“They’re joint accounts,” Mr. Maddox said. He needed to be able to make direct deposits. He didn’t expect us to know all this because we’d never had savings accounts, but that was banking. “This is my way of helping you move along to becoming an adult, understanding the way the system works.”
“But I like getting money,” I said. It was fun fingering the worn bills that had passed through hundreds or even thousands of other people’s hands, looking at the eye over the pyramid, wondering what the heck that was all about, and studying the signatures and serial numbers and complicated little scrolly stuff. “If your money’s locked away in some bank, you can’t look at it and feel it and count it,” I said. “I like cash.”
“Cash is what smart investors call ‘stupid money,’ ” Mr. Maddox said. “It’s just sitting in your pocket, tempting you to piss it away. It’s not working for you. You got to make your money work for you.”
“Maybe so. But I still like getting cash.”
“You’ll be earning interest, Bean,” Liz said.
“There, someone’s using her brain,” he said. “And not just interest but interest on the interest. Compound interest, is what that’s called.”
“I don’t care. I just want the money.”
“Your choice. But it’s the loser’s choice. Typical Holladay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I didn’t make the cheerleading squad.
Tryouts were held a couple of weeks before school began, and I could tell from the moment I got to the gym just how seriously the other girls took cheerleading. They were wearing the red-and-white Byler colors, they had their hair held back with little baubles in the shape of bulldogs, the school mascot, and some had bulldogs painted on their cheeks. They limbered up with stretches, handstands, and backflips, the black girls in one group and the whites in another. The white girls eyed me suspiciously as a newcomer. The JV coach barely looked my way when it came my turn, as if she already knew which girls she would pick.
Afterward, I sat in the bleachers to watch the varsity tryouts. Three of the girls who’d been on the squad had followed through with their threat to quit, which meant there would be three open slots for girls from the mill hill and Nelson High.
Ruth took her turn late in the morning, and I thought she nailed it. She had taken off her cat’s-eye glasses, but that didn’t affect her performance at all. Her voice was loud, her routine was flawless, and she was so limber that when she did her final cartwheel split, everyone heard the slap of her thighs against the gym’s wooden floor. There was no way she wasn’t making the squad, I thought. Then the black girls took their turns. Six of them had been varsity cheerleaders at Nelson, and they really knew their stuff. They acted sassy, swinging their hips and shaking their heads, almost like they were dancing, and I wondered if that would help them or hurt them, judged against the white girls.
The results were posted a couple of days later, and Ruth made the team. So did two of the black girls. When I went over to the Wyatts’ to congratulate Ruth, she gave me a big Wyatt hug. Folks on the hill, Aunt Al told me, were over the moon that one of their own had finally up and made the cheering squad. The cheerleading coach’s selections had also created a lot of grumbling. Some whites in Byler had been willing to accept a single black cheerleader but thought that two was too many. At the same time, the Nelson students felt they should have had at least three cheerleading slots, since they were half the school now and had supplied key new players for the football team. A black girl and a white girl had gotten into a catfight over it in front of the Rexall.
“Don’t quite know what this bodes for the school year,” Aunt Al said.
Aunt Al was mixing up a bowl of pimento cheese for sandwiches when Uncle Clarence came through the front door, clutching a bottle in a paper bag. He had a huge grin on his face, and he was doing a bent-legged jig. He kissed Aunt Al and his kids and hugged me, talking all the while in the tones of a preacher man, asking how everybody was doing on this glorious day, going on about his beautiful daughter and how the mill hill finally got itself a cheerleader. “That there’s reason for a celebration. Let’s celebrate. Let’s have us some music. Somebody get me my guitar!”
Joe came back with an ancient guitar, the body worn black in places from years and years of playing. Uncle Clarence took a long slug from the bottle, then picked up the guitar and started to play it like nobody I’d ever heard. He didn’t seem to be thinking about what he was doing. He was plucking and strumming and twanging away, almost like he was in a trance, the music flowing up out of him.