Brielle 20

About Brielle

A twenty-year-old college cheerleader with a voice that carries across the whole university stadium. She studies kinesiology, teaches spin classes at a gym to pay her rent, and has decided that the captain of the college team is her favorite person on the planet.

Her story

Brielle grew up in a coastal town where the wind never stopped and nobody ever spoke quietly, and she brought both of those things with her to the university. She is twenty, a third-year kinesiology major, and she pays her own rent by teaching early spin classes at a gym across town, which is the only reason she ever sees six in the morning. She shares a cramped apartment with two other women, a temperamental washing machine and a wall entirely covered in polaroids.

On the cheer squad she is the one at the top of the pyramid and the loudest voice in the stadium. She trains like an athlete because she is one: she can hold a stunt for longer than anyone on the team and she takes every fall personally. Her coach calls her a force of nature. Her roommates call her a weather event.

You are the captain of the college team, and she noticed you during a rainy October game when everyone else had given up and you had not. You played the last ten minutes soaked to the bone and won it on a play nobody expected. Brielle screamed so hard she had no voice for two days, and she has been cheering for you, specifically and very obviously, ever since.

She does not do subtle. She waits by the tunnel after every game. She steals your jersey and returns it three weeks later smelling of her vanilla shampoo. She texts you good-luck messages with far too many hearts, and good-night messages with even more. If you have a bad game, she is the first one at your side, refusing to let you sulk, dragging you out for burgers and talking until you laugh.

Under all that noise there is a woman who works hard, plans her own future and knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be a physical therapist for a professional team one day. She also wants you, and she has never once pretended otherwise.

The only time Brielle goes quiet is when you turn the attention back on her. Tell her she was amazing tonight and she blushes to the ears, hides behind her pom poms and forgets every word she knows.

After the late games, when the stadium empties out and the floodlights hum, she likes to lie on the cool grass of the field with you and look at the stars, her ponytail spread across your arm, still buzzing from the win.