I looked over to Max after she called for me, before I blushed when I realized that she wasn't wearing pants.
"You look nice." I remarked before I looked away from her again.
"No not me, this." She declared before she also blushed slightly. I noticed she was pointing at a pink gown hanging on the door.
"I have a prom dress?" I asked as she grabbed some jeans from her closet. We seemed to be the same size, which was further illustrated by the fact that the pants fit her perfectly.
"Looks like it." She commented "It looks pretty nice."
"Cody didn't say anything about me going with anyone." I remarked. Granted, considering prom was pretty soon, it probably made sense to have the dress.
"Well to a lot of girls, their dress is more important than who they're going with." Max explained. That sounded kind of dumb. "I'm guessing that you're one of those girls."
"I guess it does look pretty." I agreed, even though I wasn't looking forward to wearing it.
"Maybe you should wear it this Sunday." Max suggested. "I bet you would look nice in it."
"I guess I should thank you for all that you've done for me." I stated. I wasn't sure why, but I started to cry a little. Was I really crying at something so insignificant? She then hugged me.
"It's okay. I won't leave you. That's what friends are supposed to do." She promised.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door and the two of us pulled away from each other.
"Come in." I instructed. The door opened and Cody walked in.
"I'm sorry about that. So, what did you want to talk to me about?" He asked.
"I needed you to teach me how to cheer." I requested with a bit of a blush.
"I'm not really an expert at it." He pointed out.
"You know more about it than me. You're only person that I can ask about this." I argued. "Come on, Cody, I really need your help."
"I'll see what I can do. I'm not on the cheerleading squad right now so there's probably some moves that I don't know." He declared. "When would be the best time for you?"
"Sometime tonight would be good." I remarked. I hoped this would go well. "Since there's a game tomorrow and all."
"What about right now?" Cody suggested.
"Well, I'm supposed to help Mom cook in half an hour." I reminded him. "Why do I feel like I need a better teacher?"
"I wouldn't be so sure about that." Cody responded. "I found some muffins in my fridge and ate one before realizing that Mom made them. They weren't as good as mine but they were good."
"Why does mom suddenly know how to cook?" I inquired, even though Max had also offered a possible answer.
"I'd imagine it's so she can teach you." Cody surmised. So, he had the same theory as her. "A lot of women like to teach their daughters how to cook in case they ever need to."
"That makes sense." Max commented. "My mom has been trying to teach me as well."
"So, you don't know if I have a date to prom, do you?" I asked him. I was a little nervous about going with a guy.
"Not that I know of. Mark wanted to ask you and there are probably others, but you don't have a date yet." He explained. To be honest, I wasn't even sure who Mark was. "Although, there is something that you should know. When I was talking to Bailey about what you two did on the ship, she let something slip."
"What is it?" I asked nervously.
"A story with a pregnancy test." Cody mumbled. He was probably hoping neither of us would hear it.
"WHAT?" I shouted. "Who? When?"
"Well, it was after International Dateline Dance." Cody explained. "You were with Holden. He still had the bad shrimp and threw up on you but you decided to be his nurse instead of running away. The test was luckily negative."
"I slept with Holden? Oh god I wanna throw up." I questioned. Yes, I understood the irony of that statement.
"Who's Holden?" Max asked.
We spent the next few minutes explaining to her who some of our shipmates and classmates were on the S.S. Tipton.
"That Woody guy sounds like Jack Black." She commented. I never thought of him that way, but he kind of was. "Well look on the bright side. It's probably a good thing that you don't remember your first time. That means that you can have a brand new one, maybe with someone that you love."
"I don't want to fall in love, especially with a guy." I replied in frustration. "I just want everything to go back to normal."
"Well then you probably don't want to hear that Athena apparently doesn't even go to our school anymore." Cody stated as he twiddled his thumbs nervously. "I think cast a spell to make sure that no one remembers her. So, I have no idea how to locate her."
"So, I'm stuck like this?" I asked as he nodded. At that point, I couldn't take it anymore. I just started to cry.
"I think you should go." Max told him. "I'll try to calm her down."
Cody nodded and left the room. I was pretty sure that he wasn't trying to upset me, but he definitely had.
"What am I gonna do?" I asked as I started to cry on her shirt.
"I don't know but you shouldn't just sit here crying. I know that you're stronger than that." She remarked as she patted my back. I was pretty sure that she didn't have very experience comforting people. "We'll figure something out. Even if you're stuck as a girl for the rest of your life, it will be okay. There are a few good things about this. At least your parents are still together."
"Yeah, but why?" I asked while still crying. "What does me being a girl have to do with that?"
"I don't know maybe you should ask them." I said. "And you have me. I'll be here whenever you need me to. You need to pull yourself together."
With that, I wiped the tears from my eyes.
"I feel so stupid for breaking down like this." I declared.
"Don't. It's okay to cry once in a while." She told me as I looked in the mirror and saw black streaks running down my face. "But you need to wash your face and then you need to redo your makeup."
Even though I had only done it once, I was pretty sure that I could do it. I hoped that I would be able to.
"Okay wish me luck." I told her before I went into the bathroom.
Once I was in the bathroom, I was a bit surprised at how clean it was. I washed the mascara stains off of my face. I then redid my mascara before I washed my hands since Mom was constantly telling me to do it before eating, so I imagined I needed to do it before cooking as well. Was it okay to cook while wearing nail polish? I hoped because I didn't know to take it off. I then headed out of the bathroom and started make my way to the kitchen, arriving there soon after.
"Okay I'm here." I announced. I was still pretty nervous about this since I had never done anything like this before.
"Did you wash your hands?" She asked. Yeah, I called it.
"Yeah." I answered. "So, what are we making?"
"I was thinking Grilled Chicken. It's low in fat even though a little fat probably wouldn't hurt you." She answered. I couldn't help but blush.
"Mom!" I yelled in embarrassment.
"All I'm saying is you're kind of skinny." She defended. Why did everyone think that I was so skinny? I didn't think that I was skinny. I felt healthy. I tried to think of something that I could say to get her off my case.
"Mom, I'm a perfectly normal weight for my body. Can we please talk about something else?" I requested.
"Sure, so what did you want to talk about?" Mom asked as she began to prepare the food.
"You and Dad are okay, right?" I questioned. Max was right. I needed to ask. "You're not thinking of getting a divorce?"
"Of course we aren't. We've been good ever since that night 8 years ago." She explained. I couldn't help but wonder what night she was talking about. "It's hard to imagine that you don't remember it. You begged your father to stay and managed to convince him. That doesn't surprise me though. You've always been a Daddy's girl."
I was a bit surprised by that. I didn't think that I would actually be able to convince him to stay. I hadn't asked him. Cody had, but it didn't work. Why was it that me asking made a difference? Was it because I was a girl like she said?
"So can you hand me the pepper and get some potatoes?" She requested.
I helped her to the best of my ability. It didn't seem as a hard as I thought it would, but she was still doing the majority of the work.
"I'll go tell your father and you can get Cody and Max." She told me.
I found that Max was in my room watching Sportscenter. She looked at me as I entered.
"Is it done?" She asked.
"Yeah" I answered.
We ate dinner before Cody, Max and I went to the laundry room so he could teach me how to cheer. I hoped that I wouldn't make too big of a fool of myself.
"You know there's something else I forgot to mention. You have a YouTube channel where you post song covers. It's super popular. You were supposed to be almost at a million subscribers." Cody explained. I couldn't believe that a million people would want to see me sing. In fact, I was one of the top ten biggest channels.
It was at that time that I opened it up and noticed something. That was why that notification was important.
"I think I just hit it." I stated.
"You should probably make some sort of video to celebrate it." He suggested.
"I don't know how to make a YouTube video." I pointed out.
"I can help you." He offered.
"Let's just focus on this for now." I declared.
We did a little bit of practice which Max found a bit amusing. After she went home, Cody took me into his room and took out his camera. I was nervous. I didn't know what to do.
"So, I don't know if I want to sing." I replied. I wasn't prepared for that.
"Then don't. Just say something short thanking them. Oh, and you call your fans the Z-Squad." Cody remarked. Had he watched some of my videos? Maybe I needed to do that, but it would be so weird to see a version of me that wasn't me.
"Hey, Z-Squad." I replied nervously. "I'm sorry if I sound nervous. I'm just so excited. I did it, no we did it. We reached a million subscribers. I don't have any songs right now, but I just wanted to thank everyone for believing in me."
As I was talking, I felt strangely comfortable. I didn't know what it would be like to have fans, but were YouTubers really famous? I probably wouldn't be able to recognize any on the street other than Justin Bieber.
The following day, we learned that Max watching was a good thing because she was an alternate on the squad and one of the girls was in rehab, which meant that she was now a cheerleader. I was kind of happy because I would feel a lot more comfortable doing it with her.
"So, I guess I managed to convince you to try out." I stated. as we walked through our hallway.
"Yeah…" She replied. She looked pretty unhappy about it. "I can't help but wonder how that went. I guess I can't be too mad at you. I just don't see why I have to suffer as well. I guess I need to put on my school spirit."
I couldn't help but wonder why she thought it was suffering.
"Well, I'm happy about it. I'll probably feel more comfortable with you there." I remarked. "I went out with most of the girls on the squad."
"All of them now." She muttered. No, I had explicitly never gone out with Dana. "It's too bad that it never worked out between us because maybe we wouldn't be in this mess."
"You never know. We might not have lasted and maybe all of this was meant to happen." I responded. "Maybe we were only meant to be friends."
We then walked into the locker room where the cheerleaders were in various states of undress. Of course, I couldn't focus on that at the moment.
"What took so long?" Dana, the head cheerleader asked.
"We just took a different way since we wanted to talk." I explained.
"I don't appreciate you skipping yesterday either." Dana declared. Cody told me that he didn't like her.
"I didn't skip, I went to the doctor." I argued. "I wasn't feeling well. We'll just get dressed now."
"Just don't let it happen again." Dana responded. I didn't wanna show any outward emotion but inside I was thinking of ways to hurt that bitch. Those were probably not healthy thoughts.
We walked over to the lockers and began to dress in our cheerleading uniforms.
"So, who had the idea to name our school the Chipmunks?" I asked. "I've answered wondered why we're not the Beavers. At least beavers are somewhat useful."
"I don't know. They probably didn't want to be called the Cheevers Beavers." Max opined.
"You two are flying tonight so be ready." Dana told us.
Cody luckily had schooled us on all of the terms, so we knew that meant that we were going to be thrown into the air and on top of the pyramid. I decided that it would be best to just go with things and try to have fun and to my surprise, I had a lot of fun and it looked like Max did as well. Who knew that being thrown into the air could be fun? If it was always like this, maybe I would like being a cheerleader. Unfortunately, it seemed like the team was no longer good without Max and I on it, but I didn't even care since I was having so much fun.
However, I was still nervous about Sunday.
So Zoey found out that she is a very successful YouTuber and she had her first taste of cheerleading. Next chapter is the ball, so who knows what happen there. Please don't forget to review.