Rebel Girls Read online

  “For the last time, I don’t know the guy,” Sean said to his issue of Spider-Man. “You forget—I’m not in those smart-ass classes with you. I take biology with the rest of the normal sophomores. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this is the thirtieth anniversary issue of Spider-Man. It’s the most important story of our lifetime.”

  He put the comic back up to his face like I wasn’t there, though I knew he was half joking. But only half. Spidey was serious business, albeit serious business that Sean revealed to a select few.

  Sean’s school world was a lot different than mine, and not only because I was in honors everything. People always thought our friendship was a relic of growing up next door to each other in the crappy, boxy townhouses on the edge of Shenandoah, a sprawling neighborhood filled with streets named after Civil War battles and Confederate generals. Or else they thought it was the result of him needing some kind of help from me, like when I’d tutored Sean’s ginormous linebacker friend Trip Wilson last year. But that was because no one knew about Sean’s comics fetish or the hours he spent scouring flea markets for Star Wars toys. If they bothered to look past his football player exterior, they would see he was an even bigger nerd than I was.

  And in our private nerd world, it would take a lot more than me pestering him about the Cute Boy for him to put down his comics.

  “He’s only in my physics and calculus classes,” I protested. “I don’t know what else he’s taking, or his grade! I just thought—”

  “You just thought he looked like a football player, right?” he asked, giving me the most annoyed look possible over his comic. “But from what you’ve told me, he’s built like a quarterback. And that’s my job, dude.”

  He said the dude in a Bart Simpson voice, so I could tell he wasn’t actually offended. Also, Sean wasn’t the type to say dude for real, under any circumstances. But he was right. They were both tall and lean and broad-shouldered. I hadn’t thought of that as a quarterback’s build, but of course Sean would.

  I suddenly regretted bringing the Cute Boy up. Last year, Sean’s promotion from JV to varsity had been viewed as controversial. Or, one could say, laced with a flavor of racism, hidden under a thin patina of suburban-polite questions about a (black) freshman’s ability to compete. The absurd controversy finally died down once we started winning for the first time in our school’s history. This year, people had started mentioning our school along with the word championship, and they weren’t being ironic.

  I sincerely hoped the Cute Boy wasn’t someone’s attempt to edge Sean off the football team.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m an ass.”

  “Come on, Athena, I’m joking.” Sean peered at me over the comic. “I really have no idea who that guy is, or whether he even looks like a football player. And I promise, if you let me finish my comic and learn who this Spider-Man 2099 is, I’ll help you with your boy problems.”

  I let him go back to his comic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to get his attention again until we eventually wandered over to my house so that Sean could grab a Coke from our fridge—his mom didn’t let him have soda, but my dad kept a healthy stock of it—and make fun of Helen, since he didn’t have any siblings of his own to pick on.

  Until then, I had to find another way to occupy myself. I sorted through my homework, but since it was only the first week of school, I was done in about five minutes. I flipped through my copy of Sassy to check out the fall clothes, but I didn’t have much use for them, considering how little fall we experienced and how much time I spent in my school uniform.

  Juliana Hatfield was on the cover, guitar in hand. I’d liked her album Hey Babe, but then she’d started talking about how most women weren’t good guitar players and that she wanted to be the exception, which had really irritated both Melissa and me. But she looked cool. I pulled my hair up into an approximation of a bob, wondering if short hair would look as good on me as it did on Juliana. It might work. I would ask Melissa for her opinion tomorrow at school, even though she sometimes made fun of me for reading Sassy. She’d tried to get me hooked on Ms., but it seemed like a magazine my mom would read. Actually, it was a magazine my mom read.

  A knock on Sean’s door interrupted my reading. Helen leaned casually against the doorway, a giant red cherry slushee in her hand and a bored look on her face. She’d changed out of her school uniform into a belly shirt and short-shorts that made her legs look disproportionately long. A pair of round-framed John Lennon sunglasses sat on top of her blond hair. I don’t know who she was trying to impress, unless it was some random guy at the minimart—or maybe Sean, as remote as that possibility seemed to me.

  “Shouldn’t you be at your house, wearing out a New Kids on the Block cassette on your Walkman?” Sean gave her a teasing smile, but she looked back at him with a world-weary expression.

  I shook my head. “Nah. First of all, she’s moved on to more adult fare,” I told him, as if Helen wasn’t even there. “Pearl Jam was the flavor of the summer, and seems to be persisting into the school year, with some competition from the Lemonheads because she thinks Evan Dando is a-dor-able. And second, she doesn’t use headphones. She uses our stereo because she likes to torture me any chance she gets.”

  “Veeerrry funny, losers,” Helen said, drawling her words. She was acting annoyingly cool, and I wasn’t sure if it was to irritate me or get Sean’s attention. Either way, she was definitely achieving the former, if not the latter. “Are you two nerds done playing Dungeons & Dragons?”

  “That joke is so old,” I groaned. “You know comics are nothing like Dungeons & Dragons. What do you want anyway?” Helen often spent her afternoons in our shared bedroom, which was why I usually headed to Sean’s place after school when he wasn’t at football practice and I didn’t have cello lessons.

  “Wow, you’re so friendly.” Sarcasm was Helen’s latest favorite thing. I reminded myself that I was trying to be nicer to her, but she knew exactly how to annoy me. “I need to tell you two things. First, Mom called. She’s in New York. She wants you to call her back.”

  Our mom had just started her new job at NYU, which meant we would be spending future summer vacations and spring breaks in New York, instead of Eugene. She was supposed to call us tonight, not right after school, but it didn’t surprise me that she called early. She was never very good at keeping track of time.

  “Okay. What’s the second thing?” I asked impatiently. If I wanted to catch Mom before she got lost in her stack of freshly moved Latin poetry books, I’d need to call her back soon.

  Helen gave me a look of smug superiority. “Mrs. Bonnecaze wanted me to ask you to join the pro-life club. She said it was because you’re—quote, unquote—‘so sweet.’ I tried not to laugh in her face.”

  “I already told her I wasn’t interested.” It was hard being one of approximately five pro-choice kids in a Catholic school, especially when you were otherwise a model student. Everyone just assumed that you’d want to be part of the pro-life club.

  Last year, Helen and I had gotten into a huge fight at Sean’s house when she told me she was president of her middle school’s pro-life club. I’d initially thought Helen had joined the club for popularity’s sake, because it didn’t fit with our family’s values at all. Mom was as feminist and pro-choice as anyone could imagine. And while Dad was a Catholic and had gone to a Jesuit college, he mostly invested in the social justice side of Catholicism. We didn’t go to church on Sunday or anything.

  Then, after I fought with her about it, I had to deal with her and Melissa continuing the argument. I’d sided with Melissa, of course, and Helen had refused to talk to me for a month. I occasionally tried subtle hints to change her mind—I tossed Sassy on her bed, with a dog-ear on an article on abortion. I periodically reminded her incessantly that Eddie Vedder, the singer of her favorite band, had written pro-choice on his arm in marker on MTV. She had taped that episode of Unplugged and watched it ov
er and over, though she always fast-forwarded through that part.

  “I know. I told her that,” Helen said, crossing her arms. “Besides, I figured you wouldn’t want to get involved with something that your best friend Melissa would disapprove of.”

  “That’s—that’s so not true! I have my own opinions!” And those opinions were based in empathy, science, reason, feminist history, and a little bit of riot grrrl. I had to give credit to Mom for the feminist history part, but otherwise it was all me. I definitely wasn’t pro-choice just because Melissa was, and Helen’s accusation rankled me to no end.

  “If you say so.” She slurped on the slushee dismissively, sucking up the last bits with that unmistakable, airy, loud-straw sound.

  I sprang up from the floor and lunged toward Helen.

  Sean grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back before I hauled off and smacked my sister. “Whoa, tiger! Why don’t you go next door and call your mom back?”

  I was practically growling, but I nodded at him. Yes, I would go back to our house to call Mom.

  “Do you want me to keep her here?” Sean said.

  I nodded again, grabbed my backpack, and shot a death-ray look toward Helen.

  “I’m not staying with him!” Helen said, her voice rising. “He might try to make me read comics or watch football.” The last word dripped with disgust. One of the few things Helen and I had in common was our disdain for football in a city where everyone rooted for the LSU Tigers.

  “You’ll stay with me, or I’ll tell my mom you went out without telling anyone.” Sean nodded toward the empty slushee cup in her hand. He had her cornered, and she knew it. We weren’t supposed to leave the house without telling each other, but that slushee had come from the convenience store half a mile away.

  Sean grinned at her, somewhere between friendly and evil.

  Helen narrowed her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Oh, I would.” He gently steered her out the door. “She’d give you what for, and then she’d tell your dad, and then you’d be grounded for a week. And it would be such sweet revenge for that time last year when you ‘accidentally’ left a box of my tapes in the backyard.”

  Helen stopped and looked from me to Sean with a measured glare. “Fine. Whatever. And that was an accident. You locked me out in your backyard when Leah showed up. So I went home. Not my problem you forgot your precious tapes were outside in ninety-degree heat. And it’s not like anything good was in there anyway, other than Run-DMC.” She tossed the slushee cup into the garbage can by Sean’s bedroom door, turned on her chunky platform shoes, and stomped down the hall like an angry, knock-kneed baby giraffe.

  “She really knows how to make an exit,” Sean said, shaking his head as we listened to her clomp down the stairs. “But... I should probably go with her, so she doesn’t ‘unintentionally’ wreck something else of mine. And you should go call your mom.”

  “I think she’s gone beyond those unintentional days,” I said. “All her acts are fully intentional now, no scare quotes about them.”

  I followed Sean down the stairs. By the time we got to the living room, Helen had already sprawled across the couch in front of the TV, legs extended, so that no one else could sit with a good view of the TV unless they specifically asked her to move. The only bit of courtesy she offered—and it was clearly for Mrs. Estelle, not Sean—was that she’d taken her shoes off before she put her feet up on the couch. Mrs. Estelle was like family, which meant she’d give Helen the same punishment she’d dole out to Sean for disrespecting her couch.

  Sean tilted his head toward Helen. “I can handle it from here. I don’t think our prisoner is going to make a break for it. Though I can’t see why she risked you ratting her out in the first place by sneaking out for a sugar rush. It’s not like slushees are that appealing. Unless it’s some guy who works there.” With widened eyes, he gestured toward his midriff, then pointed dramatically at Helen.

  I guess I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed Helen’s belly shirt. Both Sean and I were still in our school uniforms.

  “I can hear you!” Helen shouted from the couch. “And there’s no slushee guy! I just happen to like keeping up-to-date with fashion, unlike either of you.”

  Last night, Helen had been so eager to try her uniform on, and now she couldn’t wait to change into something less institutional. But I could figure that conundrum out later. For now, I had to call Mom.

  Still, I found myself hovering by the foot of the stairs, alternately shooting looks between Sean and Helen. I wanted to talk this out with him, but I didn’t want to talk about my weird feelings about Mom in front of Helen. Despite being so different from each other, Mom and Helen could somehow talk on the phone for hours. But I, the supposed junior feminist, never could figure out what to say to her.

  Sean nudged me toward the door. “Go on. Git. Move along, cowgirl. I’ve got this.”

  “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?” I sounded conspiratorial, and even though what I wanted to talk about had nothing to do with Helen, she’d probably think it did.

  “As long as you’re not talking about me!” Helen snapped, right on cue. She never, ever stopped listening to me and Sean.

  “Not everything is about you, Helen,” I replied, rolling my eyes.

  Sean followed me outside, closing the door behind us. “Are you sure something isn’t going on between you and Helen? Because I’m getting a high level of tension from you two. You’re both...unusually hostile, to a point that’s made you forget all about that guy you were bugging me about.”

  I shook my head. “No, I haven’t forgotten about him. And it’s really not anything more than the usual with Helen.” I sighed, dropping down onto one of the two plastic chairs Sean’s mom kept on their tiny front porch. “I mean, I guess it is. Sort of. This was our last summer in Oregon, right? Mom’s starting a new job at NYU, and something about that makes me feel like we’re going to see her a lot less. So maybe it has to do with Helen, too, but not just the two of us. More like Helen and Mom, and Mom and me, separately.”

  My throat tightened as I trailed off to nothing. None of this should be a big deal. Mom had moved many times before, starting when she went to grad school at Duke. She and Dad were still married back then, and her academic stint in North Carolina was supposed to be temporary. Helen and I had believed her promises, but anyone who wasn’t under ten years old saw where things were really headed.

  By now, we should be used to following her to new places. I should be treating her new move as something exciting, because it was New York. Instead, I felt as if I was one more step away from Mom’s life.

  “Anyway,” I finally said. “I’m supposed to call her, and I have no idea what I should say. I saw her a few weeks ago, but now she’s in New York, and I don’t know what to say about that, because I’ve never been there, and it’s not like we can talk about all the fun things we did in Oregon this summer, because we didn’t. Do anything fun, that is.”

  Sean sat down next to me, leaning back in the plastic chair, which creaked as much as plastic can.

  “I know how you feel. My dad only lives in Houston, but...” He shrugged, looking out into the empty street. “May as well be Mars. When I went to the family reunion with him in July, he kept calling me by his younger kids’ names, probably because they’re the same age I was when he and Mom split.”

  Sean’s parents got a divorce the year after Mom and Dad, and his dad had carried out a full do-over on his life, complete with a new wife and a set of twin sons who looked like tiny cloned versions of Sean.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned. “Mom’s always calling me by Helen’s name, too. But at least Helen’s not seven.”

  “Yeah, right? Point is, every time I see him, I have to get to know him again,” he said. “And I think your phone calls are kind of like that, right? You spent the summer with her, but now she’s moved for the
millionth time. You’re starting over yet again, kind of like me and my dad every Thanksgiving. And family reunion. And birthday.”

  “So I’m not an emotionally stunted freak for not wanting to call my mom?” Sometimes I felt like Sean was the only person I could voice my inner fears to out loud.

  “Nope,” he said. “I think it’s pretty normal for you to feel weird about it. But I miiight call you out on being emotionally stunted—or maybe just immature—for the fights you get into with Helen.”

  I smacked Sean’s shoulder for the insult, a reflex that proved his point. He smiled back at me with a smug “see what I mean?” look on his face.

  “Okay.” I nodded at him. “I’m going in.”

  I walked the few feet to our front door—our houses were attached after all—as Sean went back inside.

  Our house felt extra quiet without Helen. I stared at the phone, daring myself to pick it up. I always hesitated before calling Mom. I never knew her teaching schedule, or if she’d be writing, or working on a new translation, or reading postmodern theory. When she’d first told me the term, I’d had no idea what she was talking about, and she’d laughed when I told her I watched a show on MTV called PostModern. I think that was why she sent me Foucault’s collected works for my birthday last year. Needless to say, I hadn’t read them.

  I willed myself toward the phone, telling myself that I had no reason to be so nervous. I’d missed her call, but she wouldn’t be mad at me for that. It would be fine. I inhaled deeply, placed my hand on the receiver, picked it up, and dialed.