Sarah’s Hope – Part 1 of the series

Taking us far beyond our superficial first impressions of one young woman

August 24, 2016

By ERIC ADLER – The Kansas City Star

Friday, March 29, 1996.

Sarah Clark knows what they think. The smirks. The laughs. The way the other girls, all week long in cheerleading practice, have been rolling their eyes.  They think she’s a joke.

They think she’s a big fat joke of an eighth-grader with no prayer of becoming a high school cheerleader. Minutes before her tryout, Sarah paces the corridor of F.L. Schlagle High School just steps from the gymnasium where the judges wait. She sweeps the waves of her long copper hair back over her shoulders. She tugs up on her socks and down on her cheerleading skirt, pressed the night before. She checks her laces. They’re tied. No jewelry. They said no jewelry.

Then, with her eyes open and in the privacy of her mind, she mutters a prayer.  Dear God, please… By 8 p.m. she’ll have her answer.

Please, she prays, she’ll never ask for anything ever again.

She just wants something, something in her life that’s… different. Nice.

— Sarah Clark

Yes. That’s it. Nice. She wants a life like the ones cheerleaders have. Like the ones she sees on television and in movies where the girls are always so pretty and popular and happy and lead lives so much better than her own. Maybe it’s a fiction. Still, she wants it.

And it’s not because she’s 13 years old and heavy, either. At 5 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds, she’s lost count of the number of times she forced herself not to cry as kids called her “pig” and “cow” and names just as stinging. The girls in the gym may think that’s the reason she’s trying out. It’s not.

Being fat is the least of her concerns. So many people think high school students face only the most trivial worries: whether they have the right clothes, the right car, a date on Friday night. They forget about the kids, like Sarah, who bring baggage to school that makes every day a struggle against unthinkable odds.

Yet some of these kids find ways to succeed. If Sarah makes the cheerleading team, maybe, just maybe, it won’t be so hard to shoulder the other weights she carries, she thinks.

There’s her father, Patrick Clark. A thief, a drunk and a transient, he’s serving 12 years in a California prison for trying to molest a 10-year-old girl at a McDonald’s. When Sarah was a toddler, he beat her mom’s face black with bruises. They ran crying to a women’s shelter. One of Sarah’s nicest childhood memories is playing with the wild kittens in the woods behind the shelter.

Then there’s Randy Wright, 38, her stepfather. Lanky and easygoing, Randy, until recently, was a great dad. He wasn’t anything like that one boyfriend of her mom’s who used to slap Sarah when she was a toddler and then press her face into a pillow to stop the crying.

No, before Randy began doing drugs and drinking, he was a good guy with a steady maintenance job and a nice Dutch colonial in the Westheight neighborhood. And he was good to her younger brothers, too, and to her mom, Andrea.

In recent years, though, he’s begun doing crazy things, like the night he held a shotgun and threatened to blow out Andrea’s brains if she wouldn’t have sex with him. But Sarah’s greatest weight by far, and what drives her, is her mother. Sarah fears she’ll end up just like her. Living in dumps. Attracting losers. Getting lost in drugs. Amounting to nothing.

Andrea Wright — a short, bell-shaped, 38-year-old high school dropout — grew up feeling worthless. By 16, she’d run away from home twice. The drugs and abusive men followed.

Sarah has resolved her life will be different. Whatever it takes, she isn’t going to be nothing.

So in school she earns A’s, because A’s are not nothing; they are something. They come easily to her. With them, Sarah gets respect, smiles from her teachers and notes on her report cards. “What a pleasure Sarah is to have in class.”   In seventh grade at Central Middle School, when she tried out and made the eighth-grade junior high cheerleading squad, that wasn’t nothing either. It was 180 degrees as far away from nothing as Sarah had ever gotten.   Her flexibility, her ability to sink effortlessly into a split, surprised everyone. It gave her new confidence. On game days, sitting in class in her blue and red cheerleading skirt, she felt popular. In the halls, when kids called her name,”Hey, Sarah!” and saw her at games, “Way to go, Sarah!” she felt important.

But now it’s not Central Middle School. It’s Schlagle High, an urban street-tough school on the outer edge of the industrial landscape of Kansas City, Kan. Student body: 1,000. Home of the blue and gold Stallions. Two-time state basketball champions. Alma mater of sprinter Maurice Greene, the world’s fastest human.

And it’s where, over the next four years, Sarah’s story will play out. As she gets ready for her freshman year, her goal is to make the cheerleading squad. But that struggle will pale in comparison with the grueling journey ahead as she fights to survive high school.

“Get ready, girls,” says Kerry Norbury, the cheerleading coach.

It’s time. The judges are ready.

Sarah and two other girls snap into single file, bouncing on their toes, warming up for their entrance. They’re among the last of the 80 or so girls trying out.

One of the girls in her group is Gretchen Lane. She looks like a gazelle.

Her limbs are sleek, her upper body lean like a ballerina’s.

The other girl is cute and bubbly, but no Gretchen Lane.

Compared with Gretchen, Sarah feels like a Coke machine.

“If you mess up, just keep going,” Norbury says. She tries to inspire them, pouring on her brand of encouragement.

“Smile.”

“Don’t cry.”

“No, you won’t throw up.”

“Hang in there.” S he yanks open the door. A gust of gym air hits them. Sweat. Rubber soles. Court wax.     “I may be fat,” Sarah thinks, “but I can cheer.”

Smiling, pumping her arms over her head, Sarah and the others spring into the gym, cheering as if the panel of five judges is a crowd of 5,000.

“GO SCHLAGLE! LET’S GO BIG BLUE!”

Twelve minutes later it is over.

With a whomp, the gym doors jolt open. Sarah and the others prance out as peppy as popcorn, stabbing their fists skyward in a last push to impress the judges.

But two steps out the door, she stops as if slapped, and ambles into the corridor, her face tense with worry.

A mistake! Damn. She made a mistake on the dance.

Did they see it?

Maybe it won’t count. One bad arm movement. Stab up!

Left!

She was nervous. And it was just in the beginning.

They won’t count it. They can’t. Everything else, everything, the group cheer, the group chant — “Go Stallions go! (clap, clap) Go Stallions…”  — went just right.

Girl-number-one-please-turn-and-show-us…

Girl-number-two-please-turn-and-show-us…

Girl-number-three…

She was perfect. Her spread eagle jump. Legs straight to the sides. Toes pointed. Her side Herkie jump. Face forward.

One leg straight out. Other bent back.

Individual cheer, individual chant — “A-a-a-a-aim for Victory….” Her front Herkie jump and the way she just slid into her full split. Why doesn’t anyone think she can ever do that? Not even Gretchen —

Gretchen! Why did she have to be the one next to Gretchen?

On the way home, Sarah tallies the numbers in her head. Eighty-some tryouts. Three squads. How many were going for freshman? Twenty? Thirty? She can’t remember. But there are also grades, class attendance, teacher recommendations.

Talent counts, sure. But Norbury told the girls, said it like a drill sergeant, grades are big. Very big.

She doesn’t care if you’re Barbie, Jackie Joyner-Kersee or if you can leap a goal post in a single bound, she said. Wearing the Schlagle blue and gold isn’t about popularity,

it’s about being a school ambassador.

And in the end, it’s about points. Not names or looks, but how it all — talent, grades, everything — adds up. And there are no guarantees. No shoe-ins from one year to the next. It’s all anonymous. All coded. You aren’t a name, you’re a number.

If you don’t get the points, you’re out.

If you get them…

“The senior cheerleaders will make the calls between 7 and 8 tonight,” Norbury said. “If you haven’t made it, you won’t get a call.”

Back home, Sarah marches through the door.

“Stay off the phone. No one can use the phone!” she shouts as she makes her way to her mother’s bedroom.

Barely stopping, she kicks off one sneaker, flips the heel off the other and sinks crossed-legged onto her mother’s waterbed. She plops the phone in front of her and stares at it.

7:15…7:20…

Andrea, her mother, is at work at the Hen House deli. Randy and her brothers Brian, 11, and Jordan, 6, turn on the television. They flip through the stations.  “Diagnosis Murder.” “Family Matters.”   7:30.

“Boy Meets World.”

At 7:45 reality begins setting in. They’re not going to call, Sarah thinks.

She slides off the bed and walks out of the bedroom. Maybe her chances weren’t that good anyway. She did her best.

Riiiiiiiiing

“Pick up the phone!” she yells, rushing back to the bedroom. If it’s one of Brian’s friends, she’ll murder him.

She hears Randy answer.

“Hello?” He turns to Sarah. “It’s for you.”

Sarah’s heart stops. She puts her ear to the phone. The senior cheerleader on the other end is exuberant.

“Congratulations…”

Friday, Sept. 20, 1996.

About 9:30 p.m.Sarah and her friend Trisha stand in the parking lot flirting with a couple of cute guys. She’s wearing her blue and gold cheerleading uniform, and when she smiles her cheeks turn as round as golf balls.

From where she stands, she can see the football field, all but empty now, glowing a luminescent green beneath the stadium lights. Schlagle has just lost its third game of the year to Truman High, a heartbreaker, 28-26. But Sarah doesn’t care. She’s having so much fun it almost makes up for all the grief she’s been getting ever since she made the Schlagle squad.

Kids at pep rallies mooing at her, laughing at her. Parents complaining to the cheerleading coach. Why didn’t my daughter make the squad when you have that fat so-and-so? Mostly, Sarah ignores them. She made the team. And if they don’t like it, that’s their tough luck. They aren’t going to get her tears. Making cheerleader has been the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

All summer long, she’s looked forward to nights like this. The day she got her uniform, she held it like a trophy. At cheerleading practice during the summer, she envisioned herself under the lights at the stadium cheering before a buoyant crowd. If the rest of high school is like tonight, it’s going to be great.

Within a few minutes, Sarah sees her stepfather Randy’s rusted Datsun roll into the parking lot. She and Trisha walk to the car. Trisha gets in the back. Sarah sits in the front.

That’s when the smell of whiskey hits her.

Randy wheels out of the parking lot. As he talks, Sarah knows he’s drunk. His speech is muddled. He seems agitated. And he’s headed the wrong way.  

Randy, here are you going?

— Sarah Clark

He doesn’t answer. He drives on.

She asks again.

“Randy…”

“Shut up,” he yells.

“Randy,” she pleads, “take us home.”

But with his brain embalmed in anger, resentment and a fifth of McCormick whiskey, Sarah’s stepdad is now too delirious to listen.

He just lost his job. His marriage to Sarah’s mom is rotting away. And he says if Sarah and her friend don’t shut up, he’s going to grab the gun he has tucked under the car seat and blow Sarah and her friend away.

“I’m going to kill you both,” he shouts, digging beneath the seat and steering his car into the night. “I’m going to kill you and dump your bodies where no one will find you!”

In the back seat, Trisha is shaking, weeping. Up front, Sarah, still in her cheerleading uniform, sits glued to her seat.

Through the windshield, she can see the neighborhood.

Quindaro Boulevard. Dim. Menacing. Crack houses.

Windowless bars. Tenements boarded with plywood.

Again, Sarah and Trisha implore Randy.

“Randy, stop it. Please!”

Again, he refuses.

Gradually, though, the malignant landscape begins to change.

15th Street…16th. Familiar scenery flashes by.

At 1211 N. 19th St., the car lurches to a stop at the curb.

They are home. Sarah and Trisha shove open the doors and scramble across the lawn. They dash up four concrete steps, across the front porch and into the house. They slam the front door and turn the lock.

BOOM. Randy’s foot lands like a battering ram.

“Let me in!” he screams. “Let me in!”

BOOM.  Sarah’s mom jumps up from the couch and dials 911. Trisha calls home. Toby, her mom’s boyfriend, is rushing over.

Again, Randy hurls a kick. Sarah, her mom, her brothers and Trisha press themselves against the door. Then, in an explosion of glass, Randy’s fist smashes through one of the windows flanking the door, sending shards of glass flying.   Randy claws at the lock inside. Sarah begins punching at the hand of the best and only real dad she’s ever known.

Another kick. The door jamb cracks.

Where are the police?

Then…a momentary silence.

A voice. Outside. A man’s distant voice.

Trisha’s mother’s boyfriend has pulled up. He calls Randy away from the door.

“Now! Get out! Let’s go!” Sarah’s mom yells. “Get in the van! Get in the van!”

Sarah and Trisha yank open the door and bolt. Sarah’s mom follows with the keys. But outside, Randy spots her and charges.

Now it’s a race to the minivan. Andrea wins.

Inside, she locks the doors and cranks the engine. With one blow of his fists, Randy smashes the windshield into a crystalline mosaic.

Andrea peels out.

Soon, the neighborhood lights up with police cars, inflaming Randy all the more.

The police subdue him. They slap handcuffs on his wrists and press him into the back seat of a Crown Victoria.   Inside, kicking and spitting mad, he sucks gobs of mucous from his sinuses and thwacks wads of it down the inside of the front windshield. He then rolls on his back, cocks his legs, and boots out the rear left window.

As Randy is taken away, the police take statements from Sarah and her family.

It’s after 1 a.m. by the time Sarah finishes.

Wearily, she walks into her bedroom and changes out of her cheerleading skirt.

 

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