Disclaimer: The TC Williams Titans and the city of Alexandria belong to themselves, and the fictitious characters from the movie Remember the Titans belong to Disney. I own everything else. Yay for me.
Author's Note: Wow, this has been a long time coming! Sorry this is taking so long, but a lot has happened and I haven't been able to write or post new chapters as often as I would like! Thanks for reading and I hope you'll continue to stay tuned for the succeeding chapters; I'm still working on this story and intend to finish it!
Chapter Five — The Challenge
Sunday mornings were nice because they were quiet, but they could also get pretty boring.
Cat stifled a yawn as she walked with her grandmother and her brother Elliot down the carpeted aisle of the First Alexandria Baptist Church. It took forever to get home after services. Because Grandma was in the choir and had to change out of her robes before leaving, they were always at the back of the very slow-moving line to get out. And when they reached the front of the line, Grandma always spent a hundred years talking to Reverend Harris and his wife.
"Lovely service today, Reverend!"
"Thank you, Miz Davidson! But then I couldn't have done it without my choir, now, could I?"
"Oh, we just do our best, and the Lord does the rest!"
The Reverend's wife beamed at Grandma, and then at Cat and her brother. "Aren't you lucky to have such a wonderful Christian lady for a grandma, children?"
"We sure are, ma'am," Elliot agreed with the nice-boy smile he used on grown-ups.
Grandma beamed fondly. "And I'm lucky to have such darling grandchildren."
"Would you excuse me for a minute? I see some of my friends out front and would like to say goodbye to them."
"All right, bebé," Grandma said while Mrs. Harris nodded approvingly at Elliot's manners. "You run along while the Reverend and I discuss some church business."
"Thank you. Good afternoon, Reverend, Mrs. Harris." Elliot ran off.
"Cat, why don't you sit with Annie and Laurie?" Grandma suggested to her then. She nodded toward the last pew, where the Harris girls were sitting. "This may take a while."
Cat looked at the two girls in their frilly pastel dresses, whispering with each other and swinging their shiny-shod feet. Yes, she could sit with them, but they were practically babies. "No, thank you," she answered her grandmother. "I think I'll go outside, too. Excuse me," she said, mimicking her brother's tone.
Outside the church, she saw Elliot and his friends hanging out beside Cat's Grandma's Cadillac, which was parked along the sidewalk. She was about to go and join them when a familiar voice caught her attention.
Petey Jones, who was in her class at school, was huddled by the door with Blue Stanton, Little Julius Campbell and Reverend Harris's son, Jerry. "That Alan Bosely," Petey was saying, "he ain't so good."
"He's getting better," Jerry said.
"Yeah, but he's still off sometimes. It's a good thing he managed to be in place yesterday so we were able to run the flea flicker—"
Flea flicker! She had heard Betsy talking about that the other day! "Are y'all talking about football?" Cat blurted out before she could stop herself.
The boys all looked at her, surprised. "Uh, yeah," Blue answered slowly. "How did you know?"
"Oh, I play some football, too."
Petey snickered. "Really?"
Cat raised her chin and glared at him. In school, he often got in trouble because he didn't know how to keep his mouth shut. "Yes, really. I play with my friends all the time. How else would I know what a flea flicker is?" Shame on you, Catherine Davidson, for telling a lie on a Sunday, and right after church, too!
Well, it isn't really a lie; I do know that flea flickers have to do with football!
"That's true," Little Julius admitted.
"Are you having trouble doing—I mean, running a flea flicker?" Cat asked the boys. In football, you "run" a play, she reminded herself just in time. That was the way Betsy always said it.
"Yeah," Petey answered. "We know how it works and all, but we just can't seem to get it right. Usually Alan's way out of place when it's time for Jerry to pitch him the ball. We got lucky yesterday, but then after that we found out he's so slow that the defense was all over him before he even started runnin' for the end zone."
Jerry frowned slightly. "If you can't say anything nice, Petey…"
"…just tell it like it is," Blue finished, sticking out his tongue at the minister's son. "Church is over, Rev'rend Harris. You don't need to preach at me no more."
"Well, it's not just Alan's fault, you know," Cat said. "Your play could be going wrong because of other things. Maybe you aren't communicating with Alan enough — I mean, you've got to be in tune with each other out on the field, right? And…and maybe you should have more people watching out for him and making sure no one gets him while he has the ball!" she finished triumphantly.
Little Julius looked thoughtful. "Yeah, you're right," he said after a while.
"Really?" Cat blurted out.
Fortunately, none of the boys seemed to have heard her. "We'd better tell Gerry about trying to put more linesmen near Alan," Little Julius told his friends. "Maybe that'll help him hold on to the ball."
"And while that's goin' on, the Rev here will also be prayin' that Alan starts runnin' faster," Petey added, laughing and nudging Jerry.
Jerry smiled at Cat. "Wow, Cat, that's a real smart idea. I wonder why we didn't think of it that way."
Cat shrugged modestly as her grandmother and the Harrises finally came out of the church building. "You just didn't," she said.
Grandma waved to Cat on her way to the car, signaling that it was time to go home. Cat gave the boys one final smile before turning and running to her grandmother. "What were you doing with the boys, bebé?" Grandma asked as Cat caught up with her and took her hand.
"Oh, nothing much," she answered, feeling just the tiniest bit smug. "I was just teaching them a thing or two about football."
The boys didn't get to try out Cat's idea right away, though, because the next time their football club got together, they had what Gerry called a "team meeting" instead of practice. "There's another football club in town," he announced, and then paused to let his words sink in. "An all-girls football club."
"What?" Ryan exclaimed.
"Maybe that's Cat's club," Petey said to Blue and Little Julius.
"I've heard about that," Eddie Lindros remarked. "I think my little sister's a member."
"That's ridic'lous!" Ray sputtered. "Girls can't play football!"
"They think they can," Jerry pointed out.
"Well, they can't!"
Gerry held up a hand for silence. "The girls don't care if we think they can't play football," he said. "They have their club, whether we like it or not. Now, what are we gonna do about it?"
"Let's tell 'em they can't have a football club!" Ray said. "They're girls and girls can't play football!"
"They ain't gonna listen to us," Petey scoffed.
"Yeah," Eddie agreed. "Maybe instead of breaking up their club, they'll just beat you up."
Ray scowled. With his fat face and freckles, he looked like an angry poppy seed cookie. "I'll beat them up!"
"We can't do that," Little Julius told him. "They'll run crying to their mommas for sure, and we'll get into big trouble."
"Guess that means we can't play pranks on them, either," Ryan said.
"Too bad," Petey remarked in a voice as glum as Ryan's. "It would've been fun to put frogs in their football helmets or something like that." The rest of the boys chuckled at the suggestion, and then fell silent again.
Suddenly, Lewie Lastik spoke up. "Why can't we just let their club alone?" he asked earnestly. "If they wanna play football, then why not let 'em?"
Everyone had to admit that Lewie had a point. The more levelheaded boys decided that they would leave the girls alone because if the girls wanted to play football as much as they did, then the girls should be allowed to have their club. If someone had told the boys that they couldn't have a football club, the boys were sure that they would go ahead and have a club anyway.
The other boys, however, had different ideas.
"Stop it! Stop it!" Betsy screamed, throwing down the girls' football club playbook. She blew a loud blast on her whistle. "Sally Jane! You're s'posed to go left, not right! Don't you know where your left and your right are?"
"I'm still learning!" Sally Jane replied.
Betsy blew furiously on her whistle again and motioned for the rest of the team to stop practice and gather around her. "What's wrong with all y'all?" she yelled. "You ain't takin' this seriously. You have to get serious, 'cause football is a serious business!"
"I thought it was a game," Tamsin remarked.
"Well, it's a serious game!" Betsy retorted. "There are positions and ways of playin' and everything! You can't play it properly unless you know your position and do what you're s'posed to do! How can you play the game if you don't know how to play it properly?"
Suddenly, in the middle of her speech, there was a loud pop and something dropped down from the sky.
It bopped Miranda on the head. She started screaming, and naturally, everyone else started screaming, too, and running away from her. Meanwhile, the thing that had hit Miranda rolled to a harmless stop in the grass.
"Oh, for pete's sake," Betsy muttered. She blew hard on the whistle again, three or four long blasts, until the others stopped running. "Stop acting like a bunch of namby-pambies! Look!" She pointed to the white lump on the ground. "It's just some crumpled-up paper!"
"But how did it get here?" one of Miranda's friends quavered.
"Maybe it fell from outer space!" Lizzie suggested.
Presently, the girls heard loud laughter and running feet. Cat clambered up onto Emma's backyard slide so she could see over the backyard fence.
She was frowning when she came back down. "I saw some of the boys from your brother's football club runnin' down the street," she reported. "They had their backs turned, but I recognized a couple of 'em. I'm pretty good at recognizin' the backs of people's heads."
Betsy scowled. "I bet that's from them."
Cautiously, the girls approached the missile. Sharon picked it up and smoothed it out. "There's writing on it!" she announced, and they clustered around to read what the writing said.
It was a message from the boys.
We think that girls can't play football, but if you think that you can, we chalindge you to a showdown next-next Saturday, 3 PM at Fireman's Field. Be there or else…From the All-Boys Football Club
Later that afternoon, Betsy barged into her brother's room, where she found him reading the latest Superman comic book. She walked right up to him and flung down the "chalindge" from the boys. The wadded-up note bounced once off the carpet and landed with a plop in the middle of Gerry's comic book.
"You tell your club that you dumb bozos spelled 'challenge' wrong," she snapped. (At least Tamsin had said it was spelled wrong.) "And you tell your club that my club is gonna take your stupid challenge — and we're gonna win!"