Lauren and her three BFFs show football and other sports aren’t just for boys in this fifth installment of the relatable and empowering The Invincible Girls Club chapter book series that fans of The Baby-Sitters Club series will love! It’s career week in Miss Taylor’s class! When Lauren says that she wants to be a football announcer, some of her classmates laugh and ask how she could work in a sport she can’t even play. Lauren is bummed out, especially since she knows a ton about football. She feels even worse when she wants to play kickball at recess and the boys won’t let her join their teams. Instead of backing down, Lauren, Emelyn, Ruby, and Myka challenge them to a game—boys against girls. The prize: control of the kickball field during recess. But when Lauren’s competitiveness comes out at practice, the BFFs start to butt heads, and Lauren starts to wonder what she really wants out of this. Can the girls get ready for the big game? And will Lauren decide what’s worth fighting for? One of Rachele Alpine’s first jobs was at a library, but it didn’t last long, because all she did was hide in the third-floor stacks and read. Now she’s a little more careful about when and where she indulges her reading habit. Rachele is a high school English teacher by day, a wife and mother by night, and a writer during any time she can find in between. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she writes middle grade and young adult novels. Visit her at RacheleAlpine.com. Addy Rivera Sonda has loved creating characters and worlds on paper ever since she was a little girl, as everything was always possible there. Drawing was her magic power! Her favorite place is any bookstore that has that old book smell. Aside from drawing, her favorite hobbies are doing projects with her sister, who is a toy designer, and watching old Argentinian soap operas. It inspires her to think that stories and art are slowly but surely changing the way people understand themselves and perceive others, building empathy and a more inclusive world. Chapter One: Striking Out 1 STRIKING OUT Today was the day. I could feel it in my bones. Well, I could feel it in my legs, which were aching from the nonstop pumping I’d been doing. Today was the day one of my best friends, Myka, and I would go all the way over the top bar of the swing set on our playground. Many at Erie Elementary had tried, but none had succeeded. We were about to change that. We were ready to go for the glory. This was what the two of us had been preparing for, every day at recess. “We’ve got this,” Myka said, and grinned at me. My feet kicked up little puffs of dirt as I gained momentum. I gripped the chains so tight, it was as if someone had superglued my hands to them. Higher and higher I went. I swear, my feet almost skimmed the bottom of the white cotton-candy clouds in the sky. My best friends—in the Invincible Girls Club—had helped plan this moment out. Emelyn, who loved science, had calculated how fast and high we’d have to go to make it over the bar, and Ruby had her camera ready to document it and planned to write an article about it for our elementary school newspaper. “Are you ready for this?” I shouted to Myka. “I was born ready!” she replied, and pumped even harder. And I was too. Really, I was. Well, okay, maybe I was a little teeny bit nervous. Who wouldn’t be? The swing set was massively tall, and I was about to catapult myself over it on a tiny piece of rubber and chains. But what was life without a little adventure? “Pump! Pump! Pump!” Ruby and Emelyn shouted from below. “Higher! Higher! Higher!” Myka added in between their chants. Other girls stood around clapping and bouncing from foot to foot as they waited to witness the event of a lifetime. We had an entire cheering squad, and I refused to disappoint them. One more pump, and I’d fly over the bar like a bird and come back down, the twisted chains around the top a memorial to our great feat. Kids would talk about Myka and me for centuries. We’d become local legends. Teachers would include us in their history lessons. The school would place a plaque next to the swing set to honor our accomplishments. “Ready or not, here I go!” Myka yelled. Emelyn and Ruby cheered louder. All I had to do was go a little bit higher. Pump a little bit harder… TWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET! “Lauren and Myka, you slow down this instant!” a voice demanded. “You know the rules. You can’t swing that high!” I groaned. Ms. Kratus. The recess monitor. Also known as… the destroyer of fun. I was almost certain that if there was a good time to be had, Ms. Kratus could sniff it out and stop it in its tracks. Every. Single. Time. She was never without her whistle, which she used for ultimate recess torture. We couldn’t throw snowballs in the winter, dodgeball had been banned, and once she had even tried to stop us from pretending that the ground was lava, as