A few days before tryouts, I decide to approach the task as an experiment. Who knows? Maybe, while practicing jazz hands and memorizing rhymes about the competitive drive, I'll discover a new more buoyant me who can hardly contain raising her arms in a Victory V. Out on the brick inlaid basketball court that constitutes our driveway, Jeff and his dude crew confront Sacramento's relentlessly brutal sun, dribbling, dunking and lobbing wild elbows. Meanwhile, inside the air-conditioned hum of our family room, I press myself closer and closer to the white carpet drop splits, surrounded by poised, leggy girls with hair the color of shiny wheat. Daphne, Liberty, Courtney. Members of the Senior Dance Team. Girlfriends of Jeff's past, present and future, their mix tapes buried among his briefs and jock straps.

On tryout day I wake with a fever, gel my limp hair into a tight bun, don the requisite Lycra shorts and green tee, and find myself beside K. in the parking lot, waiting to be called and trying not to watch while one of our peers goes triple flipping across the lawn. "We're doomed!" K. says, breaking the ice, her blues eyes narrowed in wicked delight. Her mother has put her up to this, I realize. To be doomed just might be our luck. In that moment, our friendship is sealed. In the next, Ms. B. is blowing her trademark whistle, hollering our number, waving us toward the open door of the gymnasium. Inside, it is dim and reverberant. A squadron of older girls is seated on the sidelines, starched skirts flared over their knees, legs discretely bent in the same direction, towards the visitors' hoop. The girls are flanked by a table of matronly judges. Ms. B. kneels beside the PA system, gives us a count of three, presses play. And then there I go, crackerjacking across a squeaky floor, smacking my own Gluteus Maximus, freezing like an Egyptian, stomping low, my pencil-thin calves kicking high. Halfway through our routine, K. forgets the words. Anchored in one spot, she frantically shadows the moves with her arms like a fly after the rest of its body has perished. I am only vaguely aware of K., or of the judges' panel, or of much other than my brother, who, I can hardly believe, sits in the bleachers directly across from me beside his pal G., the two of them shouting encouragements I cannot hear, Jeff wildly waving a sign glittered with my name.   →