I slipped into the audinasium after school to retrieve my pompons and there he was on the trampoline under the lights on the stage . . . limber and lithe and good! I didn't want him to be good. I wanted him to fall splat on his handsome face and show up at school tomorrow with bruises of imperfection on that smirking continence. I think I hated that man. He was about the same age as John Kennedy but Mr. Delashmutt, our principal, was mean and manipulative and unfair and about as disagreeable as anyone I knew. I could see his cufflinks winking in the light as he accomplished a backward flip with a double twist. His grey suit pants didn't even look wrinkled and his tie somehow stayed in perfect place on the front of his shirt. His jacket was hanging neatly on the back of a folding chair with his perfectly polished black shoes placed carefully in front.

          Fortunately he couldn't scrutinize me as closely, standing quietly in the shadows at the back of the audinasium; I had my waistband rolled over so my skirt would clear the top of my knees. Even after school, as long as I was in the building or on the grounds, he could require me to kneel in front of him and if my skirt didn't touch the floor, I would be expelled. I didn't for a moment believe that he cared a fig about any impropriety if our knees showed; he just liked to keep girls on their knees on the floor. It kept us in our place: subservient, acquiescent, compliant and . . . afraid.

          Well, I wasn't afraid! I quietly and quickly retrieved my pompons from the front, undetected. I would not give them to him no matter what he said. When the school had refused to buy pompons, I had organized my eight other cheerleaders and we bought the supplies and made popcorn balls - hundreds of popcorn balls. We made cookies. We baby-sat. We earned the money: enough money for eighteen giant pompons. When they arrived, we spent days carefully scrunching them into some acceptable semblance of spheres. We bought our own skirts and our fashionable peter-pan-collared blouses with our names on them. I made black and white corduroy vests. Our mascot emblems and team names were provided by the school as well as our letter stripes. Because of the way our junior high school was split, we had five teams and wore our uniforms at least three days a week.

          We decided to root for the baseball teams as well, since that sport typically had few spectators. As the season was winding to a close, Mr. Delashmutt informed us that all emblems, including the stripes, were the property of the school and had to be returned. He then demanded that we give our pompons to the school after the last pep assembly. We declined. They were ours. He told us that if we did not give them to the school, he would withhold our report cards and we would not be allowed to enter high school in the fall. He had the authority to do it, too. Three girls gave theirs to him immediately following the assembly. During the last two periods of the day, our lockers were searched and five girls had theirs confiscated. Not mine.

          After the assembly, I had stashed mine under the seats, sure that no one would see them there. I knew that holding out was not going to do any good; keeping mine would be a hollow victory. The girls next year would be one pair short and, in truth, what would I do with them? What I had really wanted was my letter stripes but girls were not permitted to letter in any kind of sport - we were only the cheering section, dutifully supporting the boys. Even when I won a county track meet it was not acknowledged by the school since the school had no girls' teams. We entered on our own, in our gym uniforms, and were given unexcused absences for attending the meet.

          As I reentered the hall, I found all eight girls waiting for me. Since I had never been rebellious, my insubordination was surprising and had become a rallying force. But what was the next step? If I took them home, my parents would become involved, which was pointless. We were not a litigious society then and one's future was not decided upon such things as pompons.

          I had already discussed my dilemma with Mr. Galen, my geography teacher, and he had seemed sympathetic. He was the most wonderful teacher: unorthodox, interesting, exciting. He stood on tables (for shame!) to get attention and to emphasize points. He was only about 5'2", and usually rumpled, but his enthusiasm for his subject and his students was unlimited. We fought mock battles on maps we drew on wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling newsprint. We became faux ambassadors and argued our countries' plights to the United Nations. We learned the correct way to pronounce Hiroshima. We kept running scores on current events quizzes with imaginative prizes promised at the end of the year. His classroom was always a mess and he was always in trouble for it. His classroom was also always full of noisy, learning students before, during and after school. No one was ever marked tardy, even when they were late, and no one skipped his class.

          "You realize, of course, that I can't jeopardize my job over this," he said, his face revealing his rapidly calculating mind as clearly as a reflecting pool. "I have to go down to the office to get some things," he continued, moving towards the door. There he stopped and turned, speculating the back of the room. As if to himself, he mused, "I can't imagine why they ever gave me a room with a storage closet in the back. I never use it. In fact, I never even look into it - it's too dark. There hasn't been a light bulb in there all year and I'm sure the spiders and mice have taken over the highest shelf. You'd have to get a ladder to even see to the back of that one. I will definitely refuse to clean it out since it contains nothing of mine and I have plenty of other things to get done to finish this year."

          "Oh, by the way, Margaret," he now turned to me, his hand on the doorknob, "I'll talk with you more when I get back, but you must leave your pompons at school. You wouldn't want to louse up your academic record over something as petty as this." With that he disappeared into the hall, his eyes twinkling as the door closed behind him.

          The boys milling around found a ladder from somewhere and I, myself, stuffed those pompons into the blackest corner of the highest shelf of that supply room. We left a note for Mr. Galen: a giant "THANKS" on his blackboard in colored chalk. I left a note for Mr. Delashmutt, too, but would not talk to him either in person or on the phone. My parents simply informed him politely that I refused to say where the pompons were although they definitely were at school as my note had said.

          I was too busy that summer to spend much time speculating about how he found them or how long it took. Life when you're young seems to go from one earth-shattering crisis to another and I didn't waste my time holding grudges. I finally received my report card sometime in August (at least two months late) and in September I enrolled in high school. But I didn't try out for the cheerleading squad. Somehow I no longer cared about being a cute trophy. I had an unsettling feeling that there were truly more important things to spend my energy on. I would like to say that the lesson of the pompons gave me a social consciousness which prompted me to stand up for what was right from that day forward, but it didn't. It was many, many more years before I learned that some principles must be fought for, that justice cannot always be served quietly or in secret, and that I had the power to change things. It was a beginning, though, and the junior high school did have eighteen matching pompons that fall. I think, in the long run, it was I who won.