"We'll start with the basics," Sarah announced. "Warm-up stretches. Just follow everything that we do."
What followed was five minutes of pulling at arms, reaching for toes, rolling of necks, and leg splits of multiple styles. Jon was fairly certain that he hadn't been flexible enough to complete all of these motions before today, but he found that he had no problem with them now.
"Alright," Sarah said. "Now do a bridge."
"A what?" Jon asked.
Sarah huffed and rolled her eyes. "Like this." Then she got down on her back, planted her palms by her shoulders, and pushed her body upwards. The rest of the cheerleaders quickly followed in kind.
"O-okay." Jon didn't know this was called a bridge, but he was pretty sure he could do it. And so he did.
Sarah stood back up, beginning to taste blood in the water. "Great. That means you probably won't die on this next one." She turned to the side and threw her hands straight upwards in a flourish. "Back walkover." At this, she leaned backwards until her palms hit the ground, then kicked her legs over the top of herself, feet landing on the other side, and lifted herself back up straight. Once again, the four other cheerleaders echoed this action.
Jon was less sure about this one, but it would certainly test the limits of Karyn's wish. If he could manage a back walkover, he supposed, then magic really was just going to force him to succeed. So he turned to the side, threw his hands straight upwards -- did he do that little flourish on purpose? -- and fell backwards onto his palms, perfectly mirroring the cheerleaders.
Sarah managed to hide how much this bothered her, but it did bother her. "Okay, so you're flexible. But can you remember the moves to a cheer?" The five girls formed up into a triangle stance. "Five, six, seven, eight! Clap, step, clap-clap, step! High-V, daggers! Left bow, right bow, broken-T, daggers! Touchdown!" Each command from Sarah's lips matched a movement from all five girls in perfect unison. Either this was easy, or it was well-practiced. The assembled crowd gave a short applause.
It went too quickly for Jon to really take it all in, but he started nonetheless. "Five, six, seven, eight! Clap, step, clap-clap, step! High-V, daggers! Left bow, right bow, broken-T, daggers! Touchdown!" And once again, the magic compelled him to recreate the short routine perfectly, to another reasonable round of applause from the bleachers.
"Okay," Sarah's voice was a little gruffer, but still under control, "Let's try a longer routine."
But even that routine, Jon was able to mirror the cheerleaders exactly. Sarah stopped calling out steps and started giving the actual cheers that the girls would say in-game, but Jon mirrored every motion and got every word right on every cheer on his first try. And each time a routine finished, no matter whose, the students of Lake Point High School made increasingly more noise in response, and Sarah's face became increasingly red.
Finally, Jon started mirroring the cheers before the cheerleaders had even finished the routine, and this was enough for Sarah. "Okay, fine, so I guess you learned our routines somehow. But you don't just cheer, you also have to lead."
With that, Sarah ran off past Jon over towards the bleachers and did a round-off, landing stick straight with her arms in a high-V "Lake Point High School!" she cried.
"Lake Point High School!" came the response.
Jon's legs started taking him in Sarah's direction. He wasn't even entirely sure what was about to happen, but just before he got to Sarah's position, he found himself turning into a round-off, but then continuing it into a back-handspring, landing just a few feet past Sarah in an identical pose. "Looooooves Jon!" he cried.
"Looooooves Jon!" they repeated once more.
Sarah broke her pose, giving Jon a major stink-eye, but Jon kept it up, giving a few quick hops while waving his arms. "I can't hear you!"
This time a bunch of students stood up from their seats, shouting even louder, "Lake Point High School, looooooves Jon!"
"Meet or exceed," Karyn had said. Jon knew that this was poking the bear, but he literally could not stop himself. He turned with a cheerleader grin towards Sarah just as the last remnants of a mask of calm fell from her face.
"You think you're so clever," she huffed, "well sometimes a cheerleader has to shake her butt." Sarah put her hands on her knees and started twerking.
Jon followed suit, but something felt strange. As he shook his rump, he could feel his thighs growing plumper, rounding out to support a bigger ass. Was his body physically changing? Was this necessary to meet Sarah's challenge? Would he be able to change back?
The other cheerleaders jogged over to this twerking face-off in the middle of the gym. "Sarah," Melissa said in a cautious voice.
Sarah ignored her. "And sometimes," she stood back up, "a cheerleader has to shimmy her boobs." She held out her arms and started shaking her shoulders, causing her bosom to wiggle back and forth.
Jon was actively trying to resist the movement now, but his body overruled him. He stood up, just like Sarah with his arms out to his sides and found his own shoulders shaking of their own accord. His chest initially remained firm, but as the seconds ticked by, it succumbed to the motion. Even if Jon's loose shirt obscured it from the crowd, he could feel his breasts forming, slowly inflating, until even through his shirt it was clear that there was something under there moving in precisely the same way that Sarah was.
"Sarah..." Melissa said with more urgency. She could see what was happening to Jon, feel the magic at play.
"Not now, Melissa." Sarah was in her own headspace, overcome with the need to defeat Jon, this single-minded goal all that she could think about. She swung her head back in Jon's direction, hair forming a cape behind her. "Sometimes a cheerleader has to be able to toss her hair back and forth," and she gave a few more tosses.
Jon did the same, and with each toss he could feel more resistance from hair that was growing quickly, could feel it slap against his face, then his shoulders, then his back.
"Sarah, the bet!" Melissa made one last effort to get Sarah's attention. If there was magic here, she realized, then she was definitely in trouble.
"Shut up, Melissa!" Sarah wasn't even processing Melissa's words, didn't even process that Jon's hair had grown out of nowhere. The only thing on her mind was that somehow Jon had met her every challenge, and she needed to find something, anything that he'd find himself completely unable to duplicate. Then the light bulb went off. "But most of all, a cheerleader must always look cute in a cheer uniform."
"Sarah, no!" Melissa grabbed the cheer captain physically by the shoulder now and shook her out of her fugue state.
"What, Melissa, what?" All of the cheerleader's anger now focused on her friend. "What could you possibly need right now?"
"Look at Jon," Melissa whispered. "Just look at him right now. And think about what's happening."
Sarah did so, trying to see through her cloud of rage. "Oh no," she gasped. Because she could now see the smooth skin of rounded thighs coming out of Jon's shorts. And she could now see the boobs heaving under his shirt in a way that they definitely did not do when Jon had done his back walkover. And she could see the high pony tail that his hair was tied up in, glossy locks spilling from out of the hair tie. And the consequences of what those changes meant were only just fully occurring to Sarah as a golden stripe worked its way around the lower hem of Jon's black shorts.
Then a blue stripe formed above that.
Then a field of white crept up, overcoming the black fabric of Jon's shorts even as seams tore at themselves and re-stitched into a new configuration. Jon's gray T-shirt sucked in on itself, hugging his torso and making it very clear, in case anyone still doubted, that he now had a very respectable set of boobs, before it, too, succumbed to the change in hue that had consumed what was now a cheer skirt. And as the material of the shirt changed into a cheer shell top and the letters "LPHS" stitched themselves across his bust, Jon could feel an unease inside of himself, like what he'd felt when his butt and his boobs grew out.
Must always look cute in a cheer uniform. Jon may have had a few main boxes ticked, but he wasn't cute yet.
Then he felt a small rumble, like a cell phone was ringing on vibrate in both of his pockets. His hands shot down to pat at his now-more-exposed thighs, and they felt somehow smaller? No less wide than they had been, but shorter. Like, his knees were closer to his arms than they should be. He straightened up, and found himself looking up to meet Sarah's eyes. Not by much, but he'd been half a head taller than Sarah a moment before.
Another rumble in his gut, and he found his arms wrapped around his middle. When the feeling faded a moment later, his waist was thinner, his arms were more delicate, and, Jon blinked, there was blue-and-gold polish on his fingernails.
Sarah began hyperventilating as the final changes overtook Jon's face, rounding and shrinking his features. Sarah hadn't cast this spell. It had come from somewhere else. Who would cast something that would so clearly manifest where everyone could see it? Where it would manifest in a situation that clearly pointed the finger right at Sarah. When she thought of it that way, there were too many possibilities. But who could pull it off?
It didn't matter. Sarah turned to the bleachers as Jon patted himself down in shock. Already, most of the girls were clearly preparing spells to alter the boys' memories of this afternoon. Boys couldn't know about magic. But Sarah needed to alter the girls' memories, too.
"Girls, with me," she called to her squad. But only Tiffany, Erica, and Lucy joined her in the spell, augmenting the dozens that were already in the air, stitching them together into a cloud that made everyone in the stands believe that Jon had always looked this way. That nothing had changed this afternoon. She couldn't change the fact that the cheerleaders had been humiliated, but she could hide the spell that had--
Why was this so hard? Sarah's energy was draining faster than it should. It was a hard spell, but well within the cheer team's abilities when all five of them--
"Melissa!" Sarah turned around to find her friend wearing, not the white cheer uniform with blue-and-gold trim that she'd entered the gym wearing, but rather a plain black tank-top and plain black gym shorts.
"I'm not on the team anymore." Tears were forming in Melissa's eyes. "Jon is."
"Like hell you're not," Sarah's blood was boiling again. "I'll disband the team, declare new tryouts. Just because you're off the team now doesn't mean you can't get back on."
"No," Melissa choked out. "I'm not a cheerleader anymore. Like, at all. I can't remember any cheers. I can't remember any routines. I-- I don't like being out here in front of everyone."
Before Sarah's eyes, Melissa's hair got shorter and mussier. Her complexion became splotchy. Her entire frame, her entire posture shifted to that of a girl who tried to hide in the corner during gym class.
"I'm sorry, Sarah," she blurted out before turning and running out of the gym in tears.
