Rise Read online

  I begin to wake up to the fact that there’s a world beyond Newberg. I can taste it. It simmers beyond the blurry farmland horizons, flickering into the edges of my bright-light fantasies. A world where people are driven by a desire to excel. To perform at their peak. To crush it. A glamorous world in which women dance in high heels, talent and hard work pay off, and waking up for hair and makeup before sunrise is just part of the routine. The world I’m talking about is Hollywood. A bright, sunny world where peak performance is the name of the game. And that’s the world I want.

  The phone rings.

  “Hello? Is Paige Sletten available, please?”

  “Who’s calling?” Mom asks.

  “We’re calling to let you know that Paige has been officially invited to participate in the Disney pilot season in Los Angeles. Will she be able to come?”

  And don’t ask me how, but I manage to convince my folks to let me have a shot at this. They agree to let me spend a span of four or five months in Los Angeles, where casting agencies and production houses will hold all kinds of auditions to cast up for all the new shows in the works. Mom, my brother and I pack our bags and move to a whole other state, where she will homeschool us. My dad stays back in Oregon; he’s working, as always.

  I am too young to realize how incredibly cool all this is of my parents. To give me a chance to follow a dream. To go after it. To let me have this moment. But that’s just how my parents are: Tactically supportive. Facilitators. Ground-layers of opportunities. And unconditional in that quality.

  Like me, my mom and dad grasp the fact that despite my having to drop out of school for several months, this endeavor could quickly become an opportunity. And like me, they understand something key: we won’t know unless we try.

  We base ourselves out of a Holiday Inn located in Burbank, a tiny room with twin beds, where the clutter of outfit changes, hair accessories, and textbooks quickly pile up. It’s not the glitz and glamour of my fantasies, but right away, the giant sunny skies and cheerful pastels of Los Angeles make me feel happy. Its tall, skinny palm trees stand perfectly crooked in the sunsets, and there’s a dry desert warmth crisp in the air. The whole experience is a nice respite from the drizzly, leaky skies of Oregon. Hoodies to flip-flops feels good, for a change.

  Disney pilot season is like boot camp. Our mornings start at six o’clock sharp. Mom gets me fed and does my hair, and we go over the list of rounds for the day. We have a manager, Joan, who is basically my agent and drills us on all the open casting calls happening. Joan talks fast and moves even faster, as if each second of her day is part of some master plan. My mother drives me to each call, drops me off to do my thing, and drives around until I finish. I love the independence. On the way to my auditions, Mom loves to remind me about how when she first dropped me off at preschool, I asked her to leave me at the entrance because I wanted to walk in all by myself.

  I wait in long lines alongside armies of other girls, coffee cups and makeup bags in hand, each one a soldier for the cause of her own glossy success. We are all simultaneously in it together and one another’s opponents. There is as much tension as there is perfume in the air, but I douse myself in confidence and walk right in to everything. Right from the start, I’m amped. I feel like I’m home. I love the electricity of the planning and the silent intensity of the drive to each audition. Of course, I feel the pressure. But the nerves fuel me and transform into a fire in my belly that refuses to let up. I drink up the process like honey. I was made to do this.

  Every casting person is different. Some greet me with warmth and impart a vote of confidence from the start. Others don’t even really look at me. I’m just a name to tick on their long, lined yellow notepad. I walk into one audition, and the casting director herself is fifteen minutes late, and when she finally does walk into the room, a deafening silence comes in with her. Everyone seems terrified of this person, who moves her glasses to the very tip of her nose as she watches me deliver my lines. When I accidentally read the word “thorough” instead of “through,” she stops me with a single loud clap and instructs me to take the whole thing from the top. I’m somewhat mortified, but I respect the perfectionism!

  I make it a point to arrive at each audition with courage leading my way and fifteen minutes early. I make sure to smile with my eyes. I project my voice when speaking, and make each dance step as precise as a punctuation mark. I keep telling myself to honor the details. I walk away from each audition with my heart racing in my throat, with a certain emptiness that comes with not knowing when or if these people will ever think of me again. The whole experience is at once empowering and humbling.

  After a few months of this, of lingering in greenrooms, memorizing lines, learning lyrics, waiting for phone calls that don’t necessarily come, and praying for just one lucky break, the season is over, and it’s time to go home. Some callbacks trickle in. I manage to get one national commercial for a mop, and I pull off a few runway shows and ad campaigns for Nike and Columbia Sportswear. But what really matters is that I get a taste of the hustle.

  Back home in Oregon, the dancer in me is lit more than ever. The Disney scene and LA in general ignited even more motivation within me. I spend more time in my mom’s old studio. I take all the classes: ballet, hip-hop, lyrical, jazz. But my favorite is jazz, because it has a real structure with exciting turns and unexpected jumps. I dance so much that I start competing, even choreographing some of my own pieces. To take it up a notch, I switch gears from my mom’s studio and join other ones, such as MVP Dance Elite and Dance Vision. I become a Junior Blazer Dancer, too, which means I get to perform at Trail Blazer basketball games in Portland during halftime in front of thousands of people. There is really nothing quite like the energy of a massive crowd, their roar, their excitement, their singular focus on whatever is happening on the court, be it basketball or dance. Right from the start, I feel connected to the idea of performance, the grind of rehearsals, the sweat life, the mental part of having to memorize routines. Dance becomes the thing around which everything else happens.

  When I perform at the Hollywood Connection, a dance convention and competition, I earn a gold medal for my solo. I win platinum, the highest award, at Star Power, which is another national dance competition, and take first place for my division. My folks, who don’t have any extra funds to spare, especially now that my mom doesn’t own the dance studio, somehow manage to scrounge up whatever money they can so that I can keep competing. In two months, I think they spent two grand on competition-related expenses, which was pretty much Dad’s whole Christmas bonus. Mom even starts teaching private dance classes on the side to be able to afford a lot of these extra expenses. She takes it all very seriously. Luckily, I get to go to the Tremaine Dance Convention on a scholarship. Every win stokes the fire in me, pushes my personal bar even higher. Every leap forward makes me hungrier for even more.

  ICED OUT

  My mother and grandmother were both Newberg High cheerleaders, so I figure that having a third generation of cheerleaders could be really cool for our family history. Plus, I’m athletic and a dancer, so cheerleading is an obvious go-to. Games, fans, team morale, spirit, practice: the perfect constellation of variables to really kick off an awesome social life, which is going to be key when I start ninth grade in a few months. At the end of eighth grade, I try out for the squad with my friends Tammy, Jesse, Lisa, Laura, and Faye, the lot of us keen on proving ourselves. Making the team will be our calling card to being badasses in high school.

  I’m not intimidated by the tryouts, because learning choreography is my middle name. I pick up the routines quickly, and I can tell that the coaches are trying to look neutral but are really impressed by me. Since I dance so much, I have stamina to spare, and I know how to use my facial expressions to make the routine pop even more. It feels like everything I have done in my life is somehow building to this very moment. I keep making the cut, moving from tier to tier, with fewer girls in each squad every time we move ahead. My bu
ddy Tammy gets cut, and as she walks off the court, I can see her fighting back tears. After a few rounds of this, I learn that I make varsity, a feat I know often takes years to accomplish. In fact, I am the only freshman from my school to make varsity at all, which leaves me dizzy with emotions: proud, for managing to make the final cut, but also excited about the prospect of ninth grade turning into something really memorable.

  But the start of the new school year brings with it a certain shift, an intensity that I didn’t see coming. There are kids from all walks of life at my new school, children of farmers and winery heirs alike. I am enrolled in all AP and sophomore-level classes, which are a bit advanced, and in which I don’t know any of my fellow students. My classes are made up of all new people, a total reshuffling of faces and familiarities. My old routines are shaken up, and in their place is a whole new mash-up of classes, criteria, and crowds. Thousands of pairs of new eyes size me up daily. Maybe they don’t know what to make of me, this sporty-girly-brainy person. So each day is like walking into a new abyss. A place with no point of reference, no axis, no sounding board, no exchange. In ninth grade, I find myself suddenly on my own.

  Even though I’m not in the same classes with my crew from middle school anymore, I still try to hang out with them during lunch or free periods, but the minute they found out about my making varsity, something seems to have shifted. I can tell Tammy feels slighted because she didn’t make the team, and in an effort to salvage this relationship by not further upsetting her, I take down all my cheerleading posters and photos from the wall before she comes over to my house one afternoon to hang out. Why rub it in, right?

  I start to realize that what began as us just naturally drifting apart, the way kids often do after transitioning into a different level of school, now feels like full-blown rejection. It’s not distance that I feel from Tammy—it’s straight-up animosity. She and her pack try to convince me to quit the team. I guess if they can’t be on it, they feel I shouldn’t be either, as some kind of gesture of solidarity. But that will never happen. They start to ice me out and really shrink into the distance, and every step I take forward moves them farther away. I know that I need to land somewhere socially this year, but I just can’t tell where I belong.

  I begin to feel an unfamiliar void. When I lean over in class to try to join in on the chitchat, Tammy talks over me, pretending my voice is inaudible. When they laugh about an inside joke, I am not privy to what it is. The first week I tell myself that this is all normal, that things just need a little bit of time to settle into place. I try to remember that humans are creatures of habit, and that once everyone gets used to the new rhythms of high school, we’ll all pal around like old times. But by week four, I realize there are events I don’t know about, social media groups I’m not on, and secret handshakes I don’t get taught. And it becomes clear that no matter what, I am now officially on the outside of something.

  There are no friends to be made on the cheerleading team itself either. In fact, much like Tammy and my old friends, the other cheerleaders clearly don’t like me. It apparently took most of them years to get on the squad, and I made varsity on my first try. They hate that. Each day, I grapple with the irony of giving it my all and not doing as well to appease their concern. I learn our first routine so well that I’m able to perform it without one single mistake, and when I smile at Linda, one of my teammates, as if to say Our squad is going to crush it, she just cracks her neck, rolls her eyes, and looks the other way. Even though I am one of them, I’m simply not welcome into their world. They all seem to have it out for me, like they’re looking for reasons to knock me down. They actually rat me out to the coach for letting a non-cheerleader girl—whom I saw crying in the hallway, and whom I wanted to console—wear the team jacket. For reasons that I cannot understand, they want me to fail.

  I can’t talk to my coach about my concerns, as her own daughter is on the team. But things get even weirder. For instance, I’m the smallest person on the team, which means—according to physics—I should technically be the “flyer” in the group. A flyer, in cheerleading, is the one who gets thrown up and caught as part of a routine. But the girls don’t think I am worthy of being a flyer because of my level of seniority, which is nil. They want me to do my time, to earn it. So I resign myself to standing at the back in our formations, and I regularly get pummeled by double my weight. One hundred and fifty pounds of quivering she-flesh, flying directly at my face.

  When I leave practice, I can feel their scowls on my back, the lot of them standing there with their bellies overly sucked in and their hips cocked, none of them even trying to hide the fact that they’re gossiping about me. They not only don’t like me, they don’t like the very essence of me. They don’t want me on their team. But it also feels like they don’t even want me on this planet. Something somehow got lit in their minds about who I am or what I represent. How do these things start? How do people develop these narratives or notions about other human beings and feel suddenly entitled to perpetuate them for the purpose of harm? I try to pinpoint what it is about me that they’re so mad at or against; I try to be the best possible teammate. But no matter what I do or say or try, it’s already rotten with them. They want nothing to do with me. Their togetherness itself is a blatant power over me, and yet they stay away from me like I’m the plague. Their rejection is active. The gates are closed. “So, you’re a dancer. Big fucking whoop,” I hear Laura, one of the other flyers, mutter one day.

  No matter how many times I chew it over in my mind, I can’t grasp the “how” of it. How could I go from being so excited about life and happy to this… sad and confused loner? My focus in class is even starting to shift. I used to be an avid note taker. Now I find myself staring out the window more, daydreaming about the life I thought I was going to have in high school, and wondering how things spiraled into my current reality. When I come home, I’m not the bubbly, zealous kid I used to be, and instead of rattling off all the awesome adventures of the day, I sit in my room quietly and chisel away at my homework, feeling frustrated about the day that just passed and nervous about the one that’s coming next. I hate feeling like a victim, but right now I can’t escape it. My parents tell me to have faith, to give things time. They’re used to a daughter who aces everything, so they probably think I will eventually have things under control.

  “Stop being a pussy,” Dad says, without a hint of reserve. He’s not much of a talker, but when he has something to say, the words come like bullets. “And we both know giving up is not an option.” I know this should comfort me, but I still can’t make any sense of it. What is it about me that these kids hate so much?

  At night, I listen to the wind looping around our house, and I force myself to sleep because I know that each new day is a chance to make things better somehow. To meet new people. To try to make some new friends. To shuffle the cards and see what else the deck has to offer. I look my loneliness in the eye, and I make a pact with myself to keep trying. But in the mornings, the fear of the new day creeps on me. The fear of not knowing what to expect or that I’ll make a mistake. Sometimes the day is so lonely that it gets to like four p.m. and I realize I haven’t actually spoken a single word to another human being.

  I am in all these great advanced classes—but I have no classmates my own age. The solitude weighs on me. The invisibility. I know I am friendly and fun loving, but I can’t seem to shake the disregard from the girls on the team. Our whole mission as a group is to foster good spirit—cheer—but there is absolutely nothing cheerful or good spirited about the way I feel around these people. It feels strange to have to plaster a smile on my face when we perform, but performing is the only thing I have to hold on to, so I keep doing it.

  I try to focus on schoolwork to hold me up because the loneliness starts to feel like a growing tornado that constantly swirls all around me, locking me in. But the competitor in me knows the game isn’t over. This is still a transitional time, and nothing great happens fast. I
have to do my best to stay open and optimistic, and have faith that something good is just around the corner. There have got to be some avenues I have not yet explored.

  I pour all my feelings into the cheerleading routines, my limbs stretching, my heart racing, the sweat pouring. One afternoon after practice while I’m cooling down, Ivan comes over to me.

  “Nice moves, kid,” he says. He’s a formidable young man. The rumor around school is that he’s already earned a full-ride scholarship.

  “Thanks!” I respond, unaccustomed to compliments here.

  “You’re really good, brah,” he says, which makes me laugh. Something about the way he refers to me as “brah” reminds me that I am—and always have been—a tomboy, and that maybe I should rely more on that sensibility to mobilize my social life.

  “Thanks, brah,” I respond playfully, pleased with what feels like a micromoment of actual progress.

  Ivan now smiles at me sometimes between classes, and asks me how I am. He even invites me to lunch with a group of the other jocks, and a few times a week we drive off-campus to Taco Bell. For the most part, it feels all right, if a little new (for lack of a better word) in some ways. On one of our drives to lunch off-campus, while I sit in the passenger seat of Ivan’s friend’s car, I see a tiny little plastic bag with what appears to be talcum powder. But I know it isn’t talcum powder.

  “When you gonna sell that, brah?” Ivan asks his friend.

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe I just won’t,” the friend responds with a husky giggle and a coy smirk, and he peeks at me in the rearview mirror. I have never seen hard drugs before. Sure, kids in Oregon smoke their fair share of weed, but this is a whole new can of worms. This does not sit well with me, but what can I do? It’s none of my business, really, and it’s not like they offered me any. Nobody’s perfect, I think. And welcome to high school.