The Siren Squad Tries a New Flyer

by Kate Horsley

This girl Mackenzie’s new to Echo Lake High, an eighty pound package of spraytan and Instant Freeze Hairspray, guitar-string-tight when she stands on our hands. All nineteen of us are torso-tense, muscle-sprung, feeling-not-seeing Mackenzie tuck her back so we can launch her high in a basket toss. She lands in a cradle of laced fingers and Team Captain Taylor beams, besotted, murmuring, Mackenzie’s way lighter than Susie! Mwah! My new favourite girl! Perfect Taylor, strafing the raked seats for her Quarterback boyfriend, Mike. The crowd admiring us stomp and shake the gym. Slicking lipgloss alongside the lockers, lacquering, flipping our hair. We’re one blue-uniformed beast, hunting for blood like the electric eels Mr Hickie showed us in Science. Tubes of tight muscle patrolling the Amazon basin in packs. Did you know eels use electricity for more than zapping things? Did you know they can do real mind control, shocking dumb fish so they swim right inside their mouths? Eels hypnotise, like us. They’re tough like us, cool like us, rather less deadly. Our bare legs, bare midriffs, hypnotising highschool boys and teachers who are nothing to us. Electrifying them. At Echo Lake, the Siren Squad is the apex predator. And we watch out for our own – unless anyone breaks a rule, like eating carbs, or wearing slacks, or messing up a cheer. Or unless it’s Susie, who Taylor caught making out with her boyfriend Mike at the kegger on Saturday night. Or Mackenzie, who was Taylor’s new friend-crush until we all caught her watching Taylor shower, sizing up her dew-dropped flesh the way a boy might. Poor Mackenzie, so small and delicate, teetering to the top of the pyramid, putting her faith in Taylor’s love, in the mesmerising net of our electric, outstretched hands.

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