Payton Malone was the kid who took apart her pen just to see what was inside, then put it back together. She wanted to know how the pieces fit, why the thing worked at all. Years later, the Vandalia junior is asking essentially the same question, just aimed at something considerably bigger: airplanes. "I've always been interested in how things work," she said. Payton wants to become an aeronautical engineer, though she's quick to clarify she has no interest in actually flying anything. She wants to understand it instead: "how things that go in the air do the thing," the physics, the engineering, the invisible forces that let something enormous leave the ground.

She's preparing for it deliberately: AP Chemistry with Mr. Forbes, AP Pre-Calculus with Mr. Strom, statistics with Mr. Sanders, and somewhere around two and a half hours of homework most nights on top of it. She's already thinking about college, weighing whether to leave Illinois for the sake of some independence. University of Tennessee has caught her eye, though she's also aware Purdue has a strong program and knows full well that the University of Illinois' aeronautical engineering program ranks among the best in the country, right in her own backyard.

Then there's the part of her life that might look, at first, like it belongs to a different person entirely: cheer. Payton's been doing it since sixth grade, partly inspired by her mother, who coached junior high cheer for a couple of years. Along the way, she's also tried competitive tumbling, track, a year of volleyball, and soccer when she was very young, training at one point three days a week, three hours a session, at a gym an hour from home, before she had to give that up once high school cheer took over her schedule. These days she tumbles at a gym in Highland, after training earlier at KPTC in Shelbyville.

Competitive cheer is what she loves most, more demanding, more structured, closer to what most people actually picture when they think of cheerleading now. Her team made it to state her freshman year, competing through the IHSA and ICCA circuits, regular meets leading to sectionals, then state, with nationals as the ultimate ceiling. She'd eventually like to try ‘All Star’ cheer too, competing through a club gym rather than through school, and she hopes to keep cheering in college. But ask what she loves most about it, and she doesn't start with results. She talks about the relationships: the whole squad eating together before football games, the sheer amount of time spent together, the closeness that builds from it. When a stunt finally lands after a lot of failed attempts, the payoff is obvious. "Whenever you hit them, it's really exciting," she said. Stunting also demands real trust; someone's literally being lifted into the air, and that trust doesn't happen by accident.

That combination, advanced math and science on one side, an intensely physical, social, collaborative sport on the other, says something real about Payton's experience at Vandalia. Nobody's asked her to pick a lane. She gets to chase difficult academics and throw herself fully into cheer at the same time, and both, in their own way, ask her to understand how separate pieces come together to make something work.

Payton isn't pretending to have everything figured out. She doesn't know yet exactly where she'll land for college, or which out-of-state school might beat out staying closer to home. She knows engineering pulls at her. Junior year, for her, is mostly about building out possibilities rather than closing them off, and Vandalia is giving her the rigor to actually chase one of the more ambitious ones. Part of that drive traces back to her family: her mother was the first in her family to go to college, and her grandfather's own military service left its mark too, both cited as steady sources of support behind her.

But her most interesting answer in the conversation had nothing to do with airplanes. Asked what kind of difference she'd want to make if she knew she couldn't fail, she didn't reach for anything related to engineering. "I guess I've always wanted to make, like, an impact on how people see other people." Less judgment, more kindness. "A lot of people are mean these days," she said, and she wonders whether social media and constant comparison have something to do with it. Whatever the cause, she wishes people's default reaction to something they don't understand wasn't immediately, Why would they do that? That's so weird, but something closer to curiosity instead.

It's a striking instinct from someone this fascinated by taking things apart to see how they work. Payton seems to understand instinctively that people aren't machines; you can't disassemble a person, inspect the parts, and know everything that made them who they are. Maybe that's part of what growing up around a wide mix of people has taught her, including her own family: an older sister, about six and a half years ahead of her and now a cosmetologist, and a much younger sister, Taylor, roughly ten and a half years behind, putting a 16-year spread across the household with Payton squarely in the middle.

Payton's own path to Vandalia wasn't a straight line either; her family moved around before landing here in second grade, and she describes the town in simple terms now: small, safe, familiar. "You don't know everybody," she said, "but I feel like you know more people than you would in a bigger city." Some of her favorite memories already come straight out of that familiarity: cheering under the lights, standing in a packed student section, watching friends compete, the long bus rides back with teammates that tend to become their own kind of memory later on.

She wants a bigger world eventually, and Vandalia seems to be preparing her for exactly that, not by forcing her to choose between the serious student and the cheerleader, and not by telling her which one she really is, but by giving both parts of her room to grow at the same time. Someday Payton Malone might help design something that actually flies, using physics, math, and engineering to understand exactly how all those pieces fit together. She already suspects the harder puzzle might be people, since those pieces never quite fit as neatly. Maybe that's exactly why her instinct is the right one: before judging something you don't understand, get curious first. Try kindness. And keep asking how things work.