Earlier, before school started, Gladys Brewer (an overweight girl with no friends) came to her first period class early, only to be joined by a fellow student a moment later.
After sitting in the seat next to her, he turned in her direction, asking "How was cheerleading practice?"
She looked at the boy with a blank expression. "Who are you? What do you mean, cheerleading practice? I'm not a cheerleader." With her weight problem, it was easy to see that she could never be a cheerleader, not that she really wanted to anyway. Those girls were such bitches, especially to her.
"The uniform could've fooled me," the boy said. "Didn't you have time to change before class?"
Uniform? she thought, before looking down and getting a surprise in return. She was wearing a cheerleading outfit. A very large one, that fit her body without being too tight. But how had that gotten on her? She could have sworn she came to this class wearing something else.
"Gladys, are you okay?" Danny asked.
Definitely not, she thought, trying to figure out how this could have happened. Clothes didn't just change in the blink of an eye.
Then she realized that the boy called her by her name, and not one of the dozen or so nicknames invented by the popular crowd. "You know my name?"
"What kind of question is that? Of course I know your name. Who doesn't?"
Gladys really did not understand any of this.
