Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  “What? What are you talking about?” I asked, horrified that she could even think I’d had something to do with it. I might’ve been mean to Helen on occasion, fought with her on others, but that was normal sister stuff. The stunt with her locker involved public humiliation and deliberate meanness, and whatever issues we had with each other, we were never that kind of mean.

  “Why would we know anything about your locker?” Melissa asked at the same time.

  Melissa and I exchanged a look. Her forehead was wrinkled in confusion, and I knew she had to be feeling the same bewilderment I was, even if she didn’t necessarily share my fear of losing the fragile, new kind of relationship we’d all been forging in the past few weeks.

  Helen seemed to relax a thousandth of a percent, her scowl not so deep as before. But she didn’t back down.

  “I heard from Angelle, who heard from Reagan at St. Ursula’s, that two girls visited Choices a few weeks ago and asked for a bunch of pamphlets. Angelle said Reagan said Miss Laurel Anne said they were interested in a tour of the place, but that one of them—” She paused and looked at Melissa with daggers in her eyes. “One of them was a girl with purple hair who freaked out near the end of the tour. And the other—” this time she looked at me “—was a redhead who couldn’t hide the fact that she didn’t want to be there.”

  It certainly sounded like us. As in, exactly like our trip to the fake abortion clinic. I wasn’t surprised that it eventually got back to Helen, considering her connections.

  “Helen, I would never do that to you,” I said, hoping that she’d believe me. I was telling the truth, but with how she’d been treated lately, I would understand if she didn’t trust anyone. “We went there, yeah, but that was before we started campaigning. And it wasn’t to do anything that would hurt you. I may not always be so great at it, but I’ve been trying to help you all along.”

  She looked at me for a long time, judging me, before she said anything.

  “Okay,” she said, relaxing even more—at least toward me. “I believe you. You’re a terrible liar, so if you’d done it, or if you’d known that Melissa was planning something, I know you never would’ve been able to keep quiet about it. You’d have been sweating bullets by the time we got to Melissa’s locker. And you were as confused as I was.”

  I wanted to protest, but she was right.

  Helen turned to Melissa.

  “But I’m not sure about you.” She paused dramatically and resumed her glower. “Number one, you’re deeply committed to pro-choice causes, and plastering my locker with dead babies makes the pro-life side of things look bad. Number two, you were at the clinic, and Miss Laurel Anne said that the girls had asked about the posters. And number three, you mess with people’s lockers all the time.”

  Helen had amassed a respectable level of circumstantial evidence: motive, opportunity, skill set. Even I could see how Melissa could have done it. But I didn’t believe for a minute that she would. At least not now.

  For someone who normally traveled in the land of the self-righteous, Melissa looked surprisingly hurt at Helen’s accusation.

  “We didn’t take anything from the clinic,” Melissa said, never breaking eye contact with Helen. “I swear.” She shook her head. “I mean, we did go. But that was before we all got together and started campaigning. And the woman—Miss Laurel Anne, did you say?—she got some pamphlets for us to pass out at school, which, yes, we told her was St. Ursula’s, but we didn’t take them with us. She said she’d send them over with some guys. We were in and out in about five minutes, and never even got close enough to touch those horrific posters.”

  I could tell that Melissa was holding herself back from calling the posters scientifically inaccurate, or talking about how Miss Laurel Anne had been a jerk to the “patient” waiting in one of the “treatment” rooms, which wouldn’t help her case with Helen. But what she was saying was all true. I’d never gotten a good look at the posters, and neither had she.

  Then I remembered something that could clear our names, if Angelle was a decent person and not deliberately undermining us.

  “You know, Miss Laurel Anne told us that there’d been two girls who visited before us,” I said. “Specifically looking for those posters.”

  Helen looked at me with a measure of distrust. “That sounds awfully convenient.”

  I sighed. “I know it does. But you think I’m a terrible liar—which I am—but even if you don’t believe me, I think you should ask Angelle. Or call Miss Laurel Anne yourself. I’m sure she doesn’t know enough about a bunch of gossip at St. Ann’s to take sides with anyone.”

  Next to Helen, Sara perked up. “Oh! I can call her,” she said. “She used to be our youth group leader at church, before she started working at the fa—I mean, Choices.”

  Melissa’s eyebrows shot up. She’d heard what I had—Sara was about to call it “the fake abortion clinic,” which meant a significant shift in our group. I knew better than to say anything, but it gave me an idea.

  “Okay,” Helen said. She looked at me. “You are a terrible liar, so I’m going to believe you. But until I hear from Sara that Miss Laurel Anne says other girls visited, the jury’s still out on you, Melissa.”

  * * *

  I cornered Sara in the hall between sixth and seventh period, grabbed her by the wrist, and pulled her into the girls’ bathroom.

  Hey, it worked for everyone else.

  This time, I was the one checking the bathroom stalls for spies. I put my finger to my lips as I leaned down to check for feet.

  “Athena, what’s going on?” Sara looked worried. “Did you and Melissa...?”

  It dawned on me that I probably seemed more like I was feeling guilty instead of cautiously conspiratorial.

  “What? No!” I protested. “I’m still hoping you can clear things up with the fake abortion clinic woman so Helen will believe us, too.”

  Her face squinched up. “Then, uh, what’s this about?”

  I could see why she was confused. Aside from helping her with button production, Sara and I rarely spoke.

  “So, remember when we were talking about that idea for homecoming?” I said. “Well, the student council is going to announce the nominees in less than a week, and we’ve done nothing about it. Do you think we have time to convince Helen and the members of the student council?”

  Her brown eyes lit up, and she nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, wow,” she said excitedly. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it since we started handing out patches. It’s not much time, but I know that Jennifer has a meeting about it before school on Monday, and I know of at least a couple of other girls who would be totally supportive if we got them nominated.”

  Sara dug in her backpack, pulled out a notebook, and flipped it open. She shoved it in front of my face, not rudely, but eagerly. I took it from her hands and looked at what she’d been working on.

  “Look, I made a list,” she said, pointing to the page in front of me, where she’d written down first names and last initials. “Whenever a girl approaches me, I’ve started thinking about what level of popularity she is, and if she’s the type of girl who could actually be on the homecoming court in terms of votes and support. And I have at least one name for each year, and a ton of seniors. Like, they’re my most loyal customers. So if we can come up with a list of names in time, Jennifer should be able to lobby for them.”

  Sara’s ranking system was brilliant, but keeping this list in a notebook that someone might find was not. Although we’d structured everything so that we technically weren’t breaking any rules, we couldn’t know what might be used against us if anything fell into the wrong hands.

  “Okay, two things,” I said. “First, that list is great. Second, for the love of God, keep it at home from now on. We don’t want anyone in there to become a target.”

  Sara turned red with embarrassment. “I didn’t th
ink—”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “Just leave it at home tonight. But let’s talk this through. Our plan is to stock the homecoming court, and then what?”

  Sara bit her lip. “See, that’s the part I’m not sure about,” she said. “We need to bring in Melissa, I think, and Helen—”

  I interrupted her with a wave of my hand. “Leave Melissa to me. But Helen’s not going to agree to anything until we can clear up the mess with Miss Laurel Anne.”

  “I’ll call her as soon as I get home from school,” Sara said eagerly. “Like I said, I know her from youth group—I’m sure she’ll be willing to talk to me.”

  I smiled at her gratefully. “Thanks, Sara. That would be amazing.” I looked down at her list again for a moment, then made an executive decision. “We’ll come up with the purpose of Phase Two later. We know we want do something at homecoming, and you have a brilliant list of girls who are popular and sympathetic. So let’s run with that for the moment.”

  “But we don’t have any idea of what the something is,” she said with a sigh, slouching against the bathroom sink.

  “Doesn’t matter.” I shook my head. “The important part right now is that we get the court stocked with sympathetic people. Then we’ll have, like, two weeks to figure things out. But we’re running out of time to get this rolling—when did you say the meeting was again?”

  “Monday,” Sara said. “First thing. Then the nominees are announced Tuesday morning at assembly.”

  “I know you’re planning to call Miss Laurel Anne, but do you think you can get the final list together tonight, too?” I asked, trying to sound way more confident than I actually was. When I said it aloud, the task felt impossible. It was already Thursday. We basically had one school day and then the weekend to figure this out. “Hopefully we can convince Helen tomorrow, and then call everyone on your list on Saturday to see if they want to participate? Maybe do a phone tree? That is, if Helen and Melissa are behind the idea. And Jennifer is willing to be our voice.”

  Three days wasn’t nearly enough time, unless everything worked precisely as planned—and we still didn’t know exactly what we were going to do at homecoming. But for now, the more pressing issue was how to get everything done in time for the meeting. Melissa and I had youth orchestra practice tonight at LSU. I had a date with Kyle tomorrow after my cello lesson, and Melissa had two dates with two different guys—one from St. Christopher’s, the other an LSU freshman she’d met at Highland Coffees. She was testing out who she wanted to ask to our homecoming, which required some research on her part. Plus Helen, Sara, and Jennifer had modeling class on Saturday morning, which Helen would never miss, especially now that Dad was going to meet with Mrs. Brouilliette about her callback from Ford. They were trying to figure out whether Helen should fly up to the New York offices so she could do her callback there, or if another scout would visit New Orleans.

  Then again, Sara had been putting together names all this time. Maybe she could pull this off faster than I knew.

  Sara nodded in fierce agreement, soothing my doubts somewhat. “I can do it. I’ll start calling people tonight. And Helen has to say yes when we tell her. She knows So What? has its limits, and as soon as we give her another option, I know she’ll do it. We just have to present it in a way that doesn’t make her feel like she’s losing ground.”

  Sara really got my sister, maybe more than I did. I crossed my fingers that Jennifer would surprise me as much as Sara had. Then maybe we’d have a fighting chance.

  25

  Angelle was waiting outside the door of Mrs. Bonnecaze’s religion class before first period, hands held awkwardly in front of her, almost like she was praying. Her dark ash-blond hair was permed in a wavy style that hung heavily around her shoulders in a way that made me think of the Virgin Mary’s veil. Or maybe I only read that in Angelle’s image because she was such a big part of the pro-life club.

  The last time she’d spoken with me, I’d been a freshman, and she’d tried to get me to join the pro-life club because it would be good for my college applications. When I told her I didn’t plan to go to a Catholic college, she got huffy and told me I had no principles. Of course, one could argue that joining the pro-life club in order to get into a certain college was deeply illustrative of said lack of principles, but when I told her so, she got huffier.

  Now she was looking contrite and polite, almost saintly. I wondered if she was planning to give our class a pro-pro-life speech—it seemed like a good time to do it, given the circumstances at Helen’s locker. But when Angelle saw me, she waved me over to her.

  “What’s up?” I asked, half expecting her to tell me I was going to burn in hell for being pro-choice. Or maybe she wanted to try to dissuade me from the So What? campaign, because it might actually make people think for themselves for a change.

  “I wanted to say it’s awful—just awful—what those creeps did to Helen,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do...”

  “You kicked her out of the pro-life club,” I said flatly before I could stop myself.

  “That’s not how it went,” she insisted. “I never wanted to kick Helen out, I just wanted to make sure that she hadn’t...you know...”

  “You mean you wanted to make sure she hadn’t had an abortion?” I rolled my eyes. “You can say it.” I gave Angelle the fiercest look I could muster. “I don’t know why you think you can now say, ‘Oh, it’s so awful what those creeps did to her,’ when you could have ended this yourself a month ago by standing by her and believing her.”

  Angelle shrank back, like my words were personally wounding her, instead of an accurate description of what had happened. I felt a momentary burst of satisfaction that I’d gotten to her, and then a pang of regret because I was pretty sure Mrs. Bonnecaze had overheard.

  “I...did believe her,” Angelle whispered. She pulled me closer to the lockers, out of earshot of the kids filing into the classroom. “It’s just... Look, even before someone started saying it was Helen, like, literally the first day of school, I heard that someone had seen someone on the way to the clinic. And not like Melissa, either. Not ‘protecting the clinic.’”

  She did air quotes around the last part, like no one should ever protect an abortion clinic. But what Angelle said reframed everything, including that conversation I’d had with Jamie. It felt like a thousand puzzle pieces snapping into place in my brain, or that feeling when I kept messing something up on the cello, but finally, on the thousandth try, gotten right. The rumors about Helen were super believable to people because they were true—but about someone else. If people had already heard that someone had an abortion, it was easy enough to match a random name to it. Leah and Aimee had taken advantage of something that was already there.

  Still, if I was right, there was no way I was going to betray Jamie—not even to save my sister. She didn’t deserve to be the focus of everyone’s gross judgments, any more than Helen did. There was a reason we’d made the “So what if she did?” patches.

  “That’s no excuse,” I hissed back, anger simmering in every word. “No one deserves what’s happened to Helen. No. One. And you were part of that, whether you admit it or not.”

  Angelle sagged against the row of lockers, her curly hair covering her face. She stared down at her hands, looking regretful enough that I began to wonder if maybe she actually had believed Helen. Maybe I’d gone too far—or maybe she’d just needed the reminder I’d given her. I wasn’t sorry, in any case.

  “I know,” she said. “I...just don’t know how I can help. At this point anyway.”

  Her regret barely cut into my anger. Angelle could have stood up for Helen at any point, but instead she stood by and let the rumors fester. But I realized there was one thing she could do now that might help—not Helen directly, but something that might repair our fractured alliance.

  “If you really are sorry, there is something
you can do,” I said, softening my tone a bit. “Helen seems to think that Melissa and I might have had something to do with what happened to her locker, because we visited that fake abortion clinic that one time.” Angelle cringed at my name for the place, but I kept going. “The one that has those posters? Well, we didn’t take anything that day, and we need to confirm it. Could you get in touch with that woman—”

  “Miss Laurel Anne.” Angelle fidgeted against the locker, like she was afraid I was going to ask her to put out a hit on Miss Laurel Anne.

  “Yeah, her,” I said. “All I want is for you to confirm with her that Melissa and I had nothing to do with the garbage in Helen’s locker. Sara’s supposed to call her, too, but I feel like Helen will believe it even more if the news comes from you.”

  Angelle’s whole body relaxed. “Oh, yeah. I can do that, for sure. I thought for a second you were going to ask me to go to the clinic and do something mean to Miss Laurel Anne. She’s so good to us.”

  And now I was back to being angry with Angelle.

  “No. Do you seriously think I would do that?” I stared at her with disbelief. She shrugged back at me, looking sheepish. “I just want you to do the right thing.” I didn’t add the for once.

  “You want me to call Miss Laurel Anne and confirm that you and Melissa didn’t take anything. That’s it?” Angelle squinted back at me, like she couldn’t believe that I’d gone relatively easy on her.

  “Yes.” My eyes darted to the classroom doorway. The hallway was nearly empty, and the bell would ring soon. Sure, Mrs. Bonnecaze was the teacher least likely to get mad if you were late, but I had no excuse because she’d likely seen me standing outside the classroom.

  “Anything else?” she asked. “I...feel like I should do more to help.”

  I reached inside my backpack for a “So what if she didn’t?” patch. Under normal circumstances, I’d consider it a huge risk to do a handoff right out in the open hallway, but I was down to my last one and you can’t get caught with what you don’t have.