Mia with her big brother Marty

If I were a person with a yen for evil, I would have been in my element last week at a cheerleading competition in Chicago.
Yes, cheerleading.
Yes, a person of my house, my own kin, is a competitive cheerleader.
Was I against this initially? Initially, I was. But our Mia is such a trickster, such a performer and such a darned good athlete – despite, at age nine, being 44 inches tall and weighing 46 pounds – that she was sort of a natural for this growing sport, which involves more than shaking your pom-poms these days.
And young women and men can actually get cheering scholarships if they’re good enough, and from what I already know of kids in college, I’d let her try for a scholarship in hacky sack.
But let’s get back to the competition and the appearance of the competitors. I have to exclude my own daughters’ gym, not out of prejudice, but simply to state the fact: Gymfinity, in rural Wisconsin, did a much better job than, well, all the other gyms there of letting the little girls look like girls instead of like Las Vegas showgirls.
The little girls wore makeup, and while it had to be perky and flashy, it also had to be modest.
That wasn’t true of almost every other team.
Girls who didn’t come up to my navel were wearing navel-baring costumes, some with push-up bras. A few had see-through midriffs with embroidery that looked like body paint. It was a wonderland for what police officers call “short eyes” – which, translated, means adults who have eyes for short people.
The face paint was truly scary. It was as though these girls had Barbie heads screwed onto bodies that, in most cases, were flat and wiry as little boys below the neck.
Some teams actually hire makeup artists, a coach told me, to come in and train the coaches and parents to paint on “smoky eyes” for people ten years too young to legally buy a pack of smokes, and cat’s eyes with seductive Emily-Blunt upsweeps on the end, on people who wouldn’t be able to spell the word “seductive.”
Moreover, the place was a zoo, with probably five hundred cheer girls from age 6 to age 18 and their mothers and sometimes their fathers, their coaches and their assistant coaches.
No one knew who was who.
No one knew who was where – as evidenced from the amount of text-messaging and paging going on, as evidenced by the amount of up-and-down elevator riding and corridor-running.
Some teams were staying at the hotel resort, others at the hotel across the street. Cross traffic and mass confusing were the orders of the day.
Some of the ten or 15 gyms represented took the precaution of counting heads and forming long conga lines of girls and the occasional boy, holding hands as they moved from place to place. But there were still plenty of little girls -- tiny wisps of things that could be carried out a convenient door as easily as someone hefts a computer bag – skipping around with identically-costumed American Girl dolls and teddy bears.
They were all alone, with lipsticked smiles, the lipstick sprinkled with glitter, pretty prey on a plate.
I thought about how easy it would be for some kindly-looking fellow to walk up and say brightly, “Miss Danielle wants you to meet her and the other girls by the big doors.”
The little girls were focusing on their toe kicks and back flips, excited by the booths advertising personalized pennants and modeling careers. They weren’t on guard.
It would have been easy for anyone to overhear the names of the coaches. Confused and befuddled as I was, I could scarcely avoid seeing them on the backs of shirts or overhear them spoken over the course of three or four hours. And for anyone who wanted to come in, the price was on $12 for a wristband.
Most of the routines were anything but wholesome (though, again, I have to single out my daughters’ gym for concentrating more on gymnastics than gyrating). My brother and I sat at the sidelines marveling at the hip-shaking, hip hop-inspired moves on the stage. And the sexier the moves were, the higher (it seemed) were the scores.
Next day, the whole thing was repeated, with hair extensions, eye shadow and mascara for us, with a silver star sticker on one cheek – for the other green parrots, lightning bolts and hair glitter.
One veteran mother with three daughters in the competition explained that nail polish was not allowed.
But everything else was.
“Very Jon Benet,” one mother whispered to me. It was a crude way to put it, and yet I found myself repeating the same thing later on the same day to another mom, as my horror at the amount of exposure and the vulnerability of the girls grew.
Curious, I (ostensibly) complimented one girl on her yellow-and-silver outfit. It consisted of a bra top with see-through sleeves and a hip-hugger bottom. Above the waistband, a bauble swung from a navel pierce.
I asked her age.
Now, think about it.
I could have been Jeffrey Dahmer’s Vanna White, a sinister assistant sent in to lure little people out to a white mini-van -- vehicle of choice for serial killers nationwide. It wouldn’t have taken much luring, and I doubt anyone would have noticed a little girl crying, being led along by anyone matronly.
There was a good deal of crying on the second day, when teams that had great hopes placed sixth, seventh and tenth. One more little girl crying, being led by a tight-lipped older woman staring straight ahead, wouldn’t have looked out of place at all.
In fact, the little girl in yellow and silver shouldn’t even have been talking to me. She should have said, and loudly, “You’re not my mother! Go away!” But I’m a gentle-looking person, and was wearing a pink university hoodie with black pants and black Ugg boots – every inch the non-threatening Mommy.
She trusted me. She glowed.
“I’m twelve,” she said. “Next year, I move up to seniors!”
I moved on.
One of the seniors was outside, having a cigarette before her performance. After she was finished, she stuck the lighter into her satin underpants, along with a sheet of paper on which a boy had, she said, written his cell-phone number.
Now, don’t let this make you think that I consider cheerleading unsavory.
As opposed to “beauty” pageants and some jazz dance shows, there was at least athleticism and sweat equity.
To the credit of my daughters’ gym, the girls’ outfits were flashy yet modest, far different from the rest. They had high necks and long sleeves and short skirts but wore skirts that covered their rear ends.
Coaches and parent helpers were also eagle-eyed around the girls. I was the one wandering around after I lost my wristlet and couldn’t get into the performance area. Whenever I called them, someone answered and assured me that Mia was with the group.
There was this one moment, though, right before the presentation of the trophies.
Mia kept begging me to “go find the other girls.” I finally allowed her to do that. There was seven feet between my daughter and me as she searched on tiptoe for the rest of her squad. A group of girls passed, and Mia was gone.
In that moment, I thought I was being repaid for every sentence of suffering I’d ever inflicted on a parent in fiction.
Mia’s older brother was at the event. Frantically, I called him. He had come walking out of the upstairs lounge, seen Mia alone and taken her hand.
It was that easy.
Of course, it was her brother.
Mia is not very friendly and I’ve taught her to be less than trusting – less trusting of people who are familiar to her even than of people who are strangers: People who are familiar to children are most often predators.
Ironically, the sexy, cutesy facial gestures and disco wiggles are not allowed at the college level, where the stunts are more complicated but the glitz largely absent. I guess it’s my belief, after the experience of the meet, that cheerleader costumes should be changed, made more age-appropriate, more like those worn by athletes than by pole-dancers.
But I also guess, so long as the girls with the bare midriffs (admittedly accomplished) keep bringing home those big trophies, nothing will change at all.