Dying with Her Cheer Pants On

by Seanan McGuire

“Don’t mysterious-disappearance-shame the cheerleaders.”

It was a sharp face, all angles and hard lines, like the flesh had been applied to his skull only as an accent, and not as its own creation.

The pee-wee baseball team saves the world twice a season, and so does the sewing circle down at the retirement home.

The interior wasn’t much better, although to be fair, it was precisely the sort of place that had been promised by the exterior.

He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a chin that should have been immortalized in story, song, and the occasional soft-focus photo shoot.

hit it shoulder-first, bursting onto the porch in a shower of splinters and deeply confused termites.

as far as anyone with eyes was concerned, but try telling that to the cheer squad, who acted like being the living avatars of a vaguely menacing cartoon squash was the best thing that could ever have happened to them.

I might never have become friends with most of my fellow Pumpkins without our shared uniform, shared weirdness, and shared interest in humanity not being wiped from the face of the planet.

Being a Fighting Pumpkin means standing up for yourself, whether it’s in the face of peer pressure or against the unstoppable skeleton armies of a confused death god that wandered into the wrong high school.

“I don’t think ‘not blowing anything up’ is the Fighting Pumpkins way,” said Heather.

was hard not to think that maybe their cheerleading squads would attract fewer cosmic horrors if they’d stop theming them all after a harvest fair gone completely feral and hungry for human flesh.

“Writing things down is a level of protection against an uncaring universe, as long as you’re sure nothing’s changing what you wrote.”