It was a nice escape. Almost.
“Oh, Athena! I didn’t see you there.” Leah’s voice carried over the football players’ steady rumble. “Why don’t you and Kyle come over here? It’s always good to see you two!”
She smiled at Kyle in a way that made him flinch. I couldn’t believe this was happening in front of Sean, who was now busy talking with Trip. It had shades of that first lunch I’d had with Kyle, but it shouldn’t bother me. It shouldn’t mean anything, even if she was doing it in front of a bunch of people, and even if I was obviously on a date with Kyle. But, in the eternally valid words of Han Solo, I had a bad feeling about this.
“Good to see you, too,” Kyle said. He shifted nervously next to me. “Uh, Athena and I are kind of hungry, so...” He trailed off, not moving from his spot, with a confused look on his face.
I grabbed Kyle’s hand, desperate for a physical connection. I felt like something was off, but I didn’t know what. The look she gave him wasn’t her usual playful, flirtatious glance. It was different, somehow more intense.
She must have read my mind, because she broke her gaze on Kyle and switched to me.
“Oh, Athena,” she said, all feigned innocence and big, Margaret Keane–painting eyes. “I feel so bad about what’s happening with Helen. I hope your little badge and button campaign works. It’s such a bummer that she’s not in the pro-life club anymore. We all miss her so much at our meetings.”
An involuntary snort erupted from my nose. “Really?” I asked, rage bubbling up my esophagus. And then it finally happened. I was taken over by the Spirit of Riot Grrrl or some other feminist instinct or maybe pure anger. “You didn’t seem all that interested in the pro-life club until your lies got Helen kicked out. You weren’t even a member last year. I didn’t think you were enough of a sadist to colonize the part of her life that you destroyed, but I guess I was wrong.”
My entire body tensed as I waited for her mean retort. But Leah just stared at me, her overlarge brown eyes slowly but surely welling with tears.
“I...I thought we were friends. I can’t believe you’d think I had anything to do with that! Why would I want to hurt your sister?” She looked at me with a mouth open in shock, as though my accusation came from out of nowhere, and was based on nothing.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. Everyone was looking at me now, from Sean to Trip to the benchwarmers in spotless uniforms and everyone in between. I must have lost contact with reality, that my version of the world was being warped into some through-the-looking-glass truth.
“Are you serious? Friends? You’ve never been my friend! And all you do is spread shit about people! You’re petty and jealous and mean, and...” Panic surged through me as all logic and argument slipped away, and I realized that everything I said made me, not her, look bad. I scanned the faces around me to see if they believed her. Trip looked worried that he’d been the one to call me over. Sean stared at me with the same blank, disengaged look that he usually gave to the opposing team before and during a football game. I didn’t know a lot of the other guys, but Matt Ambeau and Paul Guillory were looking at me with wide eyes, as though I’d confessed to working with the Unabomber to support Bill Clinton to win the election as a Nixonian Republican—which is to say that they were looking at me like my actions made no sense.
But next to Leah, Aimee hid a silent laugh behind a greasy wadded-up paper napkin. So I wasn’t wrong about the real state of things. Leah was gaslighting me and everyone else.
“Are you kidding me? Look at her,” I snapped, pointing to Aimee. If the guys saw her, maybe they’d believe me about Leah. She dropped the napkin on the table and struggled to keep her mouth in line. “She’s laughing at this. She thinks it’s hilarious that her best friend over there is ruining my sister’s life.” I turned dagger eyes back on Leah. “You can pretend like you didn’t do anything, or that I’m somehow at fault, but I know what’s going on. I know what you’ve been saying about her, about Drew Lambert and some fake abortion. And you know as well as I do that it’s not true, just as well as you know that it shouldn’t fucking matter whether or not she had an abortion. But it matters to her. And you two are... You’re—”
“Athena, I think you should go,” Sean said, interrupting me with a cold voice. “You’ve done enough.”
His eyes were flat and distant again, but I wasn’t some lineman on another team that he had to dodge. I was supposed to be his friend. My chest suddenly hurt, and I thought I would cry.
“Done enough?” My voice wavered as a lump gathered in my throat. “I can’t believe you, Sean! I thought you cared about Helen! I thought you were my friend. I thought you of all people would see that I haven’t ‘done’ anything. I’m not the one who’s at fault here.”
I burst into tears, unable to continue. I couldn’t keep making accusations, not when Leah was so good at pretending.
I saw myself through the eyes of the guys staring at me. I was a drama queen. A shit stirrer. A “crazy girl” who couldn’t get over the fact that her friend didn’t need her now that he had a girlfriend. “Crazy girls” like that didn’t exist—as riot grrrl reminded me, it was just an excuse for guys not to deal with girls’ emotions.
And right now, no one wanted to deal with mine. They probably thought I was jealous that Sean was dating Leah, that I wanted him for myself. But that wasn’t true at all. I missed having a real friendship with him. I missed being able to trust him. I missed him trusting me. But that wasn’t part of our current reality.
Sean stood up and nodded to Kyle. “You need to take care of her, okay? Get her out of here. She’s upsetting my girlfriend.”
The words were like a gut punch. Not to me, but about me. Like I was a misbehaving child who needed to be dealt with.
Sean knew me. He knew literally nothing else he could say would make me more upset. Make it all about a guy being able to “calm” me down, to “take care of” me. Really dismiss me. Make me feel small. Push me to explode with feminist rage, so they could all dismiss my righteous anger as some scene caused by “that crazy girl.”
Kyle grabbed my arm. “Co—”
I jerked my arm away. “It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m leaving.”
I turned, but not before I saw Kyle shrug at Sean out of the corner of my eye. Rage boiled inside me. What was wrong with guys that they didn’t see how manipulative Leah was? How was I the one in the wrong here?
I bolted back out through the Denny’s as fast as I could, with Kyle following silently. I’d fucked everything up, and I didn’t know what to say. Or do. Or if I even wanted to talk to him right now, after his display in there.
Back in the car, Kyle pressed Play on the cassette player and turned it up loud. I sniffled in the passenger seat, looking out the window. I was fuming from all the things I wished I’d said to Sean, to Leah, to the whole damned football team—and even to Kyle, because who agrees to “get their girl out of there”? I didn’t want to strike up a conversation with him. I wanted him to break the silence to talk with me.
He’d put in Faith No More earlier, and I’d said nothing about disliking them. It wasn’t that they were terrible musicians—they were technically awesome—but every asshole misogynist in our school was into them. If I held up a boom box playing “Epic” in the style of John Cusack in Say Anything, every wannabe muscled goon within a five-mile radius would show up and worship at my feet.
The song on right now was “Midlife Crisis,” which started out with a loopy, groovy drumbeat. And then it was fine through the verse—typical angsty dude stuff. Whatever. But then it got to the chorus, and I decided I’d had enough.
“Is he seriously singing about a woman on her period? Are you fucking kidding me? What is this bullshit?” Yes. I was going full-on feminist rage at this point.
Kyle sighed. “You could just ask me to turn it off. Don’t get mad at me because of what hap
pened back there.” I could practically read his mind: he was thinking I was mad about a dumb menstruation line because I was PMSing, and now he was trying to placate me. He reached over to the passenger side and grabbed a case of tapes. “Pick something out that you like.”
The case was full of bands that were supposed to be what you listened to if you were a guy with good indie rock taste. The Clash, whom I obviously liked. The Replacements, who were vastly overrated and apparently disastrous live, even though I’d never seen them. The overly pretentious Elvis Costello. Nirvana, including Bleach for DIY cred. Dinosaur Jr for indie cred. Pavement for boring indie cred. Fugazi, who at least had done some shows with Bikini Kill over the summer. Lemonheads, which meant Kyle had something in common with Helen. The fucking Screaming Trees. Who would even buy their album? Soundgarden, almost metal grunge. Pearl Jam, now super popular mainstream grunge.
There were no women. Not even critically acclaimed ones, like Throwing Muses or Tori Amos or PJ Harvey. None of the rocking ones like L7 or Hole or Seven Year Bitch or Babes in Toyland. No Lush or Sinead O’Connor. No Sugarcubes. Not even the Pixies, who had Kim Deal.
This is what the tape collection of a guy who wore a Bikini Kill button—sorry, badge—looked like. The same as every other indie rock boy.
I grabbed Sonic Youth’s Dirty, because at least the band had Kim Gordon. I pushed it into the tape player and hit Play.
“Good choice.” Was it supposed to make me feel better to be validated by a guy’s agreement?
“Humph,” I said, not quite acknowledging him.
He turned the stereo down. “What’s wrong? Why are you mad at me? I didn’t do anything back there.”
I glared at him for two seconds, and then realized that I wasn’t that mad at him, at least not for what had transpired at Denny’s. The jury was still out on his music collection. He’d been trying to help in the only way he could see, not playing into some patriarchal conspiracy to make me seem like a stereotypical “crazy girl” in front of the football team.
“I’m not,” I told him with a sigh. “I’m just mad in general. Leah thinks she can get away with ruining Helen. This pin and patch thing hasn’t gone anywhere. No one cares. I know it’s been less than a week, and I shouldn’t expect so much, but... People would rather continue to speculate on the status of Helen’s uterus.”
Kyle was quiet for a while, but he didn’t turn up Sonic Youth again. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Are you sure that’s it?”
“Well, mostly, yeah.”
“Mostly?” Something about his voice worried me. Like he didn’t trust me. In just one word, I sensed an ocean of doubt.
“Yeah,” I said. “Leah’s been one step ahead of us this whole time, always dropping hints about ‘things she’s heard’ or leering in front of Helen and asking, ‘oh, how are you doing,’ or taking Helen’s place in the pro-life club...” I trailed off.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” He was hinting at something, and it bothered me that he didn’t come out and say it.
“So what are you talking about?”
He couldn’t look at me because he was driving, but it felt like he didn’t want to look at me, either.
“What’s going on with you and Sean?”
“Wait. What? Why would you think anything is going on with us?” Though of course I knew why he would think that, after the way Leah had managed to spin our confrontation off as me being mean to her. It was what a girl jealous over a boy might do, even though it had nothing to do with that, at least not in the sense Kyle seemed to be thinking.
His shoulders slumped. “It’s just that...back there...you seemed like you were more upset about Sean’s reaction than Leah’s.”
“Of course I was!” I protested. “We’ve been friends since we were three! I’m upset he basically erased that in favor of believing his girlfriend and her cackling apprentice!”
Kyle sighed again, louder than the first time. It felt like he didn’t believe me, either about Leah’s culpability or about my lack of romantic feelings for Sean.
“Have you ever considered that your dislike for Leah might be coloring your opinion of who started those rumors about your sister? I didn’t want to say it, but—”
“I am absolutely certain that she’s behind it,” I said, trying to sound serious but calm and not completely angry that he’d doubt me. I was, however, utterly livid at him now, too. “She’s practically been holding up signs over her head claiming responsibility every time she talks to me.”
“I know you think that, but...” Kyle paused for a second. His mouth was at war with itself—firmly set until it looked like he was about to say something, then repeat. Finally, he found the words. “I need to know that it’s not something else.”
“Something else?”
“Do you like Sean?”
My heart pounded. I could lose Kyle, right now, if I answered wrong. I didn’t like Sean, not like that. But I understood why people got confused. There wasn’t a whole lot of precedent for a girl being close friends with a guy at our school. Or anywhere, really.
“No, Kyle,” I said. “I don’t. I like you. It’s been hard to lose Sean as a friend, but honestly, I think we’ve been slowly growing apart for years. It’s just that this thing with Helen has brought that fact to the forefront of my life, you know? But it’s not about being jealous or whatever.”
Kyle let out a long exhale as he slowed the car to a stop in front of my house. “Are you sure?”
“One hundred percent,” I said earnestly.
He turned and smiled at me. “I like that percentage.”
Then he kissed me, long and slow, and I finally felt like he believed me.
21
After a week, our campaign had halfway worked with the lowest strata of the school. The So What? buttons popped up among the freshmen, and they had a strong appeal with the stoners. But no one seemed interested in the patches, which had our real message.
“Give it time,” Melissa said. From the sound of her voice, she was reassuring herself as much as the rest of us. She liked being our de facto leader, but that meant she had more to lose if we failed. Not as much as Helen, obviously, but enough to make her nervous.
Jennifer, Sara, and Helen stared down at their sandwiches. We were going to need a miracle to make this work.
I looked at my own sandwich with defeat. Not only had I lost faith in our ability to get the right kind of attention on Helen, I’d had that huge fight with Sean at Denny’s. I couldn’t even put words to what happened. I kept trying to tell Helen about it, and had even reached for the phone to call Melissa, but somehow the whole episode embarrassed me so much that I didn’t want to talk about it. I’d meant to come off as strong, to stand up for what I believed in. Instead, everyone had looked at me like I’d set the Denny’s on fire while vowing to destroy Leah.
I couldn’t tell them. At least not yet.
“Good afternoon, girls.”
Oh, God. Mrs. Breaux towered above us in a paisley polyester dress that flowed around her pantyhose-covered calves. She smiled pleasantly and said, “Melissa, Helen, Athena, could you please come with me?”
We hadn’t done anything. I could see her seeking us out if our campaign had been successful, but it wasn’t. Still, the self-satisfied expression on her face didn’t bode well for us.
I put my sandwich back in my bag, hoping I’d have the chance to eat it before the bell rang for my next class. My stomach rumbled, a complaint at the unfairness of Mrs. Breaux interrupting us during our free time, especially when Melissa and I had just come from her class right before lunch. If she was going to “catch” us at something, she should have done it fifteen minutes ago.
But whatever she wanted to catch us at remained a mystery for now. Melissa shrugged as she got up from her spot, while Helen’s mouth was a thin line of consternation. I was sure I�
��d complained about the physics teacher in front of Helen before, but since she was only a freshman, she hadn’t yet fully experienced the wrath of Mrs. Breaux.
The three of us followed Mrs. Breaux through the empty corridors toward what I thought was our final destination—the principal’s office. But when she got near Melissa’s locker, Mrs. Breaux stopped. She rubbed her hands together, satisfied that she had uncovered some secret wrongdoing.
“Please open your locker, Miss Lemoine,” she ordered.
“Why?” Melissa asked. She crossed her arms and stood in front of her locker, blocking access.
“You know why.” Mrs. Breaux crossed her arms, matching Melissa in defiance. It occurred to me from Mrs. Breaux’s answer that maybe she didn’t know why she was doing the search. I looked at her face for clues that I was right, but it was hard to say. Her manners were usually so put-on that it was impossible to tell what was genuine indignation and what was a knee-jerk response to Melissa’s question.
“No, really, I don’t,” Melissa said. “I don’t know why you want to search my locker, and I don’t think you have the authority.”
The patches and buttons weren’t in Melissa’s locker, and besides, they weren’t against the rules to have—though obviously we didn’t want to have to explain them to the principal or the dean of discipline, because it would likely undermine our rebellion before it had a chance to take off. At any rate, Sara was carrying them in her backpack, which, in theory, teachers weren’t allowed to search. I’m not sure that those search parameters mattered to Mrs. Breaux, though, since she wasn’t supposed to search our lockers, either.
“Just open it,” Mrs. Breaux barked, her face red above her high-necked dress. Her aggression seemed way out of line for mere buttons and patches. Melissa flinched as the physics teacher leaned toward her. “I can assure you that Principal Richard is aware of this search.”
Melissa squinted at Mrs. Breaux with a quizzical look, then shrugged and twisted her locker combination, throwing open the locker door in seconds. She had nothing in it except a neatly arranged row of books and binders, plus some pictures of Suede’s Brett Anderson pasted on the inside of the locker door. According to NME, where Melissa got the photos, Suede was Britain’s next awesome band or something, or else Brett Anderson wouldn’t have made the coveted spot. He was one pretty man, though.
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