cheer for. But then, suddenly, Leshawna snatched up the pom-poms and began chanting as she moved across to each of us.

"Courtney, Courtney, she's my pal, she loves her PDA, she's an organized gal!

Lindsay and Justin might be dumb, but I'd be so proud if they called me their chum!

Toni, Toni, Chrissy's cuz, she's lively and chatty, always got the buzz!

Duncan and Beth, they're quite a pair, he's tough, she's goofy, but they both got flair!

And Harold's the best, he's quite a guy, he's goofy and scrawny but he's got my eye. WO-OO!"

Wow. Just wow.

"That was either the coolest thing," Harold remarked, "Or the dorkiest thing I've ever seen!"

"Cool or dorky, that was amazing and might just redeem you!" I said, smiling at Leshawna. "Can the Grips beat that?"

As it was, they could. But I think Leshawna's cheer was better. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it, but they'd done what I should have suggested all along – to cheer for Chris. The Grips won the reward, and we had lost.

I had a serious talk with Leshawna that evening while the other girls were off enjoying themselves. "So, what was with all the trash talk? Did you really mean that cheer?"

"I totally did!" Leshawna insisted. "Look, I'm sorry I said mean things about y'all, but remember what I said about the show that day? That it was stressful? That part was true, and I needed to vent. Leshaniqua's a great listener and she totally gets me, so I complained about the stuff I didn't like to her. But I really meant all the nice things I said too! I really do like how full of life you are, even if I do find you too bossy sometimes. I don't think I really meant that you were so much like Chris, because I know you're not a sadist or cruel, but you do look a lot like him, and he's bossy and jokes around at our expense – not that you make jokes at our expense, but you don't always act like you're taking this game as seriously as I get the feeling you are."

I nodded. "Okay, I accept that. I guess I'll think twice about voting for you next time, but that's all I can promise."

Leshawna shrugged. "All good. That's all I'm going to ask. I really have learned my lesson about it, but I guess you'll want me to prove I have before you believe it."

I know, it was a long chapter. If you're wondering, I really, really wanted to pit Toni and Courtney against each other, which is why I decided to have Duncan pushed down to second worst on his team. Toni's just more athletic than he is. I never planned to have her win, but I did want her to prove to Courtney that she could put up more of a fight. After all, the merge is coming, and it's time to step up the game.