Chapter 10: Centerfold Cheer
The polyester of the cheer skirt felt like sandpaper against Jake’s—Ally’s—thighs. It was a cruel joke of a garment, red and white with a fraying hem, barely skimming mid-thigh. The crop top was worse, a tight, stretchy cage that compressed and accentuated in equal measure, a constant, squeezing reminder of a topography that was not his own. Beside him, Marcus stood rigid in an identical uniform, the colors clashing violently with her dark, cascading curls. They’d been given names by the cheer coach, a relentlessly perky woman named Gutierrez who smelled of grape bubblegum: “Ally” and “Maya.”
“It’s temporary,” Nate had whispered to them in the barren equipment room where they’d changed, his back turned. His voice held no conviction.
Now, standing on the sun-bleached south field, the reality was a physical blow. The main practice field lay thirty yards away, separated by a chain-link fence. The grunts of drills, the sharp whistle blasts, the familiar thwack of pads colliding—it was a symphony of their old lives, playing just out of reach.
Coach Gutierrez clapped her hands, the sound sharp as a gunshot. “Ladies! Focus! From the top. ‘Gooooo Fight!’ sequence. Starting positions!”
The other cheerleaders, seven genuine ones, fell into line with practiced ease. They were sharp, athletic, smiling. Ally and Maya were dark clouds at the end of the line. Ally caught his reflection in the window of the field house: a blonde stranger in a ridiculous skirt, posture screaming defeat.
“Five, six, seven, eight!”
The routine began. It was basic, juvenile—a series of claps, high-V’s, and low kicks. To the mind of a linebacker who could read complex offensive formations in a heartbeat, it was insultingly simple. To the body of a blonde bombshell, it was a minefield. The knee-high socks itched. The sneakers, a size too small, pinched. Every jump sent a disorienting, painful jounce through his chest. Every sharp movement made the skirt swirl, exposing more thigh than he’d ever shown in his life.
“Maya! Hips! You’re stiffer than my grandma!” Coach Gutierrez called out. Marcus glared, her feminine face twisting into an expression of pure, familiar fury.
A whistle blew from the main field. Water break.
Like a tide, the football team—his team—drifted toward the fence, plastic water bottles clutched in massive hands. They leaned against the links, watching. Grinning.
“Well, hellooo, new talent,” drawled Carson, the backup quarterback. His eyes roved over the line of cheerleaders, lingering on the two newcomers.
Ally felt a hot flush creep up her neck. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, trying to become a statue.
“Don’t be gross, Carson,” said Lisa, the head cheerleader, rolling her eyes but smiling. She turned to Ally and Maya. “Don’t mind the Neanderthals. You guys are doing great for your first day!”
“Thanks,” Ally mumbled, Jake’s voice trying to climb out of the higher register.
The next part of the routine involved a simple pyramid. Ally and Maya, as the new “bases,” were positioned at the bottom. Ally felt the weight of one of the flyers, a tiny girl named Chloe, settle onto his raised thighs and shoulder.
The pressure was manageable, a fraction of what he handled on the line, but the positioning was all wrong. His center of gravity was different, lower, and the skirt felt obscenely short as he braced. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cluster of players at the fence tightening, their break-time amusement focusing into direct attention.
“Steady, Ally!” Coach Gutierrez chirped.
He locked his knees, the muscles in his new form trembling not from strain but from a profound, existential wrongness. The pyramid held. A smattering of applause came from the fence, dotted with a few low whistles. Heat flooded his face. Chloe, perched above, waved brightly at the players, causing the entire structure to wobble.
“Easy!” Marcus—Maya—hissed from the other side of the base, her own voice strained.
The pyramid disassembled, and the team broke for water. Ally turned, desperate for his bottle, and nearly collided with Nate, who was lingering awkwardly by the equipment bag. Nate’s eyes flickered over the uniform, a muscle in his jaw tightening, before he forced a casual grin.
“Need a drink, Ally?” he asked, his tone a poor imitation of his usual, easy-going self. He held out a water bottle.
“Thanks,” Ally muttered, taking it. His fingers brushed Nate’s. A stupid, electric jolt, entirely unfamiliar, shot up his arm. He fumbled the bottle, catching it clumsily against his new, softer chest.
“Whoa, got it?” Nate said, his hand hovering near Ally’s—Jake’s—waist for a half-second before snatching back as if burned.
Ally nodded, unable to speak, and took a long gulp. Over the bottle’s rim, he watched Nate. Really watched him. The way the late afternoon sun caught the stubble on his jaw, the familiar arc of his shoulders under his practice jersey, the concern in his eyes that was now shaded with a confused, hesitant something else. Nate had always just been Nate. His roommate. His friend. Solid, reliable, goofy Nate.
So why did his stomach do a weird, fluttering thing looking at him now?
Across the field, Marcus was getting a similar lesson. Drew, the strong safety, sauntered over to the fence directly in front of her, leaning on it with a lazy confidence. “Tough first day, new girl. You okay? You look a little… intense.”
He flashed the million-dollar smile that had gotten him featured on campus recruitment brochures. Marcus had seen that smile a thousand times. She’d teased him about it. Now, seen through Maya’s eyes, it was a different weapon entirely. It hit her like a physical thing, warm and disarming. She felt a traitorous heat in her own cheeks.
“I’m fine,” Maya snapped, but it came out less cutting than she intended, almost breathy.
“Feisty. I like it,” Drew said, winking before pushing off the fence to rejoin the team.
The two transformed players found themselves side-by-side at the water cooler, a moment of hollow respite. The sounds of their old world—coaches barking, pads cracking—drifted through the chain links. They didn’t look at each other.
“You see Drew’s arms?” Marcus whispered, the words leaving her mouth before her brain could censor them. She sounded horrified by her own observation.
Ally stared at the grass, his mind filled with the memory of Nate’s hand near his waist, the scent of his deodorant mixed with grass stains. “Yeah,” Jake breathed back, the confession feeling like a betrayal. “And since when did Nate have, like… that jawline?”
A long, miserable silence stretched between them, filled with the cheerful shouts of the cheer squad and the brutal, familiar symphony of football. The cognitive dissonance was a physical ache, a nausea of the soul. These were their brothers. Their dumb, sweaty, fart-joke-making brothers.
Now, through this cruel new lens, they were a gallery of stranger’s bodies, all shoulders and smiles and confusing charisma. It was terrifying.
Coach Gutierrez’s whistle sliced through their turmoil. “Ladies! Let’s run the full routine with the music this time! Game day energy!” The opening beats of a pulsing pop song blared from a portable speaker.
Ally and Marcus mechanically fell into line. As they spun and clapped, their movements gradually syncing with the music out of sheer athletic muscle memory, their eyes were drawn irresistibly back to the fence. To the crowd of powerful, grinning young men watching them.
They moved in unison, ponytails swinging, skirts flaring, a perfect picture of crafted femininity. Inside, two minds reeled, drowning in a silent, screaming question that had nothing to do with football or magic pills.
The music cut, leaving a ringing silence punctuated by their own ragged breathing. Practice was over. A few of the genuine cheerleaders offered thin, sympathetic smiles as they headed for the main gym, but most just chattered among themselves, already forgetting the two awkward newcomers. Ally and Marcus were left standing on the fading turf, alone under the vast, indifferent sky.
Nate shuffled over, cleats crunching on the dry grass. He kept his eyes carefully on a point between their shoulders. “Coach Briggs says you gotta use the visitors’ locker room. Main one’s… occupied.”
Marcus just stared at the fence, where the last of the football team was jogging back to the field house, their laughter carrying on the wind. “Visitors’,” she repeated, the word flat and hollow.
The room was a dank, tiled cave smelling of mildew and industrial cleaner, a stark contrast to their own vibrant, chaotic sanctuary. The showers were a row of chipped nozzles with no curtains. Ally leaned against a cold locker, the metal biting into her shoulder blade. The skirt’s sequins glinted mockingly in the fluorescent light.
“I can’t do this again,” Marcus said, her voice echoing. She wasn’t looking at Ally. She was staring at her own hands, fingers flexing as if trying to remember how to make a fist.
“We have to,” Ally mumbled. The uniform felt like it was fused to his skin. “Until it wears off.”
“And if it doesn’t?” The question hung there, ugly and real. Marcus finally turned, her dark eyes wide with a fear no linebacker or wide receiver had ever trained for. “What if this is just… us now?”
Ally had no answer. He yanked at the knot on his crop top, fingers slipping on the slick fabric. The silence between them was thick, packed with everything they couldn’t say. The memory of the fence. The watching eyes. The way their own bodies had hummed in response, a traitorous, cellular betrayal.
Marcus peeled off her top with a sharp, frustrated motion. The air was cool on her sweat-slicked skin. She balled the fabric and threw it at a bench. It missed, fluttering to the floor like a wounded bird. “This is so messed up,” she whispered, more to herself than to Ally.
She walked to the showers and turned a knob. Icy water sprayed out, but she stepped under it anyway, gasping as it hit her. She scrubbed at her arms, her face, as if she could wash away the reality. The water plastered her dark curls to her skull and ran in rivulets down the new, infuriating slopes of her body.
Ally remained by the lockers, paralyzed. His mind kept replaying the last hour on a sickening loop. The heat of the sun. The grit of the turf under his palms during a toe-touch. The heavy, approving gaze of the players—his friends—as they watched the pyramid. Carson’s drawl. Drew’s wink.And Nate. Nate’s hesitant hand. The confused flicker in his eyes that wasn’t just concern. It was appraisal.
A hot, sharp bolt of something entirely unfamiliar lanced through Ally’s gut, settling low and tight. It was hunger, but not for food. It was a desperate, aching want that seemed to pulse from his very core, a throbbing echo to the cheerful pop song still stuck in his head. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to banish the image of Nate’s jawline, the way his practice jersey stretched across his shoulders.
It was useless. The image shifted, merged with the feeling of the cool water bottle against his—her—lips, the phantom brush of Nate’s fingers. Her body reacted before her mind could protest, a warm, pooling weakness spreading through her limbs. She felt her face flush, her skin prickling with a sensitivity that made the cheap fabric of the uniform feel like a torture device.
Across the room, the sound of the water changed as Marcus adjusted the temperature. Steam began to curl into the air. She braced her hands against the slick tile wall, head bowed under the spray. Her mind was a battlefield.
She kept seeing Drew’s smile at the fence. Not the generic, teammate smile. The one he’d aimed directly at “Maya.” It was a smile she’d seen him use on girls in the student union, a smile that promised easy, flattering attention. It had always seemed kind of cheap from a distance.
Up close, aimed at her, it had been a sunburn. Her stomach twisted, a coil of heat tightening beneath the chill of the water. She remembered the solid set of his forearms resting on the chain link, the defined veins she’d never noticed before, the easy confidence in his stance. A sharp, vivid fantasy flashed, unbidden: what if she’d walked over? What if she’d touched one of those arms?
She slammed a fist against the tile, the pain a bright, clean counterpoint to the confusing fog in her head. It didn’t help. The heat between her legs was a blunt, undeniable fact. This new body had its own relentless, humiliating agenda. She was turned on. By Drew. By her own goddamn teammate.
The water ran clear. The room was silent except for its drumming and their own ragged breaths. They stood there, prisoners in their own skin, drowning in a shame that was so much worse than any missed tackle or dropped pass. This was a fundamental rewiring, a sick joke played on their very instincts.
Ally finally opened her eyes, staring at the rusted locker handle. Her voice, when it came, was barely a scrape of sound. “What is happening to us?”
Marcus turned the shower off. The drip of the nozzle was obscenely loud in the quiet. She didn’t answer. She just stood there, water dripping from her new form onto the gray tile, shivering not from the cold, but from the terrifying, intimate fire still smoldering inside. The visitors’ locker room offered no answers, only the echo of their own horrified realization. This was the new playbook, and they had no idea how to run it.