The Hardest Cut by Jamie Bennett (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

Some days he was brilliant, but other days, he played like he had for the Woodsmen: he stunk.  There was plenty on his personal life, parties and women, more parties and more women, a naked picture scandal, suggestions that he was drinking too much and that he’d somehow sidestepped the league’s mandatory drug tests.  His life off the field was a lot more interesting than what he was doing on it, that was for sure.

I yawned and closed the laptop, because it was getting late.  I’d been sleeping in when I wasn’t staying over with Marley but I’d have to get up tomorrow to make sure she went to school, and to practice more for the second round of Woodsmen cheer squad auditions.  It had been a little hard getting out of bed for the last few months, so it was good to have plans and goals.  Something to look forward to.  But even though I was tired and I knew that I needed sleep, I turned over and over, not getting comfortable, not able to conk out.

Then, because I couldn’t help myself, I reached onto the nightstand to pick up my phone.  The one minute and forty-nine second message, the butt dial, hadn’t been all silence.  I listened to it again, to his muffled voice, some off-key singing, static, and a loud sigh.  Then I made myself delete it.  I was done with Shep and everything that had happened with him.  I was moving on.

Luckily Hallie had put a lot of tissue boxes in her guest bedroom, too.

Chapter 3

I wasn’t really cold.  My teeth were chattering together loudly enough to make the woman next to me look around for a squirrel, but it was nerves, not the fact that we were standing outside and my phone had told me that the temperature was a balmy twenty-eight degrees.

However, it actually was our outdoor location—not the temperature, but the location itself—that was causing my teeth to rattle around in my head.  We were on the field at Woodsmen Stadium!  I was standing on the actual grass where the legendary Warren Wilde had led the team back from thirty-nine points down in the third quarter to pull out the win, where Mike Roosevelt had run for more than three hundred yards in a single game (three hundred three, to be exact).  I could barely stop myself from throwing my body down on the field and rolling on it to soak it all in, but I had to maintain my cheerleader pose, and also, there was a lot of frost.

There were only nine spectators in the huge stadium today for the second round of auditions, and they were the judges.  We were in spandex, but all of them wore winter coats, hats, and gloves, and some of them were ready with binoculars to really get a good look at us.  I kept my fists on my waist, knee tucked, my chin tilted thirty degrees up instead of down so I could smile at them in row C.  My lips felt so frozen that I didn’t know if they’d ever go back to their original shape.

“Good morning, trainees!” a familiar voice boomed out of the stadium loudspeakers.  “How are you today?” Rylah, the head choreographer, asked us.  Despite the blue lips and extreme goosebumps of some of the women around me, all of us newbies who had advanced past the preliminary audition shook our invisible pompoms in the air and cheered back at her.  “I hope you’re here to do your best!  We’re ready to see it!” she announced.

We cheered again, pumped up by her words.  I felt ready.  I could do it!

She gave us a thumbs up.  “Great!  So excited!” she encouraged us.  Then her voice dropped in pitch.  “Just remember, if you don’t do well, if you don’t try your hardest, if you do mess up, we’ll show you the door.  It’s a short walk to the parking lot and you’ll never step foot on this field again.  Your dream may very well die today.”

Oh, gravy.  You could have heard a pin drop in the stadium.

“Look around and you’ll notice that there are only twenty of you on the field,” Rylah continued, but I had already counted and noticed that our number was smaller.  “That’s right!” she gloated.  “One trainee was already cut due to problems we found in her social media presence.  Don’t make the same mistake.  It could happen to you, next.”

We all looked at each other.  Luckily my face was frozen into the smile, or I definitely would have lost it.

“Ladies, some introductions,” Rylah said briskly into her microphone.  She pointed to the seat on her left.  “First, a very important man in your lives.  The head coach of the Woodsmen cheerleaders, Sam Weller!”  We all whooped as a short, grey-haired guy stood up and frowned down at us.  Sam Weller had been with the Woodsmen organization since before I was born, first as one of the mascots, and now with the cheerleaders.  He wasn’t a dancer himself as much as he was a gymnast, so there was always a lot of tumbling in the routines.  Not great for me, since I hadn’t done much of that since about seventh grade when I grew four inches (plus hips and boobs to match) and gymnastics as I had known them didn’t really work with my body anymore.  Rylah, the choreographer, was in charge of the dancing, and she had already criticized me, so…

I smiled bigger and pushed my chest forward.  That growth spurt had taken away tumbling, but it had also provided me with a D-cup that I hoped would help me out today.

“And this morning, we are also joined by a group of women you’ll come to know very well throughout our audition process!  They’re going to be your best friends,” Rylah announced happily, “but they’ll also be the ones to crush your dreams under their cute little tennis shoes, so watch your