Bad Haircut by Tom Perrotta Page B

sat with her hands folded and stared straight ahead at the empty blackboard. Mrs. Glowacki spoke to her at the end of homeroom, butwhatever she said, it didn't work. Wendy remained seated again on Friday, even though Coach Whalen and Mr. Wyznewski were watching her from the doorway. She didn't even wait for them to speak. As soon as the pledge ended, she stood up and followed them out the door. She was suspended for three days.
    Whalen would have busted her on Thursday, but he'd had a more pressing problem to deal with. Randy Dudley, our all-county middle linebacker, had gotten arrested. With just two days to go before the big game, his timing couldn't have been worse.
    Randy was a great player but a frightening person. On Wednesday morning his girlfriend, Janet Lorenzo, had come to school with a black eye. No one had to ask her where she got it. That night, Randy got drunk and went to her house to apologize, but Janet's father wouldn't let him in. Heartbroken, Randy took a crowbar to the windshield of Mr. Lorenzo's Oldsmobile, then led the cops on a high-speed chase through three towns that ended when he missed a turn and flattened a mailbox.
    As far as Whalen was concerned, drunk driving was the most serious charge. Team training rules prohibited smoking, drinking, and drugs during the season. The policy was simple: get caught and you were gone. Two scrubs had already been kicked off the team when they madethe mistake of buying a six-pack in a bar where a couple of coaches happened to be drinking.
    At Thursday's practice, Whalen gave us the verdict: Randy wouldn't be allowed to play on Saturday.
    Rocky was glad to see Randy go. He said that if we couldn't win without a guy like that, we didn't deserve to be state champs. I disagreed. If we beat Pine Ridge, the Booster Club was going to buy us expensive championship jackets with leather sleeves and our names written over the heart. I believed that the jacket would redeem the whole wasted season, and I didn't want to lose it at the last minute, just because Randy Dudley rammed his Skylark into a mailbox.
    The cheerleaders kicked off Friday's pep rally with a foot-stomping routine. Their saddle shoes raised a thunderous din in the big drafty gymnasium. They clapped their hands and sang to the crowd; the crowd clapped and sang back:
    We are Harding
Mighty, mighty Harding!
     
    They ended with their most famous cheer. They turned their backs to the bleachers, bent over, and flipped up their pleated skirts. Sitting with my teammates on the gym floor, all I could see was a row of red smiling faces, but I knew that they hadeach ironed a yellow letter on their blue panties, so their butts together spelled “GO HARDING!” The crowd loved it.
    The cheerleaders scampered off the court. Coach Whalen took the microphone. He said that he had planned on talking about the game, but something else was on his mind. Something more important than football. He pointed to the American flag hanging on the wall next to the banners commemorating our conference championships in 1974 and 75.
    “When I was in Vietnam,” he said, “there were people at home, not much older than you, who got their kicks out of spitting on that flag. I guess they thought it was fun. But let me tell you something: for those of us who were serving our country, it wasn't a helluva lotta fun.”
    He didn't sound angry. His voice was so calm, he could have been lecturing us about the rules of paddleball.
    “I don't know,” he said. “I thought I'd put it all behind me. I thought it was ancient history. But something happened this week in this school that brought it all back to me. I've been thinking about my friends again. The ones who came home in bags. The ones who were buried in coffins with that flag draped on top.”
    A hush came over the gym. Whalen looked up, as though his speech were written on the ceiling.
    “A lot of brave men died in that war. And they didn't just die of bullets and shrapnel. They died of