The clock hit 00:00 and the game ended. Wainwright fans and alumni were pleased: the Blue Wave had vanquished Long Beach Lutheran by a score of 28-10. The cheerleaders were packing their bags when someone spoke behind Cordelia. "Hey, stranger." She turned and had to crane her neck upward to look into the speaker's face.

"Nice uniform," Matti Hollis said. The former Knight wore a sleeveless navy-blue top and cream-colored cropped pants. Her shoes were Nike Air Duels.

"What-" Cordelia swallowed. "What are you doing here?"

Matti grinned. "It's a beautiful day, so I just thought I'd drive down and catch your debut." She looked at the activity going on around her. "Would you like to get dinner or are you busy?"

Cordelia frowned. "No, we don't go over film until tomorrow, but I, uh… I need to put my stuff away and clean up first."

Matti looked down, eyes twinkling. "Well, it's only two-thirty and I'm not AARP ready yet, so there's a pretty good window." She stepped back as Maria hurried past. "How about I pick you up at four? Sound good?"

"Sure. Sure." Cordelia shouldered her gym bag. "Just, uh, in front of Southard, OK?" She shook her head and held up a hand. "Brain lock. That's Southard, right there."

Matti nodded. "The big building attached to the football field. Got it," she deadpanned. "I'll be out front at four. I'm still driving the 4Runner." She winked and walked away, long strides eating up the artificial turf.

"Who was that?" Maria asked from behind Cordelia.

"That was… that was my high school coach. Senior year, anyway." Cordelia watched Matti grow smaller in the distance.

"Man, I bet that was scary." Maria stepped up beside Cordelia. "Did you see her arms?"

Cordelia gave Maria the side-eye. "Every day."

Maria shook her head slowly. "If I had arms like that, I'd never wear sleeves."

"Hell," Wyatt Pilgrim said, walking by, "if I had guns like that, I'd never wear sleeves."

"Well," Cordelia said, her voice dry, "I'm glad I was able to convene this meeting of Arm Fetishists Anonymous."

"So, how is everything?" Matti asked as the server took away the menus.

"Pretty good," Cordelia said. "How is Sunnydale? How's-" She bit off the rest of the sentence.

"I don't know," Matti said. "I haven't seen her. How are your classes?"

Cordelia nodded as she spread her napkin on her lap. "Pretty good. Some of the math makes me feel like the dark side of Good Will Hunting, but the history and English have been fine."

"Roommate?" Matti took a sip of water.

"Tess is great. She plays volleyball."

"I remember. She get much playing time?"

"I don't really know." Cordelia scrunched her nose. "She's 'in the rotation', whatever that is."

"For a freshman, it's not bad. Oh, thanks." Matti leaned back as the server placed her lobster ravioli with garlic butter sauce on the table. Cordelia had opted for the dinner salad with grilled chicken. Matti eyed the girl's plate. "You're not developing an eating disorder, are you?"

"No. I just don't have twenty-four hour a day access to a fully equipped gym slash torture chamber anymore." Cordelia ate a small forkful of salad.

"I imagine you get a pretty good workout at practice."

Cordelia swallowed. "We certainly get treated like slaves."

Matti paused, fork in midair. "Are you not enjoying it?"

"No, no it's not that." Cordelia shook her head. "Most of the people on the team are the best, I mean, they're all a little-" She rolled her eyes and made a wavy motion near her temple. "I mean, Wyatt's the bad-joke king of the castle, Maria-" she shook her head "-Maria would trade her pom-poms for a bag of magic beans, but… they're all right, it's just…"

"Just what?"

"One of the captains wants to be Queen Bitch."

Matti nodded. "Is she stepping on your toes?"

Cordelia rewarded the quip with a withering stare. "Oh, how very ha-ha."

"I try." The former Knight shrugged. "So, tell me more."

"Not really much to tell." Cordelia ate more salad and took a drink of her tea. "I think she suffers from a life-threatening allergy to giving compliments and she's on perma-period, but it's not like I'm the only one. She's up everybody's ass." Matti nodded as she took a sip of water. There was a long moment of silence, then Cordelia said, "I'm having some kind of issue."

Matti put down her fork. "Like what?"

Cordelia looked down at her plate. It was easier to speak that way. "Some of… I'm not completing some of my lifts. It's not… terrible, but I know it. My partner knows it."

"Huh." Matti ran a thumb over her eyebrow. "Is it unfixable?"

"No." Cordelia's head came up and her eyes sparked. "I'll work harder. I'll figure it out." Her face softened. "It's just… cheering was always easy."

"Yeah, that happens sometimes." Matti wiped her mouth on her napkin.

"Oh, god," Cordelia groaned. "You have a story, don't you?"

"More of an anecdote, really. Get comfy, I don't get to use this often. When I was in high school, I was the best girls' basketball player in my school's history."

Cordelia rolled her eyes and exhaled. "I have so heard this, you went to college, you scored, like, I don't remember, but it was a lot of points?"

Matti nodded. "This is a different angle. If I can get back to my very pertinent story? Okay, in high school, nobody could get within a mile of me. I started playing when I was in middle school when I was already five-ten. Problem is, I weighed about ninety-five pounds and couldn't run more than three steps without tripping. The first couple of years were miserable, then an amazing thing happened. I quit growing up and started growing out and my coordination improved when my nervous system caught up to my skeleton. Now, when I was a lost cause, I paid attention in practice and did my very best to try and do what the coaches wanted. All of a sudden I had athletic ability to go along with what I'd learned, and I was suddenly unstoppable." She took a sip of water. "I will also own that all of the embarrassment I had endured made me a little…" She inhaled sharply.

"You were looking for payback." Cordelia stated it as a fact, not a question.

"Yeah. I remembered the girls who had laughed at me when I fell over my own feet… and not just the ones at other schools. I made some of our practices a living hell. See, a lot of athletes who dominate when they're twelve, thirteen, it's because they matured physically at an early age."

Cordelia touched her upper lip with an index finger. "This is starting to sound a lot like an unpaid therapy session."

Matti held up a hand. "Nope. Stay with me. Anyway, I went on a tear my last three years of high school. Senior year I led the state in scoring and rebounding for our class. Lots of colleges were interested in the girl who four years ago couldn't get up off the bench without face-planting. I signed my letter of intent, gave everybody in high school the finger… that's a figure of speech, my granny would have whupped my ass if I actually flipped anybody the bird… and headed off to glory."

The former Knight took another drink and leaned back in her chair. "Except that everybody at college had been all-conference or all-state. They all led their conference or their state in something… and it turned out that, at that level, six-one wasn't that tall." She shook her head. "I got my shot blocked so much that first semester I practically had 'Spaulding' printed on my forehead." Cordelia frowned. "Spaulding makes the basketballs," Matti clarified.

"Okay, now, how does this story apply to moi?" Cordelia arched her eyebrows. "Tess is the jock, not me."

"Cordelia, don't pretend to be dense." Matti took a chance and placed her hand over the girl's. Cordelia flinched, but she did not jerk her arm away. "I have said this before. I will say it now. I will say it ten thousand times if I have to. I have never seen anyone as focused and determined as you. I mean, when you were queen of the Mean Girls, didn't you want to be the best at it?"

Cordelia bit her lip. "Low, but accurate."

"When I went to college, I had an identity, a sense of who I was. That got challenged early. The same thing is happening to you, but it's part of the process, part of growing up." Mattie squeezed the girl's hand. "And you'll get it. I know you will, because I've watched you overcome more than any of your teammates, and I say that not knowing anything about them."

Cordelia blinked and looked away. "Got a bucket for all that sap? We could make maple syrup."

Matti pulled back her hand. "I think my entree is getting cold. Oh, and while I respect your commitment to healthy eating, you are going to get a dessert when you're finished with your rabbit food."

Sunday afternoon was film day. The squad gathered at Southard and trooped into the film room. A couple of the senior guys (Cordelia thought their names were Terrence and Jason) wore sunglasses and the kind of body language that said 'Saturday night ended about fifteen minutes ago'. Dorian stood at the front of the room.

"Everybody settled?" He nodded in response to the groans and shrugs. "Hey, first game yesterday, went very well, I thought. Of course, it always goes better when the team plays well-"

"Yeah." The speaker was a girl named… Rylie? Kylie? Cordelia knew it was one of those. "Let's hope yesterday wasn't a fluke. Man, it got brutal last year."

"Hey!" Everyone simultaneously sat up straighter and huddled lower in their seats as Allie's voice cut through the air like a straight razor. "When the team's good, we are the show with them. When they suck, we are the show instead of them. No excuses, ever!"

"How does she do that?" Tamarra murmured. "Who yells in italics?"

"But there's always room for improvement." Dorian held up a moderating hand. "Everyone got your notebooks? Good. Let's get started. Justine, can you get the lights?"

A picture of the football field filled the screen. The last members of the departing Blue Wave Marching Band could be seen at the far left of the image; the cheerleaders were racing in to fill the space from the right.

"Right there." The video paused and Allie got up, the frozen squad superimposed over her. "Do you see how sloppy our set-up is? We're supposed to be on a line, not-" She made a wavy break-dancing movement with her arm.

"Move quickly, don't hurry," Dorian said. "You can see where our alignment is a little off because we didn't check our reference points. It takes less than a second to make sure you're in the right spot."

The gauntlet continued. Allie in particular paused the video constantly. "Right there," she said, pointing to Kelli Collins's frozen image, "what is that? Huh? What are you thinking, Barbie? 'Oh, I'm so pretty, it's okay if I wave like a half-melted Lego'?" Later, "Terrence, is a hundred-and-fifteen pounds too much for you to carry? Because it looks like you're about to fall over and drop Kylie." Cordelia nodded: Kylie. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Terrence shoot a surreptitious bird at Allie.

The onscreen team set up for the finale. Cordelia worried at a thumbnail as it began. Almost immediately, Allie froze the image. "Hey, Small Town, what's that?" Cordelia shot a quick glance at Juniper Taliferro. "Hey, you do know we're putting on a show, right? That people are supposed to enjoy it? What's that expression, huh? Are you auditioning for Night of the Living Dead? Because you look like a zombie." Allie snapped her fingers, then pressed 'Play' on the remote. Cordelia let her eyes drift to Juniper. The girl from Oregon's face was impassive, perfectly still. If her eyes hadn't been open, Cordelia might have thought she was asleep. No, check that: too much tension in that torso for sleep.

Dorian tapped the screen. "Execution of the stunt was great, but we always have to think about that little extra. Look at it this way, if we were the football team, it wouldn't be enough to score, we have to be smiling while we do it. Okay?"

Two more tumblers and one base were subjected to Allie's withering assessment. Cordelia felt her breathing flutter as her turn arrived. Her video twin ran, flipped, twisted, all exactly right, then… The camera couldn't capture the quiver, but the video certainly preserved David's small step forward. Cordelia was wincing before the picture froze.

"Hey, Last Minute, you do know that you're supposed to make it all the way to your base, don't you, not leave it six inches short? We're supposed to know what we're doing, not look like a bunch of middle-schoolers pretending on the playground." The tape reversed, then ran again. "See how she doesn't put herself in his hands? How he has to come to her? That's a day one mistake, people." As the diatribe continued, Cordelia mentally repeated 'I have seen the world almost end. That was worse. I have seen the world almost end. That was worse.' She was grateful that the room was dark; she was certain that her face was the same color as the cardinal-red tennis dress she wore.

"Small mistakes can be difficult to correct," Dorian said, "because they're small. You can see that everything is great up until the lift, no gross mistakes, nothing's off line, arms are in great position, push is fantastic. It's not obvious what goes wrong at the end, which can make it more difficult to fix, because you have to identify it first." He shrugged. "And sometimes that takes more effort than correcting something big and obvious."

Cordelia Chase had never had a knife twisted in her heart. She had seen it done, of course, but never experienced it herself. Still, she knew this was that feeling. The last three lifts were critiqued, if one could call Allie's slash-and-burn comments criticism, then the lights came up.

"All right," Dorian said. "Enjoy the rest of your evening. Tomorrow afternoon, we start working on what we learned today."

"What's that?" Tamarra whispered from behind Cordelia. "That we all suck?" The team began to filter out of the film room.

"Cordelia, have you got a minute?" The low voice right behind her made her jump and turn, hand over her heart. Dorian held up a hand. "Sorry. Could you hang back?" Cordelia looked at the departing team members; Juniper glanced over her shoulder and their eyes met. Cordelia's jaw clenched. Dorian had pulled one of the Wainwright-branded chairs out of its row and turned it to face the others. He sat down, hands on his thighs, and motioned to one of the empty chairs facing him. Cordelia's stomach felt queasy as she sat down.

Dorian looked down at the Wainwright Blue Wave logo inlaid in the carpet. "David, uh, talked to me last night."

Cordelia's mouth went dry; her gut clenched. "Okay."

"You guys are having issues with your lift." Dorian looked up at her; now that he was going, the words seemed to come easier. "You saw it on the video. Nothing major, but you're not quite finishing."

"Oh, really? Thanks for the clarity, that ten-minute ass-chewing I just got was a little vague."

"Allie and I have… different views of how we work. I know she's a handful, but above all, Allie wants this squad to be the best it can be, and if that means calling out individuals, so be it." Dorian paused for a beat. "I think that the way to get the best out of the squad is to get the best out of the individuals, so I guess we've adopted a sort of… good cop, bad cop approach."

Cordelia snorted. "She's more like bitch cop."

"Are you saying she's wrong, that there is no problem?"

"No, I'm not saying that-"

Dorian rubbed his leg with the flat of one hand. "Cordelia, the two of you should be killing it, you're both really strong, so David's concerned that you have some sort of issue with him."

"What? No." Cordelia shook her head. "He's fine."

Dorian nodded. "Well, if you're not worried about David, then what's the problem?"

"I think it's been made very clear that the problem is me." Cordelia hated the sound of her voice, the shakiness, the near-break warbling underneath. How could she explain the situation to her captain when she didn't even understand it herself? She swallowed with difficulty. "Does he- Does David want a different partner?"

"No, he had nothing but good things to say about you, he's worried that he's letting you down. Listen, it could just be a chemistry thing. Do you need a switch?" Cordelia shook her head, teeth gritted. "Then maybe just a break." Dorian shrugged. "Would you want to work with me?"

"What? Why- No." Cordelia continued to shake her head as a hard knot formed under her sternum.

"It might be a good idea." Dorian's tone was soft and compassionate. "I mean, you were on an all-girls squad in high school. You wouldn't be the first girl who's been a little uncomfortable when she has to work with a male partner."

"That's complete brain-lock." Cordelia crossed her arms. "And it would be unfair to your partner."

Dorian grinned. "Breanna would not suffer at all. She could partner with a sawhorse and it would be fine. She's that good." His face turned serious. "And you have the potential to be that good. That's why I want to fix this little glitch."

"Then if the problem is partnering with a guy-" Cordelia felt the skin on the inside of her arms crawl "-how would working with you make it any better?"

"Well, you know…" Dorian's smile was soft. "I am gay."

"Wait a minute." Cordelia held up both index fingers. "You think I'm worried that David's trying to cop a feel and working with you will fix that because…" Her eyes widened.

"It would remove that possibility from your mind." Dorian stood up. "But…. it sounds like you're not on board."

"No, I'm not." Cordelia shot to her feet. "That's the stupidest, most insulting thing I've ever heard, and I dated Xander Harris for a year. I don't need to change partners. Do you realize what that would do to me, what everyone would think?"

Dorian held up his hands, palms out. "What people think isn't important. It's-"

"Oh, spare me. Of course, what people think is important. If it isn't, why do we wear deodorant? Why do women shave their legs? Not important? Bullshit." Cordelia took a breath to calm down. "Has anybody ever switched partners? Huh?"

"Well, yes, of course-" Dorian began.

"Anybody on the squad now?"

"What? No?"

"Uh-huh." Cordelia nodded. "So I get that hung around my neck, the girl who has to be babied, who's hard to work with? No thanks. I'll do extra mat work. We'll put in more time and get it down. We- I will figure it out and fix it."

Dorian looked at her; Cordelia returned the stare with all of the intensity she could muster until he nodded. "Okay." He stood up. "But 'extra' won't always fix everything, Cordelia. The squad's family, it's all right to share." He turned as he reached the door. "It's supposed to be a beautiful night. Enjoy it."

Cordelia's eyes narrowed as he walked out the door. After this? Yeah, sure.